With treble secured, Pep Guardiola breathes soul into Manchester City’s petrodollars

Last night in anbul, quiet and undramatic, the legacy of Pep Guardiola changed its course. Until the night he became the only manager to claim the treble twice, in two different leagues and dinctly different eras too, embellishing the enormity of achievement, his defining image was defined in Barcelona, as the preacher of football’s most radical idea of this century. To burn this image, to surpass the peak he scaled in Barcelona, he needed to produce something more spectacular, something more celestial and immortal. He achieved this installing an identity to a club that has languished in the lower rungs of top division, their success often measured surviving the relegation scare, knit an identity and breathed soul into an empire built on petrodollars. City were briefly successful before in the pre-Guardiola era too, but he turned a fiefdom into an empire.
In Barcelona, he was special, he was loved and praised. It was his home, then his soul and spirit. But he was an inheritor of a glorious tradition of football intellectuals and visionaries, his ideals forged in their grand tradition. But he was just one of them, a band of legendary names that adorn the walls of the horic club. There was legacy and hory, their philosophy inscribed in stone nearly half a century ago and chiseled to near-perfection in the modern era. At City, he had to build everything on his own, from system to structure, hory to legacy. There was money, an obscene amount of money. But he gave money a meaning, he showed that money is only as smart as the spender, as useful as the wisdom of the spender. It’s not hyperbolic to say that he is to Manchester City and the league what Sir Alex Ferguson was to neighbours Manchester United for the large part of the Premier League era. Perhaps even more influential, in that United had enjoyed spells of domination in the past too, less so City.
If Ferguson’s was a triumph of tactics and drive, Guardiola’s was a victory of ideas. There is no deeper thinker of the game than Guardiola in the modern game, a tactical perfection, his exence not fueled titles or money, but the quest to understand the game, a spiritual journey, a pilgrimage to find the soul of the game. He himself once put it philosophically: “I have been in the game for 35 years. But if you ask me how much I know about the game, I would say nothing, maybe just a bit.” He often self-effaces. He credits his playing days glory to Cruyff. “Without him I would have been playing in the third division.” He would reproduce the same lines later: “If it wasn’t for Messi, I’d be coaching in the third division.”

In City, too, he has shirked away from himself and dwelled on the players. He is rarely blinded the aura, rather blind to the aura. He does not glow, even fleetingly, in self-glory. He is a pur, but not a puritan, a romantic, yet a pragmat. At the heart of the game is the ball, and like any other coach he wants control, and is fearful of the opponents. It is just that his way of achieving control is different: that is protecting the ball more than the opponent. Death thousand passes. Death rigorous pressing. He himself had laid out that philosophy: “We play in the other team’s half as much as possible because I get worried when the ball is in my half. We’re a horrible team without the ball so I want us to get it back as soon as possible and I’d rather give away fouls and the ball in their half than ours.”
But he is not dogmatic, He is sensitive to the ever-changing demands of the game. He realises that what is good now might not be in the next game. So he tinkers and revises, shuffles men and systems. It’s a total-football hybrid, but not in the sense that every player can play every role, but every player can adapt to every role and system. Even at the tiki-taka heyday, he grasped that the method would soon become outdated, that the approach needs to be altered. He was the messiah of False Nine, but later he would resort to classical No 9s and win titles with them. Like Robert Lewandowski, Sergio Aguero and Erling Haaland. False 9’s poster boy was Messi, but he would depute him in a more withdrawn role too. He was a proponent of inverted full-backs, then at City, he would make the full-back join the midfield so that there is an extra shield. It’s at times, a back three-and-a-half.

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This year, especially after Joao Cancelo, a full-back with play-making vision (a Fale 2 as he was jokingly called), was loaned out to Bayern Munich following an alleged disagreement with Guardiola, he repurposed John Stone as a play-making defender. Against Inter Milan, he was something of an inverted full-back at times, and had more touches in the Inter box than many of their attackers. A centre-back who could be a playmaker as well as a full-back is the definition of total football.
This subtlety embodies the genius of Guardiola, the football brain that keeps on ticking and picks the minutest, microscopic disorder. He wants every note in place. His former manager Louis Van Gaal had detected this trait during his playing days. “He never conforms, he doesn’t relax, he always wants to change things, to learn things,” he had said.
It’s appropriate to reproduce a quote from his close friend David Trueba in Marti Perarnau’s book, Pep Guardiola: The Evolution. “When it comes to analysing or judging Guardiola, you must bear in mind that underneath the elegant suit, the cashmere jumper and the tie, is the son of a bricklayer. Inside those expensive Italian shoes there is a heart in espadrilles,” he says.
Guardiola, according to Perarnau, is driven an inner feeling that he is somehow not good enough, so works twice as hard to make up for his perceived deficiencies. That could be at the core of his unstinting perfectionism even on minor things as the length of the grass. Upon his arrival at Etihad in 2016, he went to the groundsmen and detailed the exact specifications for how they should cut the grass on the fields at the Etihad Stadium and the club’s training facility. Should be no longer than 19mm, he insed.
Much of the system was in place even before he reached Etihad. The club had a robust youth system, the sharpest scouts around, cutting-edge technology in data crunching and mining and loads of money to buy the players the manager wanted. One thing it didn’t have was identity. He immediately set about establishing that, as he has in every other club. He encouraged the players to take to the field together before games, to leave as one afterward, and celebrate the goals together. He instilled in them a sense of pride that comes from not just playing for Manchester City, but that they come from Manchester. “Manchester is a city that knows how to fall down and get back up again. That is the club’s identity too,” he used to tell his players.
The success of this club would be his biggest legacy. The treble was an assertion that we are living not just in the era of a grand Manchester City team, but in the times of a grander coach too who breathed soul and life into petrodollars.