This is the moment Manchester City have been dreading, but the whole of English football is going to miss Pep Guardiola too.
He’s a true legend of the game, and I am gutted he is going – the Premier League just won’t be the same without him.
Pep is one of the best managers we’ve ever seen. The greatest ever? Well, it’s hard to disrespect Sir Alex Ferguson when you have that conversation, but those were different times – Pep’s the greatest manager of the modern era, that’s for sure.
If you look at what they both won – and I know everyone will read this and say City have spent more, which I get – then Pep has won a Treble at Barcelona and a Treble with City. That’s incredible in itself.
But the biggest difference between the two is that ‘Fergie’ was a great manager but Pep is the greatest coach. He has transformed the way football is played in England in a way that no-one has ever done before.
I played against Fergie’s teams and the way he galvanised them was incredible. Facing them was horrible because you knew something special could happen and they would fight to the end, and that’s coming from someone who played for City. He did it with loads of different sides too.
But as a pundit I’ve analysed dozens of Pep’s games, and he’s a genius. It’s as simple as that.
When he replaced Manuel Pellegrini in 2016, City already had some very good players so he was not starting from scratch, but he did not just go on to dominate English football for a decade, he changed it too.
Now everyone plays the way City do, passing out from the back. That didn’t happen before he arrived.
People have copied that, and other things like his false nine, the inverted full-backs he invented at Bayern Munich when he had Philipp Lahm coming inside, and the same with the ball-playing goalkeeper, which he used from the start at City.
I was gutted when he brought in Claudio Bravo for my mate Joe Hart, but if you listen to Joe now he will tell you he understands why it happened because the team were playing a different kind of football.
It didn’t work out with Bravo, but then in came Ederson and he took that part of his position to new heights. Again, that’s all on Pep. As a player or pundit, I’ve not seen another coach do that in this country the way he has.
