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<\/p>\nPep Guardiola was only six months into life as Manchester City\u2019s manager when he declared, on the second day of 2017, that \u201cthe process of my goodbye has already started\u201d.<\/p>\n
Members of the club\u2019s hierarchy spoke in similar terms in those days. They did not imagine he was there for the long haul. They were just determined to enjoy it for the length of his initial three-year contract. Anything beyond that would be a bonus.<\/p>\n
As much to his own surprise as anyone else\u2019s, Guardiola has stayed for almost a decade. He has led City to six Premier League titles, winning the FA Cup three times and the League Cup five, as well as adding the Champions League, UEFA Super Cup and the old, annual version of the Club World Cup in that annus mirabilis of 2023. Now, finally, he is ready to say goodbye, his only regret being that Arsenal have just denied him a seventh Premier League title as a parting gift.<\/p>\n
The legacy he leaves goes much further than the trophies he has won. It is also his influence as the leading proponent of a possession-based playing style that many felt was incompatible with English football values when he arrived. It is now so deeply ingrained in modern coaching circles that it can be traced all the way from the Premier League to the fifth-tier National League to the sodden pitches of amateur Sunday-league games.<\/p>\n
Or at least it could until recently.<\/p>\n
Over the past year or two, there has been something of a retreat from \u201cPep-ball\u201d: the increased weaponisation of set pieces at the expense of build-up play; a slight but undeniable downturn in pass completion rates \u2014 in the Championship and League Two as well as the Premier League \u2014 after a steady increase over the previous years.<\/p>\n
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Even Guardiola has compromised on his principles by signing a centre-forward (Erling Haaland) and goalkeeper (Gianluigi Donnarumma) who excel at the basics of the job (putting the ball in the net, keeping the ball out of the net) but contribute relatively little to build-up play.<\/p>\n
In some ways, this season\u2019s Premier League has been more reminiscent of the one Guardiola described, aghast, shortly after his arrival at City: \u201cNine goals, eight from set pieces \u2014 corners, free kicks, throw-ins,\u201d he told reporters, referencing a game he had watched between Swansea and Crystal Palace. \u201cThat is English football and I have to adapt, because never before have I lived that.\u201d<\/p>\n
That first season included several chastening moments, most notably a couple of heavy defeats, at Leicester (4-2) and Everton (4-0), as his team ended up third in the Premier League, 15 points behind Chelsea and eight points behind Tottenham. There was much talk about how, unlike Antonio Conte at Chelsea and Jose Mourinho at Manchester United, he had been guilty of naivety, imagining that the rules of engagement in the Premier League were no different to those in La Liga and the Bundesliga.<\/p>\n
There was a fascinating episode of Sky Sports\u2019 Monday Night Football towards the end of that 2016-17 campaign, in which Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher raised their concerns about the direction he had taken. Carragher felt a central midfield trio of Fernandinho, Kevin De Bruyne and David Silva might be too lightweight for the Premier League. Neville reeled off a list of previous champions \u2014 Manchester United, Blackburn, Arsenal, Chelsea, and Leicester the previous season \u2014 and pointed out that \u201cevery single team that has won the league, barring none, has had power and strength at the heart of them, that spine\u201d.<\/p>\n
Trying to do it without that physicality and resilience at the heart of the team, Neville said, \u201cwould defy Premier League logic (\u2026), having to wade through those winter months and playing those horrible games that we know exist. Can you win a league playing that way?\u201d<\/p>\n
These were all reasonable questions. But it turned out you could.<\/p>\n
Guardiola and City won it back-to-back in the next two seasons with totals of 100 points and 98 points. Over those two campaigns, they won 64 Premier League games out of the 76, taking 198 points from a possible 228. To put that in context, the best record in successive seasons in English football history before that was Mourinho\u2019s Chelsea team, who recorded 58 wins and 186 points across 2004-05 and 2005-06. Chelsea scored 144 goals in the process. City scored 201.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, they did all of that without the slightest regard for the Premier League\u2019s title-winning playbook.<\/p>\n
To a team that was felt to have a soft centre, Guardiola added a ball-playing goalkeeper (Ederson), three full-backs (Kyle Walker, Danilo and Benjamin Mendy) and another small playmaker (Bernardo Silva). That added up to a \u00a3240million ($322m) outlay in the summer of 2017 \u2014 so plenty of ammunition there for those who would dismiss him as a \u201cchequebook manager\u201d \u2014 but he did so in continued defiance of that \u201cPremier League logic\u201d, while Mourinho was investing heavily in height, muscle and aggression for the spine of his team (Victor Lindelof, Nemanja Matic, Romelu Lukaku) across Manchester.<\/p>\n
There was no compromise. City played an even lower proportion of long passes (six per cent) in Guardiola\u2019s second season than in his first (eight per cent). From an average of 60.9 per cent possession per game in 2016-17, which was already by far the highest in the league, they recorded an average of 66.4 per cent in 2017-18. To put those figures in context, the average possession figures for the previous eight title-winning teams had ranged from a high of 56.9 per cent (Chelsea in 2009-10) to a low of 44.7 per cent (Leicester in 2015-16).<\/p>\n
This was the type of change that Xavi Hernandez, one of the artists at the heart of Guardiola\u2019s midfield at Barcelona, had suggested English football needed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think he will change the face of English football,\u201d Xavi said at a conference in Saudi Arabia in 2016. \u201cIf there is anyone capable of changing that mentality, it is Guardiola.\u201d<\/p>\n
English football was at a fairly low ebb when Guardiola arrived a decade ago. Leicester\u2019s Premier League title triumph a few weeks before was a wonderful moment for the Premier League, but it also reflected a rare season when all the leading clubs were in varying states of upheaval. There had been several years of underperformance in European club competition. The national team had been eliminated from that summer\u2019s European Championship in the first knockout round, having come home from the World Cup two years earlier after the group stage.<\/p>\n
Changes were already afoot \u2014 more investment in academy facilities, coach education, an increased focus on skill-based coaching at youth level \u2014 but the likes of Mauricio Pochettino at Southampton and then Tottenham, Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool and Guardiola at City brought a much greater, modernised focus on playing with speed and intensity both with and without the ball.<\/p>\n
In an interview with The Athletic last week<\/a>, City captain Bernardo, who is also leaving at the end of this season, suggested that \u201cin terms of offensive concepts, I would say he (Guardiola) is by far the best manager I\u2019ve seen. I don\u2019t think there is anyone better\u201d.<\/p>\n It makes it all the more curious that, among some football fans, Guardiola is cast as a figure who has stifled creativity rather than encouraged it.<\/p>\n Where his admirers see free-flowing, free-scoring football, in which creative players such as Xavi, Andres Iniesta and Lionel Messi (at Barcelona), Thiago Alcantara, Franck Ribery and Arjen Robben (at Bayern Munich) and Silva, De Bruyne, Bernardo, Riyad Mahrez, Phil Foden and Ryan Cherki (at City) have excelled, his detractors see possession retained \u201cfor the sake of it\u201d, \u201ctoo many sideways passes\u201d. In particular, they cite the struggles of the much-loved Jack Grealish, whose free-spirited personality and playing style never \u2014 or very rarely \u2014 looked likely to thrive at City under a coach who makes as many complex demands, both in and out of possession, as Guardiola.<\/p>\n \n Jack Grealish became a very different player from the one Manchester City signed (Oli Scarff\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s the opposite,\u201d Bernardo said when the \u201cboring\u201d characterisation of Guardiola\u2019s football was put to him. \u201cWe always go at teams. We never choose to sit at the back. The boring games we have are because the opponents sit at the back. When they play 11 players behind the ball, then it becomes a game of patience. But if you look at the games where teams come at us and play man-to-man, the games are usually open and crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n At times, the \u201cboring\u201d tag seemed to attach itself to Guardiola\u2019s City \u2014 and likewise his Barcelona and Bayern teams \u2014 because they seemed almost too precise, too perfect in their movements. Under him, City won so many games so comfortably that, yes, a sense of jeopardy was often missing until his last couple of seasons.<\/p>\n That is less a Guardiola than a competitive-balance issue. The past couple of decades have brought a series of changes \u2014 structural, financial and indeed those relating to the laws of the game \u2014 that have created a far greater imbalance between the elite teams and the rest. Guardiola, like his former Barcelona and Spain team-mate Luis Enrique at Paris Saint-Germain, has maximised those advantages by focusing on an ultra-technical style designed to dominate matches and entire seasons to an unprecedented degree.<\/p>\n So many of today\u2019s leading coaches have been influenced by Guardiola. The man who has been identified as his successor (Enzo Maresca) previously worked alongside him at City, as did the coach who has just led Arsenal to their first Premier League title in 22 years (Mikel Arteta).<\/p>\n The coach who has transformed Paris Saint-Germain into an elite team showcasing beautiful, dominant, expressive football (Luis Enrique) played and coached alongside Guardiola at Barcelona. Bayern\u2019s coach (Vincent Kompany) played under him at City, as did Chelsea\u2019s new manager (Xabi Alonso) at Bayern. Cesc Fabregas, whose reputation is growing at Italian club Como, played for Guardiola at Barcelona. So did Barcelona assistant coach Thiago. Arne Slot, who led Liverpool to the Premier League title last season, told Dutch magazine Voetbal International in 2023 that Guardiola\u2019s approach \u201cgives me the ultimate pleasure in football\u201d.<\/p>\n This degree of influence at the very highest level of the game is not normal. Coaches as successful as Mourinho and Carlo Ancelotti inspire great respect and admiration among their peers, as did Sir Alex Ferguson and others in the past, but Guardiola\u2019s influence \u2014 both direct and indirect \u2014 is unparalleled in the modern game.<\/p>\n \n Mikel Arteta worked under Pep Guardiola at Manchester City (Carl Recine\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n There is, of course, an enormous elephant in the room: this glorious City era has unfolded against a backdrop of serious allegations about the club\u2019s financial conduct<\/a>. A resolution to the Premier League\u2019s investigation into at least 115 alleged breaches of final regulations is expected soon, but it is three years since Guardiola said he wanted a swift decision on them so that \u201cif we have done something wrong, everybody will know it and, if we have \u2014 like we believe \u2014 (acted) in the right way, then the people will stop talking about it\u201d.<\/p>\n The club deny any wrongdoing, yet, depending on the outcome, their outstanding achievements over the past 15 seasons might come to be viewed very differently.<\/p>\n But these questions have always been for City\u2019s owners and executive team, not for Guardiola or for the many players who were drawn to the club in the years under investigation (2009 to 2018) or since.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/GettyImages-2198386387.jpg\")
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