Life at Manchester City is generally pretty calm, but this week’s events could be a sign that times are changing.
Monday brought the much-disputed outcome of City’s associated party transaction legal challenge to the Premier League, Tuesday the news that Txiki Begiristain is to step away from his role as director of football at the end of this season and now it has been revealed that Hugo Viana will leave Sporting Lisbon to replace him.
Apart from an occasionally big brush with the football authorities, a week like this is almost unheard of at City, given that there is so much stability and there are very few big football issues to be concerned about — the team are never struggling for long, the manager is never under pressure, the players generally lead quiet lives.
And yet here we are: the news of Begiristain’s impending departure brought with it one very obvious question: what of Pep Guardiola’s future?
Guardiola’s City contract is up next summer, too, but if people are under the assumption that he was plodding along, managing football matches and considering his future, only to have the Begiristain bombshell dropped on him, potentially adding one more ‘con’ to his list, that was not the case at all.
But the reality is no more comforting for City fans who want their manager to stay — which is more or less all of them. Everybody knew about Begiristain’s plans for ages, including Guardiola, and as reported by The Athletic this week, the thought last season was for both of them to leave in the summer of 2025.
Guardiola could change his mind at any minute. Begiristain has been set on a more relaxing lifestyle for ages and City never thought about persuading him otherwise.
At one stage, Guardiola decided that this season will be his last, but he is so prone to a change of heart that barely anybody who knows him closely would dare predict what he will do. He has threatened or offered to leave the club in the past, not because of his displeasure with his employers, but because he can be, to put it mildly, pretty dramatic. It’s rarely long before he calms down, though, and at no stage did anybody at the club actually think he was going to leave on those occasions.
Now the dynamic is slightly different but his emotions may work to City’s advantage, logic that can be explained using readily available footage. On the final day of last season, when he spoke on the Etihad Stadium pitch, he looked and sounded like he was at the end of a cycle — but by the time he hit New York on their pre-season tour a couple of months later, he was rejuvenated and was discussing the possibility of staying.
Even so, it is thought by those close to the club that a decision on his future — either way — is expected soon. Guardiola is the jewel in the City crown and they have moved heaven and earth for him — Begiristain went and found Manuel Akanji in August 2022 while Guardiola was weighing up whether to renew his deal last time, and the following summer he wanted Juanma Lillo back as his assistant, regardless of how much it would cost to activate his buyout clause as manager of Qatari side Al Sadd.
But they know that when it comes to succession planning, they do not want to leave things too late. Guardiola has signed his last two renewals in the Novembers of 2020 and 2022 but this time, he could decide in the new year, or next spring, that he wants to stay.
City would want a resolution long before that. Guardiola has surely had some offers come his way in recent months, and given the way that this week has unfolded, the English FA may yet pick up the phone to ask what his plans are.
City have maintained backup plans to replace Guardiola for years, to the extent that Patrick Vieira and Mikel Arteta were considered genuine candidates when Vieira was doing well as Crystal Palace manager and Arteta was struggling slightly at Arsenal.
They have also been keen on the idea of working with people they have had in the City Football Group (CFG) structure before, meaning that Tottenham Hotspur head coach Ange Postecoglou, who coached Yokohama F Marinos, a CFG-affiliated club in Japan, would have been an avenue to explore in the recent past (and possibly in the future), something that would certainly be the case for Girona coach Michel.
There are other admired coaches; Roberto De Zerbi, formerly of Brighton & Hove Albion and now at Marseille, is highly regarded and it would be a surprise if Bayer Leverkusen’s Xabi Alonso was not considered on some level.
Begiristain’s replacement has also been worked on for some time. His departure has been known about at the top levels of the club for more than a year.
Although Viana only formally agreed the deal this week, City’s plans for the future have included him for a while. And just as news of Begiristain’s departure asked questions relating to the manager’s future, so does Viana’s arrival.
Viana has been Sporting’s director of football since 2018 and, in 2020, he hired Ruben Amorim as coach. People who know the two men would be surprised if Viana did not want to bring Amorim with him to City.
That does not mean it will happen. The biggest influence on who manages City next season and beyond will be Guardiola.
If he says he wants to stay, he will stay. If not, then the search for a new manager will ramp up several notches. With Viana set to come on board, there is some 2+2=4 speculating over Amorim — but there is substance, given their very close working relationship. Sources who know the pair, who would like to remain anonymous to protect relationships, say they are like brothers.
Amorim himself came close to moving to the Premier League in the summer, but ended up apologising for flying to London for meetings about the West Ham United job. He was also one of the names considered by Manchester United as a potential replacement for Erik ten Hag, while Liverpool liked him but felt his playing style was too slow for them, which is interesting given the brand of football used by their eventual choice, Arne Slot, is noticeably less direct than predecessor Jurgen Klopp’s.
But so is Guardiola’s.
It is quite ironic that the grandmaster of attacking football basically allows his creative players to score all those goals by being incredibly patient and compact, so some balance is hardly a problem for City.
If we are to indulge the idea of Viana and Amorim taking City into their next era — other candidates are available, of course — then the latter has a clause in his contract that would allow him to leave Sporting next summer. (And what better way to honour Begiristain’s legacy than to trigger a buyout clause?)
There are some similarities between their relationship and the one between Guardiola and Begiristain, in the sense that they are good friends and completely understand each other’s idea of football.
Guardiola and Begiristain have been at the club for so long that their shared vision is inextricable from City’s, but while there is the prospect of one, possibly both, leaving, meaning we should be open to the possibility of the champions’ approach changing, the guiding hand will remain in place.
Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the chairman, was calling the shots the last time there was such a period of upheaval, which was when Begiristain (and chief executive Ferran Soriano) arrived in 2012, and he is overseeing this process, too.
Since that point, City have not just become one of the most successful clubs on the planet but they have popularised Soriano’s multi-club model. The scale of what they have done — which includes all those brushes with the authorities — was unthinkable back then.
It is a massive ask to keep that going, let alone improve on it, but that is what Al Mubarak and Soriano, as long as he is in place, will insist upon.
Suddenly, we know that Viana is one of the key figures charged with delivering that vision for City’s future.
It might not be too long before we get some more answers, one way or the other.
(Top photo: Martin Rickett/PA Images via Getty Images)
