Vitamin C is how Pep Guardiola makes the big decisions. In November 2024, with the weight of the world upon him, Manchester City’s manager flew to the Middle East for a short holiday over the international break.
He saw chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak, discussed the run of defeats and the future. It was within hours that the Catalan had verbally agreed to extend a contract that went against his previous plans.
Guardiola always earmarked the summer of 2025 as the suitable end date in England, when to draw the curtain on a frankly astonishing trophy-filled tenure, but felt he could not leave City in disrepair.
This gave him at least another 18 months to oversee a changing of the guard within the squad, freshen the team up and provide a platform for future success. There were those within the club who wondered if this could act as yet another refresh for the all-seeing, all-knowing workaholic who drove them to such unimaginable success.
And that is a plausible way of thinking. All season there have been rumblings about Guardiola’s future and all season there has always been the caveat of an individual who is prone to changing his mind and an individual who genuinely loves where he lives and who he works for.
But as the March international break poked over the horizon, Guardiola had still not definitively communicated a future plan to his bosses and director of football, Hugo Viana. So he went chasing the sun again. The plan had been to jet straight off to Abu Dhabi, with the Carabao Cup safely in the bag. Given air space restrictions amid the war waged on Iran by Donald Trump, that was not possible.
Pep Guardiola will oversee just two more matches at Manchester City manager after 10 years at the Etihad
The decision has been bubbling for some time, with the Catalan in deep discussions with the Man City hierarchy during the last international break
Guardiola still went away, coming back far bronzer than he might have were the 55-year-old to have travelled back home or elsewhere in Europe for a few days. It was the look of a man who had been further afield.
Coincidentally, Enzo Maresca – the frontrunner to become Guardiola’s successor – had been spending an extended period of time in the Maldives following his departure from Chelsea.
Guardiola talked things over and was by now acutely aware of the need to make a call either way. Maresca, for his part, has possessed the relaxed air of somebody confident in what is coming next.
Staff have had suspicions for months and the eventual news is merely confirmation of what they had been expecting for much of the campaign. But it is only recently, in the last month or two, where those ideas of life in east Manchester without Guardiola have become more concrete and truly worth contemplating.
An odd remark by somebody in the hierarchy, a simple slip of the tongue, offered some trusted staff members a hint over what was soon coming. Players have privately been talking about this prospect, more and more aware as time went on. The feeling grew that Guardiola and his lieutenants would soon be off into the sunset.
Guardiola has been talking wistfully, nostalgically both in the public glare and behind closed doors and the fact that he chose to watch Stockport County lose against Port Vale, shunning the game of the year between Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich, spoke volumes.
Stockport’s owner, Mark Stott, runs the apartment block where Guardiola resides, near Manchester Cathedral. The pair are close, although an open invite to attend Edgeley Park as a guest of honour has been left on the table for years. Now Guardiola chooses to go.
When asked about that a couple of days later, he replied that he’d have time to watch his old club, Bayern, from his sofa next season.
Former City assistant manager Enzo Maresca (second from left) is the favourite to replace Guardiola
It felt significant when the Catalan snubbed Paris Saint-Germain’s Champions League tie with Bayern Munich to finally take up an open invite from Mark Stott to watch Stockport County
The Etihad is ready to open up its North Stand expansion, with 7,000 additional seats, on the final day of the season – and meeting that deadline has been something Al Mubarak has been pressing home to staff in recent weeks. It felt obvious why when that was being whispered about, and yesterday’s news only confirms those thoughts.
City have been desperate to keep this under wraps for as long as is humanely possible – and to take it to the final week of the season has constituted a good job in that regard.
Guardiola has played his part, giving just enough in press conferences to convince those who wanted to be convinced that he is staying after all.
Only on Saturday, the morning of the FA Cup final, the BBC were hopping about that they had cracked the story in a broadcast interview when, in reality, the City boss only offered crumbs while remaining evasive.
That exchange had come just minutes after he’d quickly departed his media duties in jovial yet sheepish fashion when quizzed about it being his final trip to Wembley as manager. Giving the BBC something different redressed the balance somewhat.
The impact of what is said and when must have been swirling around the heads of Guardiola and City executives. They saw the effect that Jurgen Klopp’s announcement, made in January 2024, had on the remainder of Liverpool’s season. That has to have played into the thinking.
Liverpool led the Premier League by five points having played one game more when Klopp proclaimed that this was it, leading to an outpouring of emotion. They went on to drop an average of a point a game for the next 17 matches until the end of the season, finishing nine shy of eventual victors City, who made history by retaining a league title for the third consecutive year.
Guardiola departs having lifted the FA Cup and Carabao Cup in his final season. Can he make it a domestic treble this week?
Clearly there were lessons around that, which is why nothing was forthcoming as soon as Guardiola stepped off his private jet from holidays ready for the run-in. And really, there should be no discernible emotional or psychological difference between how City’s squad feel now and how Liverpool’s squad felt then.
But they will need to harness that emotion in this title race now, going down to that final day when Villa are the visitors – just as they were in 2022, the drama of Ilkay Gundogan’s late double.
Guardiola’s legacy does not depend on any of this, far from it, but to somehow manage another domestic Treble in his final month as City manager would feel poetic. Were they to do that in transition – an expensive transition but transition nevertheless – then it just further plays into the guy’s genius. Plays into the guy’s relentlessness and plays into the guy’s winning mentality.
Worrying about how they can even come close to replicating that can wait for another day. For now, for these few days, with the FA Cup and Carabao in the bag, a title still on the line and a farewell party on Monday, City’s only concern is to make sure the end is fitting for their king.
