Pep Guardiola’s new contract is fabulous news for English football. He has changed our game fundamentally and his impact will live on even if Man City are brought to heel by the Premier League, writes IAN LADYMAN

Though it may not feel like it today in the boardrooms of Old Trafford, Stamford Bridge, Anfield and the Emirates, this is fabulous news for the Premier League and indeed English football. Another year or two of Pep Guardiola, the most influential coach of the modern era. There is everything to like about that.

England has long been awash with great foreign coaches as the wealth and the cache of the Premier League has been inflated like a great golden balloon over the last two decades. Jose Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti, Louis van Gaal, Antonio Conte, Roberto Mancini, Rafa Benitez, Jurgen Klopp. Some have wandered across our green acres more than once, dressed in different colours.

All have ultimately been passing through, though. They came, they won (some of them) and then they moved on. Guardiola has not done that. 

The great Catalan – now committed to more than a decade at Manchester City – has changed our game fundamentally. The way it is played, coached, watched and talked about. Guardiola has already left footprints on the coaching fields of this country so deep and penetrating that they may well be there forever. Why would we not wish him to stay a little longer?

Still nobody in the Premier League plays football quite like City when they are on their mettle. Strangely, they are off colour right now. Four defeats on the spin ahead of Saturday’s home engagement with Tottenham at the Etihad. That only makes the timing of this news even more apposite. 

City know that Guardiola will find the right course once again soon enough. This season and now, it transpires, in the next one also.

Guardiola had a major influence on Enzo Maresca (centre) who is now trying to follow in his footsteps at Chelsea

Mikel Arteta also worked under Guardiola, and is now trying to overhaul him with Arsenal

But yes Guardiola’s City are the standard bearers and have been for quite some time. Guardiola’s imagination, intelligence and sheer damned industry is to be found not only in a trophy haul of 18 but also in the footballing bones of players such as Phil Foden, John Stones, Kevin de Bruyne and Bernardo Silva. Very good players morphed into greatness at Guardiola’s hand.

And across the landscape we see it. The echoes and the pilfered principles. The football the others try to play. Some with success and others with less. In the Premier League and beyond.

We see Guardiola’s direct influence at Arsenal and Chelsea – coached by two former City coaches Mikel Arteta and Enzo Maresca – but we see it subliminally further down, at Fabian Hurzeler’s Brighton and even at Russell Martin’s Southampton.

In the Championship last season, Wayne Rooney asked his Birmingham full-backs to play like City’s. It didn’t work but he tried it. Asked on a Gary Neville podcast to name a job he would like in football, Rooney – a former Manchester United captain – said he would like to be Guardiola’s assistant.

There are some who don’t like the way Guardiola’s City have monopolised the Premier League. They have won the last four titles. City also remain at war with the league over allegations of financial chicanery, 115 charges they deny. They may well be playing in a lower division if they lose that war. Guardiola may well be gone by then.

But to airbrush Guardiola’s work with that as the reasoning is quite wrong. Genius is genius, no matter what the accountants may or may not be doing with the curtains closed.

If City are eventually brought to heel by the Premier League, their modern achievements will forever sit accompanied by an asterisk. But the impact of Guardiola’s methods and ideologies will always live on. They are fundamental. Things like that don’t survive or die in dusty dark courtrooms. They breathe the air, out there where it matters. Out on the grass.