Manchester City captain Bernardo Silva will leave the club at the end of the season, with assistant manager Pep Lijnders offering the clearest and most definitive confirmation yet in the aftermath of Saturday’s 4-0 FA Cup quarter-final victory over Liverpool.
The Portuguese midfielder’s contract expires in June, and after years of transfer speculation that repeatedly came to nothing, the moment has finally arrived for City to say farewell to one of the most influential players in their recent history.
Lijnders spoke about the departure with a mixture of admiration and resignation that made the finality unmistakable. “Every good story comes to an end,” he said at the post-match press conference. “I hope he enjoys the last months — there are only six weeks left — and has a good farewell. He deserves all that attention.” Guardiola, who was serving a touchline ban for the Liverpool match and was therefore absent from the technical area, has previously described Silva as “irreplaceable” — a word that, in football management, carries considerable weight.
Silva joined City from AS Monaco in 2017 for a fee of around £43.5 million and went on to make 450 appearances for the club, a milestone he reached on Saturday. In those nine years, he won six Premier League titles, the Champions League, three FA Cups and five EFL Cups — a trophy haul that places him among the most decorated players in City’s history and in the broader canon of Premier League-era achievements. What has defined him throughout, beyond the silverware, is the tactical intelligence and technical versatility that made him the connective tissue in Guardiola’s most complex systems.
Barcelona and Juventus have been most prominently linked with Silva, though former club Benfica has also been mentioned as a sentimental option. At 31, he would arrive at any of those destinations as a free agent and a genuine marquee signing — a player whose Champions League pedigree and Premier League title medals make him attractive to virtually any club in Europe’s top leagues. The absence of any contract extension discussions at the Etihad suggests City accept the exit is coming and are already planning around it.
The timing of the announcement — coming immediately after a dominant cup win that has reinforced City’s position as potential treble winners — is interesting in its own right. City are trailing Arsenal by nine points in the Premier League but have a game in hand, and they remain alive in the Champions League and FA Cup. Silva has six weeks to add to his extraordinary collection before departing as a free agent.
What makes the confirmation particularly poignant is how it intersects with Mohamed Salah’s own announced departure from Liverpool, which was confirmed during the international break. Two of the Premier League era’s most accomplished foreign imports, both players who defined their respective clubs for a generation, are heading for the exit door in the same summer. The 2025-26 season will carry that valedictory quality for both clubs as the campaigns wind down.
For City, the broader question is how Guardiola and the recruitment department plan to reconstruct around the loss of a player whose positional awareness and game intelligence are genuinely difficult to replicate in the transfer market. Lijnders acknowledged as much with his press conference comment — “you never replace a player with the same kind of player because they don’t exist” — which is the honest assessment of a coaching staff that knows exactly what it will be losing.
