Pep Guardiola was not there to talk about the future. He would have known, of course, when he agreed to appear as a guest on the Italian chat show Che Tempo Che Fa six weeks ago, that the subject would be mentioned. He is old enough, wise enough, to know that there are always certain hoops to jump through with these things.
And so, when his host — the veteran presenter Fabio Fazio — dutifully asked the questions, Guardiola deftly weaved his way through them. Was he going to renew his contract at Manchester City? Was he taking the England job? “I still need to reflect,” he said. “Nothing has been decided.” They were responses, rather than answers.
A resolution, as it turned out, was almost two months away. At Manchester City, those outside the 53-year-old’s inner circle started to fret that the greatest manager in the club’s history was coming to the end. Among their Premier League rivals, a quiet, vicarious hope flickered that perhaps the man who has turned the competition into a procession might soon be gone.
Both emotions — the fear and the anticipation — were misplaced. Guardiola, The Athletic revealed on Tuesday, has made his decision. He will stay at Manchester City for two more seasons, extending his stay at the Etihad beyond a decade. The club does not have to countenance life without him. The rest of the Premier League must suffer for a little while yet.
Quite what brought Guardiola to that decision is not yet known. He may, or may not, ever show his working. A theory had done the rounds at City that the club would not countenance Guardiola and his friend and long-standing collaborator Txiki Begiristain, City’s director of football, leaving at the same time. It might be that.
Or it might be that Guardiola worried this season, with City’s injuries mounting and form slumping, could not guarantee a suitably golden valedictory to his glittering reign. Or he might relish the idea of rebuilding a squad that, first slowly and then all at once, has started to age. Maybe he was unable to turn down the money. Or maybe, when he did find time to reflect, he realised he did not have much of a choice.
Rather than the future, Guardiola appeared on Che Tempo Che Fa to talk about the past. In particular, he was there to revel in the slightly curious coda to his (European) playing career that took place an hour or so east of the show’s Milan studio in the picturesque, but provincial, city of Brescia.
Guardiola spent the better part of two years there, playing for the city’s eponymous club, an unfashionable sort of team of modest ambition and limited horizons, the sort of place where there was “a celebration every time we won a game,” as he told Fazio, exaggerating only a little for effect.
Still, he loved it. Sometimes, it feels like the evidence of Guardiola’s affection for Italy might be just a little overplayed. He likes Italian food. He likes Italian wines. He likes going on holiday in Italy. These are not what might reasonably be called niche positions. But his fondness for Brescia is sincere, heartfelt. “Places are beautiful, but what you really remember are the people you encounter,” he said. He described the experience as “one of the best periods of my life”.
It is also exceptional. Guardiola has, of course, spent most of the past two decades changing modern football. He has injected a torrent of new ideas into its bloodstream. He has crafted and honed a style that has become orthodoxy. He has, particularly in England, redefined the standards expected of a championship-winning team.
But he is also very much a product of his environment. Guardiola is a creation of football’s superclub era. The pinnacle of his playing career came at Wembley, in 1992, in the final game of club football played on English soil before the birth of the Premier League and Champions League. That match was the culmination of his, and his boyhood team’s, longstanding ambition: a first European Cup for Barcelona, a crowning glory for the dream team built, designed, perfected by Johan Cruyff.
By the time he arrived at Brescia, he was “accustomed to winning championships”, but as a manager — at three of the biggest, richest, most powerful clubs imaginable — he has harvested them in industrial quantities, ones that would have been unthinkable before the great tectonic shift that 1992 brought.
That he is still perceived as a romantic figure says more about us than it does about him. Guardiola’s origin story helped, of course. At Barcelona, he was the ballboy turned saviour, the hometown hero who rescued his club in its hour of need. He was the maven of La Masia, the anointed apostle of Cruyff. In hindsight, Barcelona’s decision in 2008 to hand control to him, rather than to fall under the sway of his great ideological antithesis, Jose Mourinho, has taken on the air of a temporal border. Mourinho was all shadow: cynical, conservative, pragmatic. Guardiola brought light.
That image has shifted a little, over the years, in line with our priorities. Guardiola has come to stand for beauty, for sophistication, for mastering a chaotic game and turning it into synchronised art. He is the game’s aesthete-in-chief. More recently, as Silicon Valley’s doctrine of disruption has turned into society’s ultimate virtue, he has been presented as an instinctive innovator, too; a restless mind in constant pursuit of perfection.
All of this, though, has been imposed on Guardiola from the outside. He has done little or nothing to cultivate it for himself. He has not, as a manager, ever made a decision akin to moving to Brescia. His legend has been honed in building, rebuilding, Europe’s great houses. He transformed Barcelona into football’s pre-eminent superclub. He moved on, and reshaped Bayern Munich, and then switched to Manchester City, a club that had effectively been built, with no expense spared, to his exact specifications.
He has never made any secret of why that is. Guardiola does not advocate the style of play that now bears his name because of some higher moral calling. He does it because that is how he believes he will win. His taste for innovation — inverting his full-backs, playing four central defenders, signing the least false nine imaginable in Erling Haaland — is proof that his principles contain, when necessary, a degree of elasticity.
He does not gauge success by artistic impression or by hearts lifted or minds won.
He weighs his legacy like everyone else: in silver and gold. “My legacy is already exceptional,” he said in a press conference before the 2023 Champions League final. “We won lots of things and won very well. People should remember that.”
To do that, to do all of it, he needs a certain calibre of player. He has never claimed otherwise. “I will tell you a secret,” he said to the Man City official website 2022. “The main thing is the quality of the players. I try to figure things out but at the end, (it is) the players. The success we had is because we have top players. This is the secret.”
If Guardiola’s knowingly overblown modesty is not to be taken literally, it is worth taking him seriously. The vision, the innovation, the ideas: they are all him. But he is well aware that he requires players of a specific stripe to execute them, and he knows that they are found in an ever-diminishing number of places.
That, more than anything, may have persuaded him to stay in Manchester for another two years. Guardiola clearly enjoys working at City. He particularly cherishes the club’s absolute unity of purpose, the fact that it is largely free of the factionalism and infighting that haunts the corridors of — how to put this delicately — Europe’s more traditional superpowers. It was the entorno, the whispers and the rumours and the internal tension, that eventually exhausted him at Barcelona. At City, there is clarity, quiet. No other club could offer him that.
And nor are there any viable alternatives who might be able to provide him with the sort of resources he needs to keep winning, to see his ideas come to life on the field.
The vast majority of clubs, across the world, cannot afford to pay Guardiola. Even if they could, they would be unable to sign the sorts of players he would demand. He has already worked at two that might — Barcelona and Bayern — and he will never work at a third, Real Madrid. It seems reasonable to assume he would not trade in City for another English team.
That leaves, what, Paris Saint-Germain — effectively an ersatz version of City — or at a push one of the faded giants of a creaking Serie A. That would rule out Brescia, but there is a romantic lure to the idea of Guardiola at one of the Milan clubs, or at Juventus, or maybe even Roma, where he spent a few months on his late-career journey of discovery.
The problem, of course, is that Guardiola has never pretended to be a romantic. “I prefer going on holiday to Italy than being a manager,” he told Sky Italia last year. None of those teams have the financial firepower to build the sort of squad he has at City, the sort of squad he needs. Football’s stratification has seen to that. The days when a club like Brescia might sign an elite player, even one illuminated by the dwindling rays of the setting sun, are gone. So, too, is the time when the world’s best could be coaxed en masse to Serie A.
The choice that faced Guardiola, then, was not quite the one that it appeared. His decision was not whether to leave City and take another job. It was whether to leave club football altogether. It was whether he might want to take charge of a national team. It was whether he was ready to retire. He has decided, evidently, that the answer to all of those questions is no, and so he has stayed, for two more years, at the only place it makes sense to be.
(Top photo: Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
