If you believed everything you read in the papers, you’d be holding a fairly hefty number of conflicting views all at the same time. If you’re a Manchester City fan, though, there are so many reports and so many different figures flying around that, like oil in water, it’s become impossible to separate the fact from the fiction.

A virtually unprecedented sum could be spent this summer by a club who broke records last summer, too. And if City have the money, the last thing you'd expect them to do is hide it under the mattress.

But the very first City signing of the summer looks like it could be the most interesting one. Just where will Bernardo Silva play? Is he a long-term David Silva replacement? If so, he could find himself on the bench more often than not for a year or two. Is he a wide player? If that's his role, where does that leave Leroy Sane and Raheem Sterling, themselves young players - if very different in style - brought in for big fees? Is he simply a luxury player bought because City intend to stockpile young talent, buying him so no one else can?

Each of those theories, and probably many others too, have been advanced on Twitter this week but probably don’t quite get into the mind of Pep Guardiola, a man who usually has a very specific plan for his new recruits.

First off, it’s impossible to predict a Guardiola ‘starting XI’ for next season. He’s about as likely to name an unchanged side as Manchester United are to entertain an Old Trafford crowd. The greatest likelihood is that City have bought a player who will slot into a squad rotation system with everyone else, playing mostly in the games where the manager has identified his strengths as useful against the qualities of the opposition. Given such a situation, it looks quite foolish to ask the question “will he start?”

But, despite that, there could be a wider Guardiola tactical trend that Silva the younger fits into. Over the final weeks of the Premier League season, Guardiola has tried to fit both Sergio Aguero and Gabriel Jesus into the same starting XI.

This season at Monaco, Silva has been most effective when cutting in from wide areas, playing mostly on the right-hand side of midfield in Monaco’s fluid 4-4-2 system. The fact he’s so comfortable at cutting inside from the right has allowed Djibril Sidibe to overlap from the right wing-back position to devastating effect, and it’s that sort of movement that Guardiola could be looking for.

The lineup below will look odd for a number of reasons. For one thing, it features players who may not be at City when the transfer window closes, but for the sake of creating a lineup, I've added in Benjamin Mendy and Kyle Walker as both players have been linked with the club in the last few weeks. Another oddity is the formation, but the point isn’t that Guardiola should play with a 4-4-2 diamond next season - the point is that it’s a flexible formation to start with; a formation that will change during the game.

I also have no interest in the defence, here - beyond the formation the players line up in. For that reason, I’ve put little thought into personnel. It could, instead, include any number of defenders City have been linked with or even Nicolas Otamendi or Aleksandar Kolarov for all we know. The point isn’t the players, it’s the system.

And for City next season, this could be the system that allows Guardiola to keep the three in midfield, width from full-back, and front three system that he enjoys playing, whilst still allowing Jesus and Aguero something approaching central striking roles.

It’s about showing that Bernardo Silva - for all his magic talent with the ball at his feet - can be used as a foil to get two world class strikers on the pitch. It won’t happen in every game (few things do in a Guardiola team) and is an experimental idea.

But it does show that Bernardo Silva might just be a player who unlocks the big question that City have seemed to grapple with since January - can Gabriel Jesus and Sergio Aguero play together?

https://video.footballfancast.com/video-2015/pub-facts-7.mp4