The sun is out at Carrington as City’s 2013/14 season preparations officially get under way today.
There will be no Monday back to work blues at Carrington as most of City’s stars return to training after their summer breaks.
As we showed you in a special episode of Inside City here on the website, Manuel Pellegrini has already been given the grand tour of Carrington but today he meets most of the players for the first time.
Notable absentees from the group will be David Silva and Jesus Navas who have been granted extra recovery time after their Confederations Cup exploits in Brazil.
One man who will be reporting for his first day in work will be first signing of the summer, Fernandinho, who completed his transfer from Shakhtar Donetsk at the start of June.
The Brazilian was greeted by thousands of Shakhtar fans when he flew into Ukraine to bid farewell on Saturday night – an indicator of just how highly he is regarded at the club he spent eight seasons with.
Of course with the opening of City Football Academy next summer, this is the last campaign that the first-team will use Carrington as a training base.
Pellegrini’s men will only spend two days in Manchester before jetting off to South Africa for first leg of this summer’s pre-season tour on Wednesday night.
City are due to play their first game of pre-season on Sunday 14 July against Supersport United at Lotus Versfeld in Pretoria in the Nelson Mandela Football Invitational.
The second and final game in South Africa will take place in Durban where Amazulu FC will provide the opposition on Thursday 18 July at the Moses Mabhida stadium.
From there, the Blues will make a 15 hour flight to Hong Kong where City take on South China in the Barclays Asia Trophy on 24 July.
Munich is next on the whistle stop world tour and a reunion with Mario Balotelli and Nigel de Jong in the semi-final of the 2013 Audi Cup against Milan at the Allianz Arena on 31 July.
The final port of call will be Helsinki for a one-off exhibition against Arsenal on 10 August before City take on Newcastle on the opening day of the Premier League season a week later.
We’ll be with the first-team squad every step of the way in South Africa, Hong Kong, Munich and Helsinki this summer, so make sure you keep checking mcfc.co.uk for all the summer news and tour features first.
There will also be a gallery of shots from the first day of training on the site later today and we'll be tweeting from Carrington over @MCFC.
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