The word legacy is thrown around liberally and at times loosely in sport. In the case of Pep Guardiola it is fitting. What the great Catalan leaves us with when he walks away from English football this weekend can be felt at every level of our game.
Guardiola came to Manchester City to win and to learn and to live. Much of what the 55-year-old does is about the journey as much as the destination and, 10 years on, we can look back and say that his time in England has been about something more profound than 20 trophies.
It’s an astonishing haul of silverware and there are – at the moment – six Premier League titles buried within. Guardiola, though, will be remembered and revered as much for the actual football than he will for what Brian Clough once dismissively referred to as ‘the pots and pans’.
The Pep trickle is real, for sure.
So much of what he did and how his City teams played has been observed and then absorbed all the way down to the English football pyramid.
Sir Alex Ferguson and Pep Guardiola are the two best managers in English football history
The junior coach in the park on a Sunday morning shouting at his nine-year-olds to ‘press high’? For good or for bad, that’s Pep.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Guardiola has redefined the way football is watched, played and even talked about in this country.
English football luminaries such as Wayne Rooney said, firstly, he had wished to play for him and, latterly, that he tried to imitate some of his methods once he was a manager. Rooney, of course, played for Manchester United.
This, as much as anything, is what Guardiola leaves behind. It is, in some ways, an indelible influence that is rare in our times and spreads far beyond the confines of City’s sprawling football academy in east Manchester.
The City rivalry with Liverpool between 2018 and 2022 was breathtaking both in its intensity and its stylistics. Symphonies and harmonies against cymbals and drums.
If you close your eyes and concentrate, you can still hear it. Wrapping itself round either side of the Covid pandemic, it felt like sporting comfort blanket for stressed souls.
The version of Liverpool that Jurgen Klopp presented during that spell was perhaps the greatest Anfield has ever seen. In its way it was Guardiola’s classic City side, one that thrummed with the genius of Kevin De Bruyne, Bernardo Silva, Ilkay Gundogan and John Stones.
Guardiola, who leaves Man City at the end of this season, had many battles with Jurgen Klopp
Back then you had to find 90 Premier League points and more if you were to prevent City winning a title. It is one of Guardiola’s most remarkable achievements that he only allowed Klopp to get his hands on one.
And this was part of Guardiola’s innate brilliance. It was not that he burned so brightly but that he found a way to keep burning.
That proved beyond so many of those who came before and who have passed through since. To build one winning team is an achievement. To construct three – if we don’t include his latest work in progress – is quite something else entirely.
Others have done it previously. Arsene Wenger at Arsenal. Jose Mourinho over two spells at Chelsea. Further back into the pre-Premier League era, Liverpool’s Bob Paisley did it spectacularly and humbly. Time sweeps on but Paisley’s three European Cups between 1977 and 1982 testify to what my colleague Ian Herbert has so beautifully described the Cumbrian’s ‘quiet genius’.
But if we are talk about the pantheon, that list of great English-based managers that must include those already mentioned here along with the likes of Kenny Dalglish, Don Revie, Bill Shankly and Sir Matt Busby, and if we are to allow ourselves to try and compare, then the tussle for the space at the top must surely be contested by Guardiola and his long-time friend Sir Alex Ferguson.
Guardiola handed the great Scot two of the worst nights of his professional life, in the Champions League finals of 2009 and 2011. Guardiola’s Barcelona side won both, Ferguson later attesting to the disorientation felt by his United players lost ‘on the Barcelona carousel’.
A year after the second one and with Guardiola taking a year off between jobs in New York, the men met for dinner in Manhattan.
Ferguson claimed he subtlety offered Guardiola the chance to succeed him at Old Trafford. Maybe it was too subtle as Guardiola claims not to have noticed. Guardiola at United? How things could have been different across Manchester and indeed the Premier League had that one come to pass.
When comparing them both, there are clear similarities. For example, the capacity to evolve and reshape themselves – beyond so many managers – came naturally to both. Ferguson, for example, was alive to the arrival of social media in football dressing rooms before almost anyone. He had rules in place before some of his players even had Twitter accounts.
Liverpool’s Bob Paisley did it spectacularly and humbly to claim a huge array of medals
Ferguson’s football had its roots in more traditional British values and it had to. The way the game was played, critiqued and, most importantly, refereed was different back then. It was no less entertaining for all of that, though.
But if we are to identify a key difference between the two men then perhaps it’s that Guardiola rewired and accelerated the trajectory of a football club that was already structured to be successful. Roberto Mancini and Manuel Pellegrini had recently won the Premier League before he arrived.
Ferguson, on the other hand, hauled a failing giant to its feet and, over the course of more than two decades, turned it into one of the most successful and – pre-Glazers at least – most profitable sporting organisations in the world.
It’s a largely fatuous debate anyway. Ferguson was a brilliant leader of people while Guardiola was arguably a better boots on the grass football coach. Players did things for Guardiola and became versions of themselves under Guardiola that they would have never have imagined when they met him for the first time. But both won and won big and won with a style that so many others would have killed for.
The manner of their exits are contrasting. Ferguson – for all that he won one final title in 2013 – was hanging on a little at the end of his 26 years. Guardiola is not.
The City manager leaves at a time when he still has more to give. He leaves with a team part way through a rebuild.
United were brash enough and bold to think the natural order would remain once Ferguson was in the wind. They were wrong. The modern City are confident in their own structures but this will be the first real stress test for a decade.
Guardiola didn’t win anything in his first year at the Etihad, back in 2016-17. How quaint that seems now. At subsequent times people said his football was boring but – though we will not miss his team’s technical fouls – we can only presume they weren’t watching properly.
This slight but rather striking looking Spaniard will leave us having woven his beliefs, values and football philosophies in to the fabric of our game. Not many can say that.
Pep Guardiola has become as intrinsic to English football as Bovril, half-time oranges and the theme tune to Sports Report.
Whether he stands as the best we have ever had doesn’t really matter.
