I hope I am wrong about this but everything I hear, little bits of information I have been told, everything I read from analysts of the game I respect and everything I see in his demeanour, including the way he savoured the Carabao Cup final win six weeks ago with his daughter on the pitch at Wembley – suggests to me that Pep Guardiola will leave Manchester City at the end of this season.
After Monday night’s game against Everton at Hill Dickinson Stadium, it may be that Guardiola only has four more league matches and the FA Cup final against Chelsea in charge at City before he departs our game for good after their final game of the season, at home to Aston Villa on Sunday, May 24.
I hope I am wrong and I hope he stays one more year until the end of his contract, because having Guardiola in English football for the last 10 years has been the managerial equivalent of having Lionel Messi in the Premier League for a decade. It has been a privilege to watch him at work every week.
It has been a privilege to see how he has changed our game for the better and it has been an education to listen to him in press conferences every week and to witness a genius at work, a man whose hunger never seems to dim and who transmits that hunger to his players.
There is no point in saying that he is the best manager ever to have graced the English game because it is difficult to compare across the generations and it would be disrespectful to the other greats, men such as Sir Alex Ferguson, Bob Paisley and Brian Clough.
Ferguson built three different title-winning sides over four decades at Old Trafford and won two Champions League trophies, Paisley won three European Cups and Clough won back-to-back European Cups with Nottingham Forest, a team that never won a domestic title before, or since, he took over.
Pep Guardiola led his Man City team to four successive top-flight titles – no other side has achieved that level of dominance over the course of 138 years of league football
But Guardiola stands alongside them for what he has done here. If they achieved things he did not, he has achieved things they could not. For the first time in English football history, he led a team to four successive top-flight titles. No team has achieved that level of dominance over the course of 138 years of league football.
I don’t care how much money he has been given to spend or which players he has had at his disposal: there is something astonishing about maintaining the hunger and the motivation to perform to that level season after season after season after season, and to keep his players at the same pitch.
That is before we talk about the bigger picture and the Barcelona team he built, which won the Champions League in 2009 and 2011 and, for many of us, was the greatest club side of our lifetimes. He bestrode football before he came here to England and his influence has only grown during his stay.
When he failed to win a trophy in his first season at City – the first time that had happened to him in his career – schadenfreude abounded. There were many who scoffed at the failure of the great Guardiola and said they had told us his tiki taka style of football would never succeed in the English game, a game that would remain impervious to his charms.
They were wrong. Guardiola was defiant. He said he would never change his style and he bent the English game to his will and to his brilliance in a way that no manager ever has before. He still gets pushback, as if we are somehow offended in this country that he has the impudence to alter our football DNA.
Even earlier this season, some were still suggesting to him that he should change. Guardiola regarded that proposal with some amusement. ‘After winning 18 titles, I would change my plan?’ he said. ‘I’m pretty sure, after winning four Premier Leagues in a row, I’m going to change the way I believe my team is going to play?
‘Never, ever will I change my beliefs in the way we are going to play. But if we regain high up the pitch, I want to attack quick. When the opponents make high pressing man-to-man and we break the first pressing, I want to attack quick. But after that, I love to pass the ball a thousand million boring, boring passes. I love it. I love my team to have the ball and play and play. I love it.’
His influence is everywhere. Some of the great English sides played fine football before Guardiola but it is his influence that has changed the culture of our football and finally shifted it away from a reliance on reductive long-ball tactics.
‘I love to pass the ball a thousand million boring, boring passes. I love it. I love my team to have the ball and play and play. I love it’
Guardiola has introduced a new aesthetic to our game. His obsession with possession and with the beauty of passing and with trusting players to develop the technique to keep possession even in high-pressure situations, to break a press with their brains as well as with the ball, has spread throughout the English football pyramid.
More and more teams trust themselves to play out from the back, more and more teams insist on a goalkeeper who can act as an auxiliary outfielder, more and more teams are happy to experiment with using a false 9, more and more teams move a full back into midfield in possession. These are all Guardiola’s fingerprints.
There are many, of course, who seek to denigrate Guardiola, who claim that he has only won what he has won because of the money he has been given to spend by Abu Dhabi. There are many more who talk about the 115 charges of financial impropriety that City are facing and will leap on them to trash Guardiola’s achievements if City are found guilty of any of them, when that judgment eventually arrives.
They will be entitled to that view but I won’t share it. If City are found guilty, they will get what’s coming to them. It won’t change the fact that those of us who love football have been lucky to watch the English game at the time when Guardiola was working in it and changing it and enriching it and making it beautiful again. We will miss him when he’s gone.
Arsenal Myles better for trusting Lewis-Skelly
Myles Lewis-Skelly has fallen from prominence during this campaign but Mikel Arteta’s decision to start him in midfield against Fulham was a masterstroke
Bukayo Saka changed the mood at Arsenal when he started the game against Fulham on Saturday. He looked rested, at last, after an enforced spell on the sidelines with injury. Arsenal looked liberated with him pulling the strings again.
But alongside Saka’s presence and fine performances from Declan Rice, as always, and Viktor Gyokeres, it was good to see Myles Lewis-Skelly back at the heart of things for Arsenal as well.
After his emergence as a stellar talent last season, Lewis-Skelly has fallen from prominence during this campaign but Mikel Arteta’s decision to start him alongside Rice in holding midfield, his best position, against Fulham was a masterstroke.
Lewis-Skelly looked calm and assured and he brought a verve to Arsenal’s play that Martin Zubimendi has lacked for much of the season. There have been suggestions that Arsenal will let Lewis-Skelly leave in the summer. I hope they don’t. He should be at the heart of their side for years to come.
