You might not have seen the current Star Wars movie. In which case I won’t ruin it by revealing any top-secret plot twists, like the imperial weapon‑shield with one small fatal flaw; the return of a bullish, roided-up Darth Vader; or the usual mawkish family stuff that can only be resolved by the violent death of a male parent.

Aside from that you’ll find all the usual things. Infomercial-level acting that doesn’t matter because there are some excellent “fffft” and “zzzzz” weapon noises going on in the background. Good bits where stormtroopers make crackly 1950s‑style small talk just before being killed. And above all the familiar organic landscape of junk, robot-men and animated machines that is the real star of these films and the most obvious reason for the films’ staggering success.

This interaction between machine world and human world is what Star Wars is really all about. Everywhere organic details intrude. The shiny new space station already has a worm in its garbage compactor. The Imperial AT-AT walkers imitate the movements of half‑speed camels and end up being capsized by a few bears with bits of string. The entire opening trilogy rests on whether Darth Vader really is more machine than man or man than machine.

The obvious comparison is with Charles Dickens, franchise juggernaut of a previous age. Dickens’ novels were also full of schmaltz and sentiment. They were also redeemed by this same astonishing imaginative landscape where buildings come alive, people turn into machines, the industrial world intrudes into the world of people, and where the real question in every story is whether the people can both survive and remain recognisably themselves.

All of which is quite a roundabout way of getting on to the glorious return of Yaya Touré. This has been one of the most unexpected plot twists of the Premier League season, and perhaps the most interesting element so far in the Guardiola-era making over of Manchester City.

Not least because it wasn’t supposed to happen. Touré was meant to be finished, exiled, a rusting hulk junked for parts. In the last month he has instead been the key figure in City’s mini-revival before the Premier League meeting with Liverpool at the Etihad Stadium on New Year’s Eve. Best of all he looks like a different kind of Touré, not just a stone and half lighter and “in love with football again” as he declared himself this week, but tactically reconditioned, circuit boards wiped, Barça-years memory stick successfully reinstalled.

With apologies, but he does seem to attract this kind of robot talk. “I’m not a machine, I’m a man,” Touré insisted a couple of seasons ago during a run of poor form. And for all the glories of the past six years, there does seem to have been a slight note of confusion on this front. The internet is full of Touré tribute videos called things like The Machine, or The War Machine. He’s the Train, the Powerhouse, the Unstoppable Midfield Goal-Tractor. Does he clank, do you think, when he walks in his stockinged feet? Do his gears whirr?

On balance probably not. The Yaya‑as‑machine stuff has always been a nod more to his basic physical strength, not to mention a certain playing style, those moments where Touré moves upfield and clanks into engine‑of‑war mode, ball trapped beneath his thundering pistons, hurtling at some retreating defence like an English fire ship scattering the Armada at Calais.

In reality the best part of Touré is quite the opposite, the human qualities, the intelligence and adaptability that have made him the most influential part in City’s own imperial rise. These are early days. Barring injury and suspension he would probably still be an over-qualified spare part. But often the best things do happen by accident and it would be a wonderful moment of vindication if Touré were to remain a key cog in Guardiola actually making this City team work.

This is a player who was edged out at Barcelona because Guardiola preferred the young Sergio Busquets in central midfield, which was on reflection a fair old call. Six years on Touré is playing that Busquets role for Guardiola in England. In the winning run against Watford, Arsenal and Hull City Touré has had the most touches, completed 90% of his passes, sat massively in front of the backline, and looked every inch a footballer who has won the league in four countries, a shared all-time record.

Has there ever been a more intelligent and adaptable Premier League footballer? Touré has played at centre-back in a Champions League victory. Three years later he scored 20 league goals, many from a bespoke Touré-role best described as Midfield Forward Run-Clanker, or Goal-Pylon Stampede-Machine. Right now he’s re-gearing himself as a kind of Iron Giant version of Xavi, reminding the world of the range and rhythm of his long and short game, but also blocking and sitting and putting in actual tackles, more then any other City player in the last three games. City have won the last eight times Touré has played 90 minutes. Every trophy of the modern City era has also been a Touré trophy. This isn’t an accident.

For the neutral, Touré has also been a humanising element in City’s ongoing transformation. In theory these super-club projects should be deathly, steamrollering, essentially quite boring things. A football-industrial complex headed up by the world’s most expensive manager and funded by bottomless wealth. This sounds in outline like the exact opposite of sport.

Instead it is tribute to football’s basic difficulty, its endless human variables, that City’s attempts to become the greatest team on earth should boil down, for now, to the slightly fraught personal relationship between a 33‑year‑old inherited part and a super‑manager who seems to have become obsessed with “second balls”, to be in his own way agreeably drunk on English football. Jürgen Klopp’s fine, evolving Liverpool will provide a huge test. Touré might not even play if Guardiola decides to go with a more prosaic Fernando‑Fernandinho central pivot. But his driving presence remains the key note, six years on, in City’s own very human east Manchester death star.