City head to Hong Kong and Seoul this summer for a tour that carries more weight than the usual pre-season kickabout.
It’s the club’s first away tour since Pep Guardiola left the Etihad, and Enzo Maresca’s first match in charge — against Inter Milan, of all sides — doubles as the opening fixture of the post-Guardiola era.
Worth taking a look and comparing it against a decade of City tours to see what’s changed and what hasn’t.
The itinerary
City open in Hong Kong on 1 August against Inter Milan at the newly built, 50,000-seat Kai Tak Stadium, which opened in March 2025 — a rematch, of sorts, of the 2023 Champions League final that City won in Istanbul.
It’s their first visit to Hong Kong since 2019. From there, the squad moves to Seoul for two fixtures: a K League All-Stars game on 5 August, followed by a repeat meeting with Atlético Madrid on 9 August, echoing the sell-out 2023 clash at the same Seoul World Cup Stadium, which City lost 1-2.
It’s only City’s third visit to Seoul in the club’s history, after 1976 and 2023, and the first time they’ve played there twice on the same trip.
Where this sits in the last decade
In 2016, Guardiola took City to China for the International Champions Cup: Beijing against Jose Mourinho’s Manchester United, billed as an Asian version of the derby, then Shenzhen against Borussia Dortmund.
Three years later, in 2019, City returned to China and added stops in Hong Kong and Japan, though a scheduled Beijing derby with United was called off because of the weather.
The pandemic wiped out tours in 2020 and 2021.
When City picked things back up in the US ahead of the 2022/23 treble season, they beat Club América 2-1 in Houston, with both goals from Kevin De Bruyne, then played Bayern Munich in front of a sell-out crowd at Lambeau Field in Green Bay.
The following summer swung back east: Tokyo for Yokohama F. Marinos and Bayern Munich, then Seoul for that Atlético defeat. In 2024, City returned to the US for a four-match tour that included Celtic and AC Milan.
Then, last summer, there wasn’t really a tour at all after participating in the World Club Championship.
With Pep prioritising continuity and fitness over long-haul travel, City’s entire pre-season build-up consisted of a single friendly away to Palermo. This year’s three-match swing through Hong Kong and Seoul is a return to the traditional pattern.
What’s actually different this time
The bigger change is on the touchline, not the itinerary. Every tour in this run before now had Guardiola guiding a squad he’d built over years.
This one has Maresca meeting most of his players for the first time in a competitive setting, on the other side of the world, with no long-term working relationship behind him.
Hong Kong and Seoul remain two of City’s most reliable overseas markets, and the Inter and Atlético rematches give the trip some familiarity that the early China fixtures, largely played against unfamiliar opposition, never had.
But for the first time in a decade, this tour isn’t really about how Guardiola’s City look going into a season. It’s about finding out what Maresca’s City actually is.
