As Manchester City scored what was always likely to be the crucial first goal of the Carabao Cup semi-final second leg against Newcastle on Wednesday, Pep Guardiola turned and grinned up at the executive level of the Etihad Stadium’s huge East Stand and held two clenched fists in the air.
Goals to Guardiola have never elicited the wild and sometimes performative celebrations typical of some of his peers. To the great Catalan, they have most often been greeted by something approaching relief, almost as though they represent less a visceral joy and more a vindication of method.
Few coaches in world football ask more questions of himself, his players and the game than Guardiola.
The statistics — three Champions League triumphs and winning the title in three major European leagues — may suggest he has, at the age of 55, conquered the game he loves — but according to those who know him, that is not how he feels. For Guardiola, the quest for real and pure understanding goes on.
The question now is whether that journey will continue beyond this season at City. Guardiola has a year left on his contract after this season and yesterday sought, quite understandably, to shut down what has become a noisy debate about whether or not he will see it through to the end.
Asked by Daily Mail Sport whether he has told the club of his current intentions, Guardiola said: ‘No, because I have one more year (on my) contract. It’s the same answer I answered two months ago. It’s the same.’
The question now is whether Pep Guardiola will continue beyond this season at Man City
Guardiola has a year left on his contract after this season but his future is up in the air
Just before Christmas, Guardiola suggested he would stay but that has not particularly convinced anybody, inside or outside the club.
City have their succession plan in place. Enzo Maresca, Vincent Kompany and Xabi Alonso are among those admired at the Etihad Stadium. What City executives do not know is exactly when they are going to need to put their ideas into action. City are relaxed about it simply because they have been here — staring over the precipice of life after Pep — on at least one occasion before.
They have not moved to shut down stories suggesting they are eyeing up replacements because they know it would be disingenuous to do so. Maresca is admired because of the impression he made while assistant to Guardiola, while Kompany would represent the kind of ‘coming home’ appointment they dreamed of when Abu Dhabi started to build the modern City back in 2008.
City know other big clubs — including one across town — have fallen foul of a failure to future-proof their managerial strategy and are determined it will not happen to them.
Guardiola, meanwhile, continues to present a variety of different faces to the world. Inner turmoil has been a look he has perfected over the years but his recent public-facing behaviour has been emotional even by his standards.
Referees and those who suggest he has bought his way to success at City have been in his line of verbal fire this month while Tuesday’s soliloquy on world events stands as one of his most remarkable press appearances of his decade in charge. It has brought comment and criticism from beyond the world of football — and from Jewish members of his own club’s fanbase.
‘Why should I not express what I feel?’ was a decent summary of his take on that yesterday and club officials know better than to get involved.
Those who have been fortunate to spend unfiltered time with Guardiola this season, meanwhile, report little change.
Former Man City captain and Bayern Munich boss Vincent Kompany is admired at the Etihad
‘What obsesses him more than anything is getting this team to win,’ one football source from outside the club tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘From that point of view, there remains just about nobody like him. The rebuild has been huge and probably came at him quicker than he expected. He won’t want to go anywhere until this set of players is where he wants them to be.
‘That’s what he talks about. The football. Not the other stuff. It’s always the football.’
City’s slip from the summit of the Premier League has surprised Guardiola as much as it did other people at the club. Last season’s regression — an almost overnight collapse of a treble-winning team — has punctured Guardiola’s bubble of modern genius. At times he has looked exposed, even vulnerable.
City were well beaten in the recent Manchester derby before collapsing embarrassingly at Bodo/Glimt in Europe.
Guardiola’s players have looked particularly rudderless in the second half of games — they are cumulatively 8-3 down in the second 45 minutes of games played since the turn of the year — and could easily have turned a 2-0 lead into defeat at Tottenham last weekend.
Guardiola’s team is almost unrecognisable even from 12 months ago — only four of the team that started against Wolves on January 24 this year faced Chelsea on the corresponding weekend a year earlier — and he said after a skittish but welcome Champions League win at Real Madrid in December that his young side would need to improve greatly to challenge for the big trophies this season.
Asked yesterday if they were ready, he said: ‘At the top, top…no. We have moments, real moments, but not enough consistency to be there.
‘But 14 games left in the Premier League is an eternity, from my experience. It’s a lot.
Guardiola’s Man City side have looked rudderless in second halves of matches this season
Antoine Semenyo and Marc Guehi have improved City’s chances of catching Arsenal
‘Everything can happen.’
Two January signings, the defender Marc Guehi and the wide forward Antoine Semenyo, have improved City’s chances and at least in part prompted Guardiola’s recent pushback against the popular notion that his club have money to burn.
In suggesting this week that his team were the seventh highest net spenders in the Premier League over the last five years, he was wrong but only just. They are actually sixth, with their net outlay of £324.7m putting them just ahead of Nottingham Forest and behind Newcastle, Tottenham, Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea.
In common with others at City, Guardiola does feel irritated by public perceptions he feels are unfair, just as he does by the fact his club do not receive the same amount of mainstream media coverage as the two big clubs in red, Liverpool and United.
Guardiola once commented publicly that MailOnline is ‘always red’ and recently admonished a regular and respected Manchester journalist — only partly in jest — for choosing to attend a United press briefing instead of his own. The two events were taking place at the same time.
This, to a degree, is representative of some slices of life at the modern City and it is perhaps not a surprise it filters down to the manager’s office from time to time. For all their progress on the field over the last 15 years, City do not carry quite the same caché as some of the established elite and they know it.
Nor, some feel, do they carry quite the same influence in the corridors of power of English football. Perhaps that is not a surprise, given the club’s battle with the Premier League over alleged breaching of financial rules that now stretches back across more than half of Guardiola’s tenure at the club.
Guardiola feels all this and, having always been a coach who carried the strains of a manager’s life particularly heavily — he needed a year’s sabbatical after four tumultuous seasons at Barcelona and did a year less than that at Bayern Munich — it is a surprise to many who have known him throughout that he has stayed in England for so long.
Guardiola’s longevity at City has been helped by the presence of now-departed director of football Txiki Begiristain
His longevity here has been helped in part by the presence of two dear friends at City, the now-departed director of football Txiki Begiristain and chief executive Ferran Soriano.
In terms of his own long-term plans, Begiristain himself confessed on the moment of his own farewell at the end of last season that even he had stopped trying to second-guess his friend.
He had, he said, imagined they may leave together but had given up on working out when that may be.
On the field, Guardiola’s immediate test comes on Sunday at Anfield, a stadium at which he has seen various iterations of his team struggle down the years. This time City and Liverpool meet not as the two most eminent teams in England but as two trying to find new paths through a Premier League that has presented new challenges to both.
Asked if it was getting ever harder to win matches in England, Guardiola was contradictory and that can occasionally be typical of a man liable to sense a slight where there is none. There was also a hint of a man who is starting to feel a little under-appreciated. ‘Yeah, maybe you are saying that to make 98 points as we did to win the Premier League is not hard enough,’ he said.
‘So I don’t agree with you, to be blunt. To win with 100 points or 98 points or 96 or 95 points, to win over Liverpool with Jurgen Klopp or United with Ole (Gunnar Solskjaer) or Jose (Mourinho), or Chelsea with (Thomas) Tuchel or (Antonio) Conte, I’m not saying it was easy.
‘The people believe I had to do it a lot. ‘Ah it’s taken for granted’.
‘Of course it’s tough. Every season is tough. The managers are better, the players. The teams invest a lot. Sorry to tell you, not just Manchester City. Of course every season is getting more difficult, but I think not just for us, for all the teams.’
Guardiola takes his City team to Anfield to face Arne Slot’s Liverpool on Sunday
When Guardiola does step away, it will be fascinating to see how City evolve. This is a football club that has been built around one man for 10 years. Guardiola has been granted privileges of influence and autonomy that will not be offered again.
At the moment the club have their own issues of identity to tackle. The balance between acting like an elite club and one that continues to service its rank and file — many from poor areas of Manchester — is proving tricky.
Matchday revenues do not match some of their rivals while on occasion seats sit empty, as they did in Wednesday’s semi-final second leg, as some supporters push back against pricing. They are not the only club to face such challenges.
Guardiola himself will leave his mark. English football will be poorer without him. He has not only played a style of football that was new to us, he has developed English players such as Phil Foden and John Stones for the better. His standing among fellow managers is high.
He has always seen bigger pictures in a way that, for example, Klopp at Liverpool did not manage to. Managers through the divisions already owe him a debt of thanks and not just those he has influenced directly, either by sharing coaching confidences or, on occasion, providing references to clubs looking to make an appointment.
On the training pitches at the vast City Football Academy, his players have not noticed much of a difference. He still walks the line of a control freak, somewhere between making footballers feel invincible and spending so much time in their ear he starts to feel like a nuisance.
In terms of the future, the players do not know. But when Guardiola sat in the same press conference seat he occupied yesterday after the Premier League’s 115 charges had been served almost exactly three years ago, he delivered a performance of such vitality and conviction that it arguably played a part in driving his team towards a fourth successive league title.
‘I am not moving from this seat,’ he declared that day.
His words echoed through the football club back in February 2023. There was absolutely no room for doubt. Right now — despite his vague protestations to the contrary — everything is rather less clear.
