star Riyad Mahrez has sent a warning to Liverpool and over the Premier League title race for the new 2022-23 season.
Mahrez registered 11 goals and five assists over 28 Premier League games last term as City won the title for the fourth time in the last five top-flight campaigns.
Liverpool are the only team to have broken City’s dominance in recent years, winning the 2019-20 Premier League title while Chelsea last won in 2016-17.
has chopped and changed his team ahead of the new season, bringing in £51.1m striker from Borussia Dortmund and signing England international midfielder Kalvin Phillips from Leeds for £50m.
Some high-profile players have left the Etihad Stadium this summer, with Raheem Sterling joining Chelsea and Gabriel Jesus heading to Arsenal, both for £45m each.
Mahrez, though, who won his first Premier League title with Leicester City in 2014-15 and now has four in total under his belt, feels City will once again finish on top.
‘We really, really want to win again,’ the 31-year-old Algeria international, who has scored 63 goals in 189 games for City since his arrival in 2018, told the .
‘When the season starts, we want to go again. That’s the big motivation. We never ever think, ‘Oh, it’s going to be easy this year,’ or we can go a bit easy.
‘No, we go 100 per cent from the beginning, because we want to win and we are built with this mentality.
‘On the last day [of last season], against Aston Villa, I was just thinking, f****** hell, what are we doing here? We’re playing at home and we’re losing 2-0 against Villa.
‘Sometimes you don’t feel good in a game, I didn’t that day, and some other people came in and helped us to win – that’s what our team is about.’
City face Liverpool in the Community Shield on Saturday as the Premier League and FA Cup winners battle it out for the first piece of 2022-23 silverware.
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