Roberto Mancini failed to land any of his prime targets last summer, eventually making a number of mostly disappointing signings close to the transfer deadline.
He will hope to move earlier and more decisively this time.
Roberto Mancini: "I think we need to improve our team.
"The next Premier League will be more difficult, but we have a team to try to win the Premier League.
"It's important to do a better job in the Champions League and for this we need to improve our team, because at the moment we are too far from the first five or six teams in the Champions League.
"The Champions League is really strange, if you are lucky maybe you can go through or arrive in the semi-final, football is strange, but after we need to improve our team."