John Stones does not quite know how to put it and, as he tries to express himself, it is impossible to guess where the conversation will go next.
“Do you know what? There’s something in the air here…” It is a suffocatingly hot morning in Seoul, South Korea, but he is talking about the atmosphere around treble winners Manchester City.
“As soon as I came… it sounds strange but I can’t put my finger on it. There are certain times that are even more special when everyone is just… I don’t know.”
And then something clicks — as it usually does for City players.
“Something inside them that’s a winner — something comes out and I think everyone’s got it. I can’t say what it is, but it all comes together and we just seem to go on runs. We’re always there or thereabouts, pushing and fighting. I don’t know if we were born with it or it’s a mentality thing, it just seems to come out and we push on and we’ve won endless trophies from critical situations.”
A few nights earlier, in Tokyo, City winger Jack Grealish admitted he was not sure as late as March whether the club would win anything last season, such was their stuttering form, but they powered on to win the treble, a 22-game unbeaten run helping get them there.
And it might make him uncomfortable to hear it — “I don’t know what to say when people say this about Beckenbauer,” he laughs — but it is no exaggeration to say that Stones was a major part in that turnaround.
Pep Guardiola had been searching all season for a way to recreate the way his team used to attack in the previous two seasons — with a midfielder deployed up front vacating the penalty box to play short passes to his team-mates — now that the guy they brought in very much does his best work inside the penalty box.
So with Erling Haaland occupying defenders in another way, City lost what Guardiola calls their “extra man in midfield”. Enter Stones.
Not only did he step into the deep-lying midfield areas next to Rodri, as City’s full-backs have done for a long time, but he often carried on right the way up the pitch into the final third, becoming that “extra man” and giving Guardiola what he had been looking for.
So much so that in the Champions League final, the night the entire City project seemed to be geared towards, Stones completed all six of his dribbles. In this era of easily digestible stats, it soon emerged that the last player to do more than that was Lionel Messi in the 2015 final.
“Yeah, I know this one!” Stones smiles, but again he is almost lost for words when asked how it makes him feel. “I don’t know, to be fair.” A long pause. “Shocked.” Another. “Proud… mixed emotions.
“I think on such a big stage I’m proud of myself for what I did in that game and how I grabbed it,” he says. “I literally gave it everything and then when you could see a stat like that, to get compared with, for me, the best player of all time — I compare that in my generation — I suppose I’m just proud of that, to have that with Messi.
“I was really pleased with how, speaking personally, I grabbed the game and tried to take it to Inter. We kept pushing, kept pushing and everyone showed courage to not let this be another replica of back in Porto.”
Porto was the venue of City’s previous Champions League final showing in 2021, where they lost 1-0 to Chelsea on a crushing evening for the club and Stones in particular. He was so low after that that he changed his entire pre-match approach this time around.
“I tried to approach it differently from the previous time. I didn’t want to make the same routine before the game; I wanted to make it different — I wanted to be calmer, I wanted to be focused on winning and not the occasion, not trying to think about too much from the outside, like ‘What if this or that’.
“I wanted to go in with a winning mentality and knowing we were going to win that game, not arrogantly, I think that’s speaking it into existence almost, and it worked.
“I just didn’t want to go through the same process — it might be strange of me but that’s my thinking. I didn’t want to do something that led to defeat and such a difficult summer. It was only minor tweaks and I think it was more mental than anything, like the calmness and not thinking about the game because when you’ve got those few days, you’re constantly thinking, ‘How are we going to do this?’. So I literally switched off after training and didn’t think about it, then gave everything towards it when I was in training.
“I switched off and left the noise because your friends and family are asking you how it is, how’s everything going. It’s small switches like that that helped me focus on the day and what was in front of me.”
Stones may be lost for words at times, but he is comfortable when discussing his role on the pitch, almost as much as he is when he is putting it into practice.
His performances from April onwards, first moving into midfield from right-back and then from centre-back, have earned him that comparison with Germany legend Franz Beckenbauer — the Barnsley Beckenbauer, to be exact — and he now considers himself both a defender and a midfielder.
(Photo: Berk Ozkan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
One of the interesting aspects of his conversion, though, is that he lacks, by his own admission, the “360 view of the game” that the best midfielders have. It is something he has mentioned several times in recent months, even after the FA Cup final victory over Manchester United in June, but when he brings it up in Korea, it sounds like he is making huge strides in that department.
“I think the biggest thing and one of the most difficult things for me is that I haven’t got that 360 vision, but I feel more now that I do,” he says, unprompted about his own vision on the pitch.
“That’s from learning where to receive the ball, how to receive the ball in certain situations, to give me that comfort of knowing what’s in my surroundings. That was one of the things at the start where I was playing a little bit safer or in a situation where the ball was coming, maybe quick or in a tight area, I wasn’t looking to turn out because nine times out of 10 I probably lose the ball, but then learning how to receive it, my body shape, timing, moving to get to receive the ball, all little things like that help.
“The guys that are playing there or are No 10s have done it all their life and they had this 360 vision without even looking. David Silva for example — he knew where everyone else was without even looking. Little things like that I had to mould and learn and watch myself back quite a bit.”
Those principles — the body shape, positioning, timing — are classic Guardiola. Recently, former City captain Ilkay Gundogan gave an interview saying he felt he “did not know anything about football” until he worked with the Catalan and it sounds like he took the words right out of Stones’ mouth.
“One hundred per cent,” he says, “I say it all the time. I thought I knew football to a decent degree, understood the game and how it works, then Pep made me feel like I knew nothing. He’s opened my eyes to so much, he’s kind of reinvented my brain towards football and what football is.”
Stones says he even understands all of Guardiola’s frantic touchline gestures by this point and outlines what it is like working for a coach who now has two trebles to his name — this one at City and one in his very first year at Barcelona.
“You’ll have heard me say ‘demanding’ so many times, which I love,” he says. “He expects a lot from us as centre-halves to start play from our build-up. It’s rewarding when you see it come off and when you train it over and over and over, what he wants from you, and then you see it play out and we create chances from our own goal kick. After last season, yeah, it’s definitely rewarding.
“It’s difficult because this is my eighth year now and I get what the manager expects of me and wants from us as players and how he translates what he wants to us as a back four. It just comes as second nature what you should do and then obviously there are fine tweaks.
“I absolutely love it. I’m learning — every year there’s something new, he knows everyone’s strengths and weaknesses and that’s why we rotate so much because he feels that player or that line-up he selects is the best to beat the opposition.”
During Guardiola’s time as Barcelona coach, he called Messi to the training ground late at night to show him videos and instruct him how to play in that false nine role — vacating the penalty area to link with others — in a crunch game against Real Madrid. So what did he say to Stones before repurposing him as a modern-day libero?
“He didn’t say much to me to be fair,” he says, maybe surprisingly. “I think I can only go back to what I said about strengths and weaknesses and maybe he could see me playing in that role, which I did a few times in certain different circumstances but without it being a permanent role when we’ve got the ball, as it is now. I think what my attributes are and what I could bring to that role, he saw that he could simplify it and help me improve and get better in that system.
“I do find it hard talking about myself like that to be fair, but I think that sums it up.”
Maybe it is better to focus on others, then. He certainly finds it easy to talk about his friends in the team, including Haaland and fellow Yorkshireman Kyle Walker, but who knew he was so close to David Silva?
The Spaniard has been forced to retire from the game due to a serious knee injury and it turns out that he and Stones have been as thick as thieves for years and are still in touch regularly, three years after Silva’s departure from City.
“He’s the best player I played with,” he says. “We created a great friendship, bond — when I first came, he kind of took me under his wing a little bit and we are just probably two different people that clicked somehow.
“We spent a lot of time together when he was here and I only text him the other day. We probably Facetime a few times a month just to see him. Over the summer I saw him when I was on holiday. I’d love to see him more. I wish he’d stayed longer, but I couldn’t convince him.
“I’m super sad actually to know that he got a bad injury and it’s finished like that. He left me a little book in my locker when he left. It’s a Spain National Team book. He wrote a little message in it because he always used to joke with me that one day maybe I’ll get a World Cup and two Euros.
“If I go through my chat, he just sends me pictures of it all the time.”
Walker, Stones and Bayern coach Tuchel (Photo: Getty Images)
There is even more contact with his great friend Walker, who may still leave the club for Bayern Munich this summer. Speaking at a time when the two clubs are in talks over a transfer fee, Stones outlined how big his impact has been on the club.
“Huge,” he says. “I think as a servant to the club and country, he’s incredible with what he brings to us as a team, on and off the pitch. He’s an incredible character and person to be around — everyone loves him.
“His presence and what he brings to us as a defensive unit is massive, and his experience as well — you can’t buy that. I’ve been with him six years now and we’ve had some incredible moments, we’ve got incredible chemistry between us and he’s a massively important player.
“I honestly can’t speak highly enough of him as a player. The speed, the strength, reading situations and I think his attacking threat as well, the unselfish nature of him for the lads on the wing making overlaps unselfishly and not getting the ball from Bernardo, they don’t pass it to him — you can see him get frustrated with them. But yeah, he’s been a massive player for us and what he still continues to bring on and off the pitch is huge for us as players and as a club, 100 per cent.”
And it is probably little surprise that he has quickly struck up a bond with Haaland, the Norwegian goal machine who spent the first three years of his life in Yorkshire before moving back to Scandinavia.
There are several videos of Haaland mimicking his Yorkshire team-mates, most notably Stones’ pronunciation of the Louvre in Paris, and it sounds like he has had plenty of practice away from the cameras as well.
“It’s perfect!” Stones laughs. “He’s cracked it. All the Yorkshire boys keep telling him he was born in Leeds so we’ve adopted him back. Erling, as a character, he’s massive for the team, at any opportunity he’s doing something funny.
“The amount of clips I’ve seen of him after someone scored or something, just being Erling last season. There’s one where he’s getting the crowd going after he had a little duel with someone. Little moments like that are brilliant for us as players — it lifts us and shows us that he’s there and wanting to fight for everything. I hope this season we can have all those little bits and pieces that we did, celebrating little defensive things or Erling doing things like that.
“It all adds up to being a big part of our game.”
Those little defensive celebrations, like fist-bumps after tackles and pats on the back after clearances, are clearly at the forefront of his mind. Guardiola said on several occasions during the final weeks of last season that City’s new-found appreciation of “proper” defending was the biggest factor in their push for the treble. Stones says that has been an ongoing process for a while now — and those little gestures are a big part of it.
“Definitely the past three years that aspect of our game — defending, clean sheets — has jumped up leaps and bounds,” he says. “For us as defenders, we don’t score much, we celebrate with the lads that are doing their job of scoring goals, but I think (the defensive work) is something that should be celebrated and obviously it has an effect on the other team as well when they see us doing things like that.
“We are a unit, such a close unit as well, and on the pitch showing those kinds of little things just changes the mood — it keeps the tempo high, it lets us know that our team-mates have our back and it can’t be nice for the other lads who are trying to score against us when they see us doing things like that. It must be a bit disheartening. I think it’s just the mentality now that we would do everything to not concede.”
That was probably best summed up in the final moments of the FA Cup final as United pushed for a late equaliser. With the ball looping high up into the air, Stones leapt up to head it away from his own goal line, seemingly cracking his own head off the frame of the goal as he did so.
“See, they asked me this after and I said I don’t think I did because I kind of grabbed the bar,” he says. “I didn’t feel it after, but I suppose there’s not much in there (his head).
“I think in that instance the mentality I had was that the ball was floating in an area where I was under it and it’s difficult for me to jump up and easier for someone to come on to that ball, so I kind of sensed danger straight away. I just did not want to concede. I suppose I put my body on the line a little bit.”
Despite what Stones may think, there is clearly a lot going on in that head.
(Top photo: Tom Flathers/Manchester City FC via Getty Images)
