Standing inside the white lines of the Amex Stadium, a big decision noodled around Pep Guardiola’s head. Manchester City had arrived at Brighton in a bleak November 2024 having lost three consecutive matches for the first time in six years. Throughout his long and illustrious career, from Barcelona to Bayern Munich and then on to City, the great man had never presided over four.
A coach wedded to routine and his own traditions, Guardiola broke both of those as a depleted squad went out to warm up. Usually he’d slump in the dugout with a thousand-yard stare pre-match before wandering inside. But here, Guardiola instead paced up and down, watching this particular set of drills like a primate might observe its prey.
His gaze focused intently on his players. He was looking for any sign of fight or life – or indeed the complete opposite. Prowling with frustration at his side’s form but also to notice body language, to see if there was still something to work with here. Guardiola has always said that he’s happy if the players are giving him enough. A warm-up can provide real indicators to that. This one more than most, given the circumstances.
He had decided that 2024-25 would be his last season in England. Indeed the idea had become an open secret among the City hierarchy. Towards the end of the previous campaign, director of football Txiki Begiristain had made it plain to relevant parties that a passing of the torch was coming.
Yet recent weeks and defeats had thrown that into doubt as Guardiola grappled with the choices that now lay before him, never clearer than watching his players with light menace down on the south coast. Once the proper stuff started, Erling Haaland gave City a lead that was thrown away late on. Brighton went on to win 2-1.
Pep Guardiola had decided that 2024-25 would be his last season in England. Indeed the idea had become an open secret among the City hierarchy
Guardiola grappled with the choices that now lay before him, never clearer than watching his players with light menace down on the south coast during a 2-1 defeat by Brighton
Guardiola remained defiant after – ‘I won’t step back, more than ever I want to do it’ – and rationalised that surgery was required. This was the moment when his mind turned to look at a new future, a new City team – one that is now about to be passed into the hands of his successor Enzo Maresca.
He went to the Middle East on holiday a day later, meeting chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak, and within hours had verbally agreed a new contract.
There was simply a recognition that Guardiola could not leave City in this state. Not like this and not now. To move forward, changes had to come. This was to become the final recycle job of Guardiola’s City. It was also to be the most dramatic, as the 2023 Treble-winning squad – one of the most gifted ensembles of footballers the English game had ever seen – was taken apart and rebuilt into something else entirely.
The acceleration of a squad revamp, over £400million spent on 12 new faces in the space of a year, was a direct manifestation of what had happened in the 2024 transfer window. That had been earmarked as the summer to ‘shake and move’ – a Guardiola-ism – and to usher in a new, post-Treble era.
But sources have since admitted that the success of the team in completing football’s holy grail and then lifting a record fourth straight Premier League title the season after, had left the recruitment team ‘confused’ as to what – if anything – was needed.
That was the mistake and, in terms of City recruitment, it was a rare one. Over the last decade of Begiristain-Guardiola genius, the club haven’t got much wrong in the market. Here – in the middle of a poor and ultimately trophyless 2024-25 season – that confusion was viewed internally as a simple failure, a case of decisions being made on the back of emotion and not data.
Senior figures, Guardiola included, had felt an ageing squad had proven they could physically hold out for one final campaign. But they were wrong and reality bit soon enough. It started at Tottenham in the Carabao Cup in late October. Despite the club’s love affair with that competition, the 2-1 defeat looked inconsequential on the surface. Haaland, for example, had been given the night off.
Back inside the dressing room, though, they were counting the cost. Injuries everywhere. Four players went for scans after Spurs, Guardiola ruing not selecting an XI full of kids. What that night – as mundane as it felt at the time – did was trigger a chain of events from which City barely survived.
A Carabao Cup defeat at Tottenham in 2024 – as mundane as it felt at the time – triggered a chain of events from which City barely survived
‘Nobody was fit at Bournemouth, our next game,’ one source says, of their first league defeat that season. Manuel Akanji played on one leg for months. Matheus Nunes was on the left wing. Nathan Ake wasn’t fit, John Stones was out.
Young defender Jahmai Simpson-Pusey made his only appearances for the club during a dismal run that saw one win in 12 games, including a chastening night in Lisbon when Sporting’s performance, masterminded by Manchester United-bound Ruben Amorim, was supposed to herald a new dawn in this part of the world.
‘Last season there were things behind the scenes we could not control,’ Guardiola reflected before winning the 2026 Carabao Cup. ‘Players don’t support you when you’re losing, except for exceptional cases.’
On this theme, City staff logged a visible drop-off from those who knew their times were coming to an end. Indeed, Guardiola admitted he didn’t realise the legs of so many older players would fail them simultaneously.
For the third time in his City tenure – 2017, 2022 and now 2025 – Guardiola and his bosses were going to make a raft of big decisions on players all at the same time and the arrival of yet another assistant more than played its part.
The revolving door of Guardiola No 2s – Domenec Torrent to Mikel Arteta to Juanma Lillo to Maresca and back to Lillo – eventually stopped swinging when Pep Lijnders walked through it last June. The final assistant and a very different one at that. Lijnders, once of Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool, is actually a coach whose philosophy appears more in line with Guardiola’s old rival from Anfield. More heavy metal than sweet symphony.
Guardiola actually asked for Klopp’s blessing to appoint the Dutchman and it marked a fundamental shift in City’s out-of-possession work. They had fallen away from the pressing monsters with the older guard – Kevin De Bruyne, Ilkay Gundogan – unable to physically produce what had been the norm for so long. Lijnders didn’t completely reinvent City off the ball but worked them back towards high intensity.
The profiles of players either blooded or bought largely reflects this alteration. Nico O’Reilly, Antoine Semenyo, Tijjani Reijnders and Rayan Ait-Nouri all have the features that suit a relentless pressing unit. Added to that is Jeremy Doku, whose defensive contributions are increasing.
Nico O’Reilly (right) was blooded and Antoine Semenyo (centre) bought to fuel a relentless pressing unit
Added to that is Jeremy Doku, whose defensive contributions are increasing
Rayan Cherki is perhaps the only signing that hasn’t fitted this way of thinking, a maverick playmaker whose number of assists and general performances in a debut campaign offer great hope for the future under Maresca. Cherki had a spell out of the team early in the season and came back looking leaner, with more vigour.
This has been a slight readjustment ahead of the dawn of the new regime and despite falling short in this season’s title race, the statistics suggest at an improvement. More goals, fewer conceded and a goal difference increasing by more than 50 per cent.
The drop in age among the squad also offers Maresca a strong foundation from which to attempt to make a success of the succession.
It all represents one final evolution for Guardiola, one last piece of evidence of his ability to adapt, and maybe we would not be looking at a truly fitting end to his time had it not come with a degree of tactical shift.
The chatter on the radios at City’s sprawling training base was of something going on in one of the car parks. There was talk of somebody driving slightly erratically. And this time, it didn’t happen to be a young Liam Delap pinching the keys of a kit man to whizz his Mini Cooper around.
Guardiola has an indifferent past with cars. Friends politely say he is not renowned for his driving skills, as one unwitting bollard outside the Etihad wearing paint from a Bentley can attest. He’s had the classic car, the electric Nissan Leaf and, more recently, the BYD. Through lockdowns, he’d ride a fashionable Pinarello bike the three miles to work from home.
Even so, he wanted to help teach his daughter Maria how to drive. They went for a spin in the City Football Academy car park, security soon alerted to the vehicle’s shaky trail, only to realise that the boss was inside.
While driving instructor might not be Guardiola’s calling, the way he has regularly reinvented City with such skill means that his time here will be remembered for the breathtaking evolution that sparked the utter dominance of several irresistible teams. Each came with energy, verve and an invisible drive that dragged others with him.
Much has changed in a decade. Nationwide rows over the Brexit referendum result were only just getting started when Guardiola rocked up in that Bentley. Petrol was £1.10 a litre. City’s war with every authority going had not yet truly taken hold. Five future Prime Ministers were mere MPs. Donald Trump came, went and came back.
Guardiola and his daughter Maria went for a spin in the City Football Academy car park, security soon alerted to the vehicle’s shaky trail, only to realise that the boss was inside
The world is an extremely different place to the one Guardiola first walked into in 2016
As that has all swirled, Guardiola’s development of what his teams look like has at times felt like a whirlwind. Conversations inside the offices at the CFA have spawned new build-ups, a goalkeeper as a spare man in possession, inverted full backs, centre halves as No 8s, centre halves as left wingers, false nines, box midfields, five up front. He’s gawped at geese flying in the sky, marvelling at their unified formation. He’s studied and implemented aspects of Herbert Chapman’s 3-2-2-3 style. He’s played with four bruising centre backs.
The only thing Guardiola has not really tried is counter-attacking.
‘When Pep came, we had a talk,’ Fernandinho says, recalling when his transition to a holding midfielder was made permanent. ‘And he said, “No, you’re going to play here because it’s important for me to have a player like you to give me the balance, because I’m going to play with at least five players in front of you”. I just said, “Wow”. David Silva, Kevin De Bruyne, both wingers, the striker!’
Par for the course now. Not then. How City move the ball into the most dangerous area of the field has altered year-on-year. Even in the 2024-25 season, widely considered a mess, Guardiola had actually come up with something that contributed to seven wins from their first nine games.
‘We went to play against Enzo (Maresca) at Chelsea after the four titles in a row,’ ex-coach Carlos Vicens tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘First game. We played with De Bruyne on the outside. We had an extra attacking midfielder that day, Bernardo Silva. He gave us the first goal that we scored (assisting Haaland in a 2-0 win). It was good for the team to know there was something extra to focus on. In the Premier League, if you keep doing the same things, you go backwards.’
Each pre-season brought a fresh twist but the guiding principles never changed. Some of them may be surprising. Others – receive the ball, pass the ball – are not.
The presumed complexity of what Guardiola requires of his players is actually something of a mirage. During his 10th season, City’s coach extraordinaire – usually still hands-on, dressed head to toe in club shop gear and standing bang in the middle of training – shrieked for one specific session to stop on three occasions. Shrieked and not peeped, as he never wears a whistle.
Players stood around as he explained the fundamentals of how they must ‘switch it’ from one side to the other, a phrase heard on Sunday league pitches up and down the country.
Fernandinho’s defensive discipline at the base of midfield was crucial to allowing Guardiola to deploy five attacking players at the same time
That was one. The next stoppage was to light a fire under his midfielders who he deemed not to have been aggressive enough on second balls, claiming that sort of attitude could easily carry into the weekend. The third was when he went mad at some for not winning duels. And yes, this is Pep Guardiola berating his players for the nuts and bolts of English football failings. This is the same Pep Guardiola who has an ethos on what constitutes the perfect cross.
Whipped? No. Curled? No. Drilled? No. Guardiola prefers his crosses floated.
Yes, that seemingly harmless flight, the sort with which defenders are eased into during a warm-up. His reasoning for this is that this is an area of the game that is largely 50-50. The floated ball is more difficult to clear, tricky for a defender to get much purchase on a header, and therefore brings second balls into play.
And this is why he goes mad at training over things you’d associate with some of the older English managers. Guardiola’s friends have always called him pragmatic.
These basics remained cornerstones well into his reign. Ake’s tenacity in the 2026 Carabao Cup final victory over Arsenal was bookmarked by coaching staff as a perfect example. When Piero Hincapie hurriedly hoicked away a clearance, Ake was the furthest man forward, having pressed a second ball right into Arsenal’s area to put them under unrelenting pressure.
City recycled possession on halfway, Rodri switching it and O’Reilly bundling in the opening goal. Three facets of that goal were Guardiola basics: Ake’s press, Rodri’s switch after drawing Arsenal over and O’Reilly’s eagerness to win a loose ball.
What that fails to mention is the lesson Guardiola gave O’Reilly in the run-up to that Wembley final. City had mapped out that Martin Zubimendi would be the man picking up their left back when he was crashing into the box, and their instincts had been right. Guardiola told O’Reilly how to arc runs to unsettle somebody of Zubimendi’s stature and the academy product finished with both goals.
It was funny, really, to hear sources say that City went down to the capital with severe trepidation after two sessions, on the Friday and Saturday, that were termed as ‘no good’. They blew Arsenal away 24 hours later and laid down a marker.
Guardiola told Nico O’Reilly how to arc runs to unsettle somebody of Zubimendi’s stature and the academy product finished with both goals
City went down to the capital with severe trepidation after two sessions, on the Friday and Saturday, that were termed as ‘no good’. They blew Arsenal away and laid down a marker
Doing the simple things well is a hallmark of Guardiola’s football and whether we realise it or not, it’s how his legacy has formed in this country.
For the opening two months of the Centurions campaign in 2017-18, when all records were blown to smithereens, Guardiola devoted every single session to transitions – and how to avoid being caught out in such a physically punishing division.
He had learnt their importance in England across that first year, when the pundits queued up to chastise his tiki-taka – a description Guardiola abhors, believing it characterises aimless possession.
During that early autumn of 2017, City’s players were drilled on conceding on the counter-attack every single day, Guardiola imploring his midfielders to play quickly and directly, using kit men to shadow the movement of Burnley’s Ashley Barnes before one game. Doing it all again and again until it was right.
That was when they came up with the five-second rule of ‘pressing with risk’. If the ball is not regained within that timeframe, players are to drop back into shape. It worked magically, with the 2017-18 side arguably the slickest of all.
Especially at the Etihad, six opponents camped in a straight line on the edge of their own box would become the norm for years. It was up to Guardiola to find ways to combat this and, of course, he did. Attackers were shown videos of rugby players slipping team-mates through holes in defensive lines to signify the importance of waiting for a perfect moment to pass in games that were ever more compact.
Premier League opponents came to fear City, travelling to the Etihad with a sense of dread. And so it was that many top flight English games came to resemble glorified sessions of attack versus defence on a Saturday.
At times, and by some who should have known better, City and Guardiola were labelled boring. But City and Guardiola were never boring. It was just that nobody wanted to play properly against them. Dread had crushed any notion of positive endeavour.
During that early autumn of 2017, City’s players were drilled on conceding on the counter-attack every single day. The 2017-18 side were arguably the slickest of all
Premier League opponents came to fear City, travelling to the Etihad with a sense of dread. And so it was that many games came to resemble glorified sessions of attack versus defence
Haaland, Bernardo Silva, Rodri, Gundogan, Ederson. There are a few who could be heralded as the most influential signing of Guardiola’s era. For their individual prowess, longevity or understanding of the manager.
There were those who got away, though. Lionel Messi got away.
It’s 2020 and life is difficult at City. Life is difficult for everybody. A season whose climax was delayed by Covid has ended domestically with Liverpool romping to the title and in Europe with City collapsing spectacularly to Lyon of all teams in the last eight of a Champions League play-off round played behind closed doors in Lisbon across the space of a week.
Guardiola has been grumpy for much of the season. The previous summer’s transfer window had left him short of defenders, something compounded by injuries to Stones and Aymeric Laporte. Just before Christmas, he had lost his right-hand man Arteta to Arsenal. The following month, meanwhile, had found him so out of sorts following the blowing of a lead in stoppage-time to Crystal Palace that he refused to do a commercial shoot.
He’d been anxious at a drop-off in intensity across the club all season. He could see the way the campaign would end and his worst fears came to pass. They finished embarrassed by the seventh-best team in France and 18 points behind Klopp’s rampant Liverpool. The night before the Lyon disaster in Lisbon, Messi’s Barcelona are also humbled, 8-2 by Bayern Munich.
Guardiola is restless at what he perceives as consistent failure in the competition and his former prodigy Messi seethes at the Barca capitulation. They rarely speak but suddenly messages are exchanged and, at Messi’s behest, the pair meet at Guardiola’s home for almost seven hours, as detailed in Marti Perarnau’s book The Pep Revolution.
It’s made clear that the Argentine is serious about leaving the Nou Camp for City. Battered by a bruising few months, Guardiola’s spring returns. Players excitably discuss the impact Messi will have. It feels like a shot in the arm and the forensic planning into the impending arrival starts.
Other than Guardiola’s own tactical ideas, there are even talks about how best to capitalise on this stratospheric signing with existing club sponsors. A ‘Messi Tax’, is discussed. For a week, confidence grows. It feels as good as done. They have his word. All is calm. And then, a week later, the little maestro changes his mind.
Lionel Messi got away from Guardiola in 2020 – just when City thought they had their man
Messi joined Paris Saint-Germain instead – a gut punch to Guardiola as he considered his future
It’s a gut punch for Guardiola, who is showing no inclination to sign an extension on a contract that runs down in nine months. June 2021 is only the length of a football season away and, with Thomas Tuchel’s days seemingly numbered at Paris Saint-Germain, it is Guardiola’s phone the French club keep calling.
There is a definite hangover from the Lyon and Messi sagas. How can there not be? The two are interlinked by the Champions League obsession. The mood is lifted somewhat by a team BBQ on the veranda at the training ground but things do not alter dramatically until a month later, in late September, with the signing of one of the most significant players ever to cross the threshold of the City training centre. Ruben Dias.
City had needed a new central defender for a year by then. Guardiola’s countenance during a pre-season trip to Asia in July 2019 had made that perfectly clear. On summer tours the mood is usually light as coaches and players, refreshed by some time away from the game, return with slates clean and clear minds. This time it was a little different. As City prepared to face Ange Postecoglou’s vibrant Yokohama F. Marinos in Japan’s Nissan Stadium, Guardiola’s discontent regarding City’s summer transfer business was becoming apparent.
Although midfielder Rodri had arrived as a record signing from Atletico Madrid and Juventus’ Joao Cancelo was also through the door, business in the one key area dragged. Vincent Kompany had gone to start his coaching career at Anderlecht and that had left a chasm at the back. The Stones-Laporte partnership blossomed but an ageing Nicolas Otamendi and largely untried Eric Garcia were the back-ups and that was never going to be good enough.
At this time City and Guardiola wanted Harry Maguire. Maguire wanted City. There was only haggling with Leicester City to do and, given City’s financial might, the expectation had been that the England international would arrive as the crucial missing piece.
The internal data at the recruitment team’s disposal valued Maguire at £40m but Leicester’s price tag was double that. Given their need, City went to £70m hoping for compromise and, after Leicester knocked that back, refused to go any higher. There was some distress among the coaching team that the hierarchy would go so far beyond their valuation and then not seal the deal for the sake of an extra £10m. At all top clubs, such tensions occasionally exist.
Maguire ultimately went to United for a world-record £80m a week after the Yokohama friendly and has had a decent career at Old Trafford, albeit without the weight of trophies won across town.
Weeks later, disaster struck. Hours prior to the 2019 summer transfer window closing, both Stones and Laporte succumbed to injuries. Laporte’s knee issue meant he wasn’t seen until new year and, by the end of the season, Stones was out of favour, with City looking to sell him. Fernandinho was repositioned as an emergency central defender.
City were willing to pay £70m for Harry Maguire (right) but rivals United paid £10m more and got their man
A long 13 months after Laporte sustained that injury against Brighton, the Kompany replacement – the solution to all defensive ills – finally arrived.
Dias breezed into town amid derision on social media for a perceived rashness in the tackle and fan discontent at another summer of City refusing to overpay for other targets. He was to win the league title in each of his first four seasons.
Dias is a fine footballer but his influence at City has spread beyond the confines of the field. For example, he proved the antithesis to ego problems that plagued the team through the first six months of the pandemic. His introduction brought to mind the famous Fabian Delph outburst in the dressing room during Guardiola’s second season, aired on an Amazon documentary, when he implored everybody to go back to basics. ‘Defenders, defend,’ Delph complained to a room of raised eyebrows.
Dias would have bought into that. He was bought to eradicate City’s soft belly and the subsequent statistics are astonishing. Fifteen clean sheets in his first 23 games and 17 goals conceded in 31 league matches. To boot, Dias revitalised Stones for his second coming after injury and personal problems. Within weeks, staff were labelling him a future captain and that will likely come to pass under Maresca in 2026.
‘Nowadays the idea is that a defender needs to do much more,’ Dias told Daily Mail Sport during those opening months. ‘But if not me, then who else will take pride from defending? It gives me pleasure to make the other team feel powerless.’
City won the league by 12 points in 2021 and reached the Champions League final, where they lost to Tuchel’s Chelsea. More than a small part of the success was down to their new Portuguese defender. Guardiola, meanwhile, had eventually signed a new contract the previous November. He felt there was more to achieve and that the environment the club had curated for him to work in was too good to abandon. Equally, he knew deep down that there had to be improvements on the pitch.
‘With the contract, it is “adapt or die” for some of the players,’ said a source at the time. Part of the recalibrating that desperately needed doing around this time centred on messaging. Guardiola cut the meetings, reducing their length, not overloading players with information.
‘We put (forward) both sides – to continue or not – and in the end we decided that the best for all of us is to continue because still we have the feeling that there is unfinished business,’ Guardiola said. ‘We are agreed that to do 100 points or 98 points and win seven or eight titles in two seasons again is almost impossible, and to win four titles in one season again is almost impossible. We know that but that does not mean we don’t fight for all the titles.’
Ruben Dias is a fine footballer but his influence at City has spread beyond the confines of the field
Within weeks of his arrival, staff were labelling Dias a future captain and that will likely come to pass under Enzo Maresca in 2026
Externally, Guardiola wanted to exude that the unreasonably high expectations he had always set himself had come down. Internally, in a December meeting with Begiristain, confidant Manel Estiarte and coaches Lillo and Rodolfo Borrell, Guardiola was somewhat different.
After drawing 1-1 with West Brom, he shouted: ‘This isn’t us, I’m not proud of how we’re playing’ at his squad, and the meeting with his trusted circle was to ascertain what needed to be done as a collective to wrestle back their crown. Dias had fixed the defence but goalscoring still needed sorting. Just don’t mention Messi.
That week, Guardiola worked hard with the attackers on the basics of their movement, to become sharper and more purposeful in unlocking the deep blocks. Something worked. They went on to set an English record of 21 consecutive victories in all competitions to win the league title and in beating West Brom 5-0 in the return fixture, put on one of the complete shows of Guardiola’s reign, an artwork of a performance that, with lockdowns still a feature of life in England, deserved fans present.
Added to that, City conceded only 37 shots in six months as Rodri drastically improved. The Spaniard boasted more ‘regains’ that set up a shot than anyone else in the division. Gundogan finished the year as City’s top scorer, with Phil Foden and De Bruyne also utilised as false nines, as Sergio Aguero’s decade at the club came to a close.
Messi was not the only world star to cross Guardiola’s City radar and keep on moving. With City needing a striker after winning the league without one in 2021, Cristiano Ronaldo – looking to end a three-year stay at Juventus – was presented to the club by his agent, Jorge Mendes. City have a strong relationship with Mendes. Even so the initial answer was a polite ‘no’. City already had their sights set on Haaland at Borussia Dortmund or Tottenham’s Harry Kane.
Once it was made clear that Haaland, then only 12 months into his time in Germany, was unattainable, the focus turned to Kane. The England captain is a perfect Guardiola striker in many ways, dropping deep to link play but with the energy of a midfielder and eye for goal on par with anybody across Europe.
The dance with Spurs – more specifically, the dance with Daniel Levy – never really had any music set to it. Levy refused to budge on a £150m valuation which, given Kane’s record at Bayern since, now seems fair. City would never go there and conflicting stories and semantics took over that pursuit, with some sources believing they bid up to £120m and others insisting no offer was ever forthcoming.
Irrespective, City knew there was no way of prising Kane away, despite the striker attempting to force the issue himself by missing pre-season training and the opening day meeting between the two teams. Officially, he was not deemed fit enough. It was the act of a desperate man. Mendes saw an opening. Ronaldo again. Executives at City liked the idea and that was down to the pound signs – the marketing opportunities and the enhancement of an ever-expanding brand.
Harry Kane is a perfect Guardiola striker in many ways, dropping deep to link play but with the energy of a midfielder and eye for goal on par with anybody across Europe
Once Erling Haaland and Kane were deemed unavailable, City went back in for Cristiano Ronaldo – but eventually Guardiola chose to go with a false nine system instead
So the ‘no’ softened and Guardiola became embroiled in conversations about how Ronaldo might fit in. Ultimately, this was a superstar he did not much fancy integrating into a team that he, the staff and new skipper Fernandinho had worked so hard to unite.
‘When I first worked with them in 2021, Pep told me they were the best group he’s ever had,’ ex-coach Brian Barry-Murphy says. ‘That they don’t need motivating and he can just coach.’
Guardiola’s say on Ronaldo was final. His take was that he would rather go with young Ferran Torres and false nines again before returning for either Kane or Haaland the following summer. It gave him another tactical problem to solve but Guardiola craves that more than anything. City sources claimed that Ronaldo wanted £1m a week as he instead sealed what was perceived to be a romantic return to Old Trafford that ended badly.
The oddities of the transfer market were nothing new when it came to forwards. The anger emanating from the boardroom in August 2017, when Arsenal reneged on a deal to sell Alexis Sanchez at the last minute, was an all-time squabble. Arsene Wenger suggested throwing Raheem Sterling into the deal but Guardiola pulled rank. Sanchez subsequently went to United and failed spectacularly.
All of those bits of misfortune or acts of strong will – depending on your view – led to the months of work put in by Begiristain to woo Haaland into joining the club that his father, Alfie, had captained in the Noughties. Haaland should one day end up as City’s greatest ever goalscorer and helped to deliver a Treble in his very first campaign.
As we have seen, the road to gold is very rarely straight but the truth is that Haaland is probably the only readymade globetrotter that Guardiola has ever signed. This is one of the reasons those behind the scenes have to work overtime to make sure the No 9 is always on the pitch.
Before being appointed City’s head of physical performance, Donough Holohan worked on reconditioning players during injury lay-offs. One afternoon in November 2022, Haaland was putting the finishing touches to a return from a foot problem. That had been one of the areas of concern for the club around a striker who was suffering persistent injury concerns at Dortmund.
It is not unreasonable to expect a club lavishing so much money on a player to be cautious with any comebacks – especially regarding a man with recent history. Next to the main training pitch, Holohan was putting Haaland through some drills.
Arsenal reneged on a deal for Alexis Sanchez in 2017, with the Gunners asking for Raheem Sterling in a swap
Haaland should one day end up as City’s greatest ever goalscorer and helped to deliver a Treble in his very first campaign
‘I was doing all sorts of work with him,’ Holohan says. ‘He was looking great. He’s doing specific work for a striker, finishing drills, acceleration to change of direction, some top speed work. I’m chuffed with him and we walked over to the main session. Erling was just standing there watching it.’
Guardiola wandered over to Holohan, who joined City in 2013. ‘Why has he not trained with us today?’ Guardiola asked. He’d been watching Haaland’s individual session through a green mesh divider between pitches.
‘I’ve seen what he’s done, and he could’ve done most of today’s training,’ he added. ‘And for the contact bits, we could’ve put him on the side. We could’ve changed that session for him.’
It is an example of Guardiola’s attitude to reintroducing players, returning them to the group as soon as possible, altering training to suit if need be, and goes some way to illustrating how he deals with the rigours of four competitions with a small squad.
‘We did it very, very successfully,’ Holohan says. ‘He challenged me a lot, to change my thinking because there’s a belief where the traditional approach is get them right, keep them in that (rehab) environment until they’re flying, until they’re ready to go.
‘It’s always a balance between risk and reward. Essentially his view was that there comes a point where the rehab environment probably becomes riskier than the football environment, because football is what they know. The longer that you give them to re-educate their brains back into being in that group environment, the better.’
And that is how it has been for 10 wondrously successful years in England. It has been Guardiola’s way. Guardiola’s vision. Guardiola’s football club. Guardiola has been afforded vast riches and he knows that some will always judge him in that light. The truth is that this is a coach who is out on his own, revered by all with whom he engages.
It is a shame that we will be spared the thrill of another final day league title showdown before he goes. Tuesday’s draw at Bournemouth ensured that Guardiola’s last season will end with ‘only’ the two English domestic cups.
Some take a while to fully understand Guardiola but most eventually come to appreciate his true wizardry, the redefining of how to achieve the maximum every single season
Twenty trophies is a remarkable return at City but it’s not really that which those outside of sky blue Manchester will remember. No, it will be the football
There is, now that it’s over, a realisation that we have been in the presence of a coaching savant. It’s a simple realisation, that he sees things we’ll never see
The fact that news of his decision to go broke before he was able to tell the world himself will have irritated and upset him. Like many great coaches, control is everything. Without it you are half the person.
But Guardiola takes his leave with the ledger complete and the boxes ticked. He came here to impose his ideas, his passions, his principles and his love on English football and he goes having gone far beyond what even he initially envisaged.
Spain, Germany and England have now, over the last two decades, fallen under the Guardiola spell. Twenty trophies is a remarkable return at City but it’s not really that which those outside of sky blue Manchester will remember. No, it will be the football. The intelligence, beauty and hypnotic rhythms of the football.
We could have watched Guardiola’s teams paint football patterns for years. He tends to win people over in the end. Some take a while to fully understand Pep Guardiola but most eventually come to appreciate his true wizardry, the redefining of how to achieve the maximum every single season. It’s largely been about joy, to those playing and watching.
There is, now that it’s over, a realisation that we have been in the presence of a coaching savant. It’s a simple realisation, that he sees things we’ll never see.
