John Stones admitted it will be hard to go into the new season without players that have left Manchester City but backed the recruitment team to continue to deliver success.
It has been a bigger summer of change than usual at the Etihad, with four significant additions to the first-team squad and five exits helping to give a fresh look to Pep Guardiola's squad. As well as Zack Steffen, City have lost Stones' England teammate Raheem Sterling, club captain Fernandinho and popular members of the dressing room Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko.
City's dressing room has been a key part of their success, with the group backing each other and supporting each other through the good and bad moments over the course of a season. Guardiola employs a small squad to both provide ferocious competition for places and make sure everyone feels they are within touching distance of a starting place.
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Changing more than a third of a winning dressing room is a gamble for City and Stones admits it will be difficult because of the shared memories. However, as a player who was brought to City in 2016 and has seen the recruitment over the subsequent five years, the centre-back has no doubts over the quality of signings that have been made this summer.
"I’m always confident we can be successful. Whoever has come in, they have always been great from the start," he said at the premiere of City's latest documentary ‘Together: Champions Again!’.
"We obviously spend that much time together and get to know people on a personal level first and then we go out on the training pitch and see what they can bring there and the quality they have. Whoever has come in has stepped up and played different positions.
"It’s sad to see people go, whether it is retirement or wanting a new challenge and that’s hard because we have so many good friends and good memories on the pitch but we won’t forget those.
"You kind of don’t want that to end, you want those memories. But that’s football, there's always new people coming in and it is credit to the backroom staff and people involved in recruiting that the character fit of players that have come in do so well in the team."
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