I see this quite a lot, but would you say that City side were built around him? Just had a flick through that insane 13/14 season he had and according to transfermarkt he played 33 of 35 games in central midfield with 2 games at attacking midfield and still got 20 goals in the PL alone. Most of the time those games at centre midfield had 4 more attacking minded players ahead of him.
I feel like if you used him in that role in a draft he'd get crucified
Yes, absolutely. It started under Mancini where he would often start him as the furtherest midfielder out of the three with a double pivot of De Jong & Barry — or he would start him in a midfield two and move him forward mid-game, it often worked as a treat in order to confuse the opponents man-marking system. Pellegrini reintroduced 2 strikers initially but actually changed to a more conservative set up mid-season, which led to better results after the disastrous couple of weeks where they've managed to get eliminated from both CL & FA Cup. Fernandinho was key to how they've played since he was often left to do the dirty work for 2 players, with Yaya getting a free reign to roam forward (incredibly, Fernandinho even gained quite an impressive amount of goal contributions despite being the main water-carrier of that team). Navas was certainly not a more attacking player than Toure in their set up, being mainly responsible for providing width on the right and doing a lot of defensive work on that side.
That 4-2-3-1 that Pellegrini had used in the second half of the season was, in reality, a bit closer to Pep's midfield three with Fernandinho, Silva & De Bruyne than to your usual Ole-esque 4-2-3-1... which shouldn't be that surprising, considering that only one player had changed in that equation, with De Bruyne coming in for Toure. Silva was still de-jure a number 10, but he was playing deeper than usual, Fernandinho covered everything in behind and Toure played somewhere between them — not doing too much work in the defensive phase but always being ready to burst into one of his devastating runs.
Using him even further forward would've been a bit of a waste and I'm going to use a, perhaps, not a very linear comparison, but think about Roberto Carlos in Italy. They've often put him as a left winger which barely amounted to anything — he needed that extra space to gain the initial speed for his runs to become virtually unstoppable, and the same is true for Yaya, just with a bit more variety and finesse.
Toure is such a weird player as he was a great (probably world-class or thereabouts) defensive midfielder at Barca... and he was world-class in that Lampard-esque goalscoring number 8 role. And it's easy to think that he was able to do both at the same time, which would've made him one of the greatest box-to-box ever to grace the football pitch, but he wasn't, for whatever reason (he probably wasn't feeling like doing the dirty work anymore and wanted to feel like the main star of the show as there were no physical issues that stopped him from combining those skillsets together).
