Sometime in early 2013, at half-time in an Under-12 match in New York, a Hispanic-looking man, whose son Marius is playing for Downtown United, strolls over to the opposing team’s striker to give him some free and unsolicited advice. The striker’s father charges across the pitch in anger and challenges the stranger: “Who are you to coach my son?” To which the man quietly replies: “I’m Pep Guardiola.”

The coach who, to his admirers, has revolutionised football as surely as the Beatles revolutionised popular music was on sabbatical in America at the time. After four tumultuous years in the Camp Nou dugout, during which he had won 14 of of 19 trophies available to him (two UEFA Champions Leagues, three la Liga titles, two Copas del Rey, three Spanish Super Cups, two European Super Cups and two World Clubs), Guardiola was exhausted, almost to the point of experiencing a mid-life crisis. He needed a break. Not from football itself. He watched most, if not all, of Marius’s matches for Downtown United, even volunteering once as a stand-in referee (spoiler alert: it did not end well). More from the constant need to worry about tactics, players, opponents and football politics, a pressure that prompted friends to nickname him ‘Mr 32’, because he could never go for more than 32 minutes without thinking about the game.

After 28 years at Barcelona, as ball boy, youth player, playmaker, youth coach and head coach, the 41-year-old Guardiola had quit. His last season in charge, in which his side finished second in La Liga, nine points behind Clásico rivals Real Madrid (managed by his great rival, former colleague and one-time friend José Mourinho), had been marred by an implausible exit in the UEFA Champions League semi-finals to Chelsea (he was blamed for prioritising academy graduates over star players), arguments with new Barca president Sandro Rosell (who was later jailed for money-laundering) and, most disturbingly by a quiet power struggle with talismanic genius Lionel Messi. 

In his obsessive, relentless quest for perfectionism, Guardiola had advised the Argentinian megastar on his behaviour in training (basically, don’t take the mickey out of team-mates), diet (no pizzas, popcorn or chocolate peanuts), and love life (opinions differ as to whether he recommended having sex before midnight or as often as possible). One particular incident is cited by those who believe – like Swedish coach Hans Backe who revealed this story – that Messi effectively drove Guardiola out of Barcelona. During the 2008/09 season – and it is not entirely clear how Backe knows this – Messi is alleged to have interrupted a pre-match team talk to ask the manager for a Coke, only to be told: “No, we don’t drink Coke three hours before a fight.” In the Swede’s account, the Argentinian got up, left, and returned, minutes later, with a bottle of Coke Zero which he opened and took a sip from. It was a declaration of independence, the opening salvo, as the Swede put it, “of a war that Guardiola cannot win.” 

Although both player and coach have subsequently lauded the other for making them the best in the world, on the day Pep left the club he said part of the reason was that he didn’t want him and his players to “hurt each other”. Many journalists interpreted this as alluding to the serial Ballon d’Or-winner. Since 1968, Barcelona’s motto had been ‘more than a club –  ‘més que un club’ – but, towards the end of Guardiola’s tenure, many pundits were convinced that Messi had become more than the club.

Guardiola had a much simpler explanation for his exit. He told Marti Perarnau, author of the book Pep Confidential: “We were playing brilliantly but I was on my knees and I had no new tactical ideas. That was why I left.” That certainly has the ring of truth but for a man whose entire philosophy, as player and manager, had championed the power of the collective, the fact that one individual had, for a time, become more powerful than him – and the club – must have left him questioning himself, his career and his faith in football. The greatest reward of his American sabbatical, watching those Under-12 games, was that it reminded him of his mentor, legendary Barcelona manager Johan Cruyff’s, famous aphorisms: “Football is a simple game.” Simplicity wasn’t just, Cruyff said, the genius of football, it was also the joy of it. As Guardiola’s biographer Guillem Balague put it, after three months in New York, he could once more look on at football with affection. 

And in September 2012, after turning down two of football’s most powerful oligarchs, Milan’s Silvio Berlusconi and Chelsea’s Roman Abramovich – and a tentative approach from Sir Alex Ferguson, then embarking on his final season at Manchester United – Guardiola agreed to become the next coach of Bayern Munich. The German media were ecstatic, lauding him as the ‘professor of success’ and ‘intellectual of football’, and hailing his appointment as proof that the Bundesliga could genuinely compete for global attention, income, and honours with the Premier League; a point reiterated next May when Bayern, under outgoing coach Jupp Heynckes, won the UEFA Champions League final at Wembley, in a German derby against Jürgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund.

Guardiola’s choice marks one of the greatest tipping points in modern football history. Ferguson kept an apartment in New York and, in September 2012, met the Catalan for a private dinner in a local restaurant where he was, rightly, convinced they would be left alone. The Scot did not, Balague reports, mention his forthcoming retirement, which wasn’t officially announced until the following May after he had won United’s 20th, and most recent, league title. He did, though, give Pep some career advice: not to be tempted by Chelsea, a club he described as without an aura, history, or vision.

Jim White, one of Britain’s leading football journalists, sums up the mood among his fellow United supporters at the time. “Given that Guardiola had recently outwitted us in two Champions League finals – in 2009 and 2011 – he was the man most fans wanted to succeed Sir Alex. It didn’t happen. Nobody really blamed Ferguson, they put it all down to the owners, the Glazers. And after Pep joined City, winning one Champions League and six Premier Leagues, he became a very useful stick for United fans to beat the Glazers over the head with. The change in fortunes has been remarkable: in 1999, the year United won the treble, City needed penalties in a play-off final against Gillingham to win promotion from the third tier.”

Although it wasn’t apparent back in the summer of 2013, joining Bayern would change Guardiola’s management style. At Barcelona, as youth coach and coach, he had been intimately involved with the La Masia academy. In talks with the Bavarian club’s boss Uli Hoeness, it was agreed that he would concentrate, almost exclusively, on the first team – a remit he has retained at City. 

Rich, dominant, loved and loathed, Bayern are German football’s nearest equivalent to Real Madrid. For fans, players and directors, winning the Bundesliga was mere table stakes. The club’s strategy, as one executive put it, was to become a “global entertainment brand” and to achieve that, they needed to win the UEFA Champions League regularly – as Heynckes had done only months before Guardiola’s arrival. 

To Pep, the opportunity seemed almost limitless. He quickly learned German – his fifth language after Catalan, Spanish, Italian and English – adapted easily to Munich, which was much less like living in a goldfish bowl than working in Barcelona, and was unfazed by Bayern’s byzantine politics, partly because Hoeness, chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, and president Franz Beckenbauer looked out for him.

The most important stakeholders he never convinced, in three seasons in Munich, were the supporters. As Uli Hesse, author of Bayern: Creating a Global Superclub, explains: “When he arrived many fans were worried he would try to play his false nine system even though, in Robert Lewandowski, he had one of the greatest centre-forwards of all time in his team. He proved that he was more versatile than people think by making room for Lewandowski. But I know quite a few diehard Bayern fans who can’t forgive him for driving Bastian Schweinsteiger away.” Such a club legend that fans christened him “football god”, the German international hadn’t even turned 31 when he left for Manchester United in July 2015.

As Hesse says, every manager makes unpopular decisions about players and, unless you are on the inside, aware of every factor in play, criticising their decisions is pointless. But many faithful fans interpreted Schweinsteiger’s departure as conclusive proof that Guardiola just didn’t ‘get’ Bayern (it also marked a strange U-turn by the coach who, before he arrived, had talked of building his new team around Schweinsteiger). “Many supporters thought Guardiola didn’t try to understand the club or it’s culture, because all that mattered to him was what happened between the white lines,” says Hesse. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you do it at Bayern you need to win the Champions League,” Today, many fans agree he is a great coach but he’s not in their top five Bayern managers of all-time.”

Let’s be clear: Guardiola’s record at Bayern was hardly shabby. Three Bundesliga titles in three seasons, two German Cups, one UEFA Super Cup, and one World Club Cup was a decent return. Successive semi-final appearances in the UEFA Champions League was decent but didn’t live up to the board’s expectations. Matthias Sammer, Bayern’s sporting director, summed up the dilemma Pep posed: “Guardiola is definitely the most important source of inspiration in football. He was always right with his analyses, his measures always worked out exactly as planned, but as a result the team stopped thinking a bit. It was a fantastic process but at the end the team didn’t grow so much that they could take the last steps alone.” In other words, as daft as this sounds, Guardiola was almost too good a coach for Bayern. Some journalists even accused him of using the club as a scientific laboratory in which to test out his theories about the game.

Ultimately, none of these reservations mattered. He had done well enough to impress Manchester City, which had been effectively acquired by the Abu Dhabi royal family in 2008, where his former Barca team-mate Txiki Begiristain was sporting director. City didn’t just want to win trophies, they wanted to build a culture and structure that delivered success year after year. And who better to manage that than a man who, as a player and coach, had played an integral part in creating one of the most admired clubs in the history of European football?

In hindsight, the appointment seems a no brainer but, at the time, it was a significant risk. There was, for a start, a danger that, with so much to do, he might get distracted by minutiae. As football journalist Sim Curtis, a diehard Citizen fan since 1983, says: “Guardiola stepped up through level after level of similar football-think at Barcelona, from being a ball boy, rising through the youth ranks, playing under Cruyff's direct tutelage, and putting the Dutchman's ideas and strategies into practice himself as a boss. He arrived at City with the task of implanting this alien methodology into a new culture, new country, new players. Naturally, this was a more hands-on task than growing gently into surroundings long enriched with the same philosophy. It calls from much more input from the leader and much more steering. Perhaps this is part of it, perhaps English players, fans, press are more stubborn and need more persuading. The emphasis on futsal-type skills and technique in southern Europe does not sit comfortably with England’s more lung-based approach.” 

It would not be wholly unfair to suggest that Guardiola is the most successful example of obsessive compulsive disorder in modern sport. At Bayern, club doctor Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt quit in protest against the Catalan’s attempt to micro-manage the squad’s fitness (he returned after Pep left). At City, he subjected the playing surface to intense scrutiny and once, legend has it, ran onto the Etihad pitch, measured the grass with a ruler and told the ground staff to shorten it by three millimetres. He is also renowned for giving his players individual targets for their ideal weight – and fining, or not selecting those who failed to achieve them.

When Guardiola arrived in Manchester in the summer of 2016, he immediately began to apply his football theories. These were derived, partly from the lessons he had learned as a midfielder – not just in Spain but with Brescia in Italy and in Mexico, playing briefly for Juanma Lillo (now his assistant manager at City). As a midfielder, he was the ultimate ‘coach on the pitch’, commentating on the action as it happened and advising team-mates (once shouting “Keep it simple Michael” to Danish legend Michael Laudrup) in a semi-continuous monologue that disconcerted some players. After one season at Camp Nou, French defender Laurent Blanc complained: “I was up to my balls with Pep, all day. This and that, this and that in the dressing room. He made my head spin.”

Pep’s philosophy was also shaped by the managers he played under, especially Johan Cruyff – those he has consulted – particularly Argentinian maverick Marcelo Bielsa – and those he has studied or been inspired by, such as Milan’s visionary Arrigo Sacchi and Louis van Gaal (who he admired more for his daring young Ajax team, which won the UEFA Champions League in 1995, than his management of Barcelona). Jorge Valdano, the great Argentinian centre-forward and sometime director of football at Real Madrid, said: “Cruyff invented the Barcelona formula, but it took Guardiola to put a method behind the formula.”

The essential elements of that formula, as summarised by Simon Kuper in his book on Barca, were: 

Possession, based on the premise that, in Kuper’s words: “There are two kinds of teams: those that organised themselves around the ball and those that disorganised themselves chasing it.” 

Playing between the other team’s lines, which is why, for example, Messi spent so much time hovering between the opposing defensive midfielder and centre-backs. 

Overloading the centre. Whereas Cruyff had emphasised wing play, Pep focused on the middle of the pitch which, stats suggested, was the quickest route to goal. 

Pressing. His players were given five seconds to chase as a pack and regain possession, the higher up the pitch the better (in his prime, Messi was especially adept at this, his tackling of opposing centre-backs was crucial). 

The 3-1 rule. If an opponent had the ball near the penalty area, one player would try to tackle him while three colleagues would form a defensive line a few yards behind.

The 15-pass rule. This approach was designed to improve the defence even as the side was on the attack, a style Guardiola called “salir en corto” – “coming out with short passes”. This can, as Arsène Wenger once complained, look like “sterile possession” and sometimes even bored Cruyff but the Dutch master could see the point: “Do you know how Barca win the ball back so quickly? It’s because they never have to run back more than ten metres because they don’t pass it more than ten metres”. As Guardiola put it: “In the world of football, there is only one secret. I’ve got the ball or I haven’t. We choose to have the ball.”

These principles were instilled in the City squad through training sessions, team meetings, pre-match talks, post-match analyses and, when required, one-to-one coaching. As Cruyff’s own mentor Rinus Michels, who won three European Cups with Ajax and steered the Netherlands to the 1974 World Cup final, observed, generations of wide forwards have shared the same flaw: if they’re not getting enough of the ball, and anxious to influence play, they drift into the middle at the wrong moment, making the team lose its shape. That was the problem Guardiola faced with City’s promising young forward Raheem Sterling. To resolve this, he had an assistant draw a chalk line down a training pitch and made the player stay outside that line until he was advised to come inside. The efforts paid off. Hitherto, Sterling had never scored ten goals in a Premier League season but, at his peak under Guardiola between 2017/18 and 2019/20, he averaged more than 18 goals a campaign.

You can also, Curtis argues, see the impact of Pep’s work on other City players: “John Stones typifies the difference he can make as coach. He’s now able to play at right-back, in a back three, or deep midfield, without a flicker of concern. A shoo-in for England, he is as cool as a cucumber. And look at Rodri, widely regarded as a ‘bit of a lump’ in his first season, he scored the winner in the 2023 UEFA Champions League final and is now widely regarded as one of the best defensive midfielders in the world.”

Ederson, City’s preferred sweeper-keeper since he arrived in June 2017, has said of Pep: “When it’s time to criticise you, he criticises you. When it’s time to swear at you on the field, he swears at you, and when it’s time to praise you, he praises you. He’s that kind of good coach who says what he needs to say to your face.”

That said, as a coach, Guardiola’s relationships with his strikers have, to put it mildly, proved problematic. At Barcelona, he was spoiled by being able to rely on Messi who, apart from being one of the greatest players ever to grace the game, was a brilliant – and brilliantly unconventional – forward. In four seasons under Pep, the Argentinian scored an astonishing 211 goals in 219 games in all competitions. Other players in the more traditional centre-forward mould, have found the manager a much more exacting task master. Samuel Eto’o and Zlatan Ibrahimović were deemed surplus to requirements partly to give Messi more scope to improve but also because Pep felt they did not fit. As Balague put it: “There is a switch in his mind that flicks on or off – if you’re not with me you shouldn’t be here.”

Eto’o had had his card marked at Guardiola’s first press conference as manager when he declared that he, Deco and Ronaldinho were not part of his plans. The latter two soon left but, after pleas from some players, the Cameroon forward stayed on, scoring 36 goals in a historic treble-winning season, including the opening strike in the UEFA Champions League final over Manchester United in Rome. Yet Pep still felt there were two compelling reasons to sell Eto’o. His reluctance to play on the wing, ceding the central striker’s role to Messi, unsettled the dressing room and he occasionally ignored his coach’s instructions if he disagreed with them. After his departure, the player said: “Guardiola asked me to do one specific thing in practice, something strikers are not normally asked to do. I explained to him that I thought he was wrong and then he asked me to leave the training session.” 

The coach invited his star to dinner – presumably hoping to patch things up –   but his offer was rejected. The switch in Guardiola’s head had irrevocably flicked to ‘off’ and, that summer, Eto’o was traded to Inter Milan (where he won the treble in his first season under Mourinho) in a deal that brought Ibra to Camp Nou. 

Zlatan’s signing was a catastrophic waste of time, money and angst for club, coach, and player. In retrospect, as the Swede has aired all his dirty linen in public while Guardiola has maintained a dignified silence, most people within football have blamed it all on Ibra. Yet the matter, as Balague’s biography makes clear, is hardly that cut and dried. The new striker started well, with five goals in his first five games. This streak alarmed Messi who told Pep that if he didn’t play as No.9, in the centre of attack, he wouldn’t play at all. It didn’t help that Xavi and Andres Iniesta were effectively hard-wired to pass to Messi even if the Swede was in a better position. 

Ibra and Guardiola didn’t speak for months, prompting Thierry Henry, also deployed on the wing to create space for Messi, to tease the Swedish star: “Has he [Pep] looked at you today?” When Zlatan replied: “No, but I’ve seen his back”, Henry joked: “Ah, things are getting better between you then.”

Like Cristiano Ronaldo, but unlike Messi, Ibra’s emotions were all on the surface, there for everyone to see. The Argentinian’s egotism was more opaque, low key and effective. He once shouted at David Villa, the all-time top scorer for Spain, for having a shot rather than passing to him. Even his guardians in the team, Xavi, and Iniesta, once felt obliged to reprimand him for not tracking back, in a 2-2 draw in the UEFA Champions League quarter-final at Arsenal in 2010 (he may have been distracted because Ibra had scored both Barcelona goals.)

Ibra’s account of what was, effectively, his exit interview with Guardiola is troubling. When he said he would train harder, accommodate Messi and sit on the bench if required, the Catalan kept asking: “But, how are you going to carry on?” To be fair, this question might have been prompted by some of the star’s recent rages – bringing a locker down, throwing a box of training gear across the room and accusing the manager of being a coward – but it also suggested that the meeting was a formality.

Ibra’s complaint that the coach recognised their differences but didn’t try to resolve them sounds like sour grapes but there is little evidence, in all the books about coach and club, to contradict that claim. In the manager’s defence, Curtis notes: “Like any ferociously meticulous boss, he can be hell to work with, unless you buy into the idea that he will improve your game. Out and out strikers need a greedy eye for goal and that doesn’t always sit rightly with Guardiola’s pass and provide style.” 

There has always been something of a cult around Pep, as evidenced by the German media hailing him as the ‘professor of success’. At Barcelona, his intensity provoked president Rosell to nickname him ‘Dalai Lama’. Ibra touched on this aspect of Guardiola’s personality, likening him to a groovy schoolteacher who wanted his players to be acolytes rather than colleagues. (This is slightly ironic because, in 1996/97, when Bobby Robson managed Barcelona, Pep used to challenge his tactics at half-time and, with colleagues, began directing how the Blaugrana played on the pitch.)

And yet as Curtis points out: “The older you get the more set in your ways you are likely to be, in any profession. Try telling the senior partner at a law firm he needs to tweak the way he conducts negotiations and you’ll be greeted with a volley of self-confident feedback.” The dilemma for Ibra was whether to risk his reputation by moving into positions that were completely alien to him to implement his new boss’s tactical whims. His mood could not have been improved by the bitter, accurate, conclusion that instead of a starring role at Camp Nou, he had been relegated to a supporting one. 

When Guardiola arrived in Manchester in 2016, he inherited Sergio Aguero, who had had earned City fans’ eternal gratitude by scoring the injury-time winner against QPR on 13 May 2012 to secure the club’s first league title in 44 years. Interviewed earlier this year, the Argentinian striker said that he and his new coach got on well at first but things soured when at a media conference, after he had starred in a 4-1 victory against Stoke City, Guardiola said something like “I like Aguero to score goals but I want him to do more for the team.” When the player confronted him, the coach apologised for piling on the pressure. 

Looking back, the Argentinian striker was generous enough to say: “I thought he didn’t like me, but I recognise now that he was a coach who was just doing what he thought was right.” After becoming the club’s record goal scorer – ultimately racking up 260 goals – he struggled with injuries and, by 2019/20, he had slipped down the pecking order behind the likes of Gabriel Jesus. He didn’t blame the manager. He was unfit and the rules had always been clearly defined: “If your ideal weight was 80kg and you were 100gm over, you would be fined and would not play.” In March 2021, City chose not to renew his contract. The player understood but his father Leonel del Castillo was less forgiving, accusing Guardiola of shedding ‘fake tears’ after Aguero’s final match for the club in June 2021.

That convoluted narrative brings us to Pep’s problems with Norwegian goal machine Erling Haaland, who turned 24 in July. One of the problems with their relationship is that nobody – other than themselves – really knows if there are any. What is clear, as Curtis points out, is that a manager who “had once employed the puny likes of Sterling, David Silva, Bernardo Silva or, occasionally, nobody at all upfront, has had to reinvent his team’s style to accommodate a hulking great battering ram of a striker.”

With City becoming the first club to win the Premier League four seasons in a row, and Haaland responsible for 90 goals and 15 assists in 98 games, Guardiola’s reinvention has, on one level, clearly succeeded. Yet many pundits argued that the team’s style of play last season was less innovative and less entertaining while others maintained that the Norwegian’s increasingly restricted role has turned him into a penalty box striker. 

In the view of German football expert Stefan Bienkowski: “City are simply too dominant on the pitch for a striker like Haaland. They don’t enjoy speeding up the pace of games and turning them into box-to-box duels.” As evidence that the Norwegian is being marginalised, he points out that he only averaged 22.1 touches a game last season, compared to 24.5 in his first campaign and 32.8 in his final season at Borussia Dortmund.

Haaland is such an effective goal scorer that some pundits have mistakenly concluded that this is all he is but in the words of Uli Hesse, a lifelong Dortmund supporter: “He doesn’t need to play only in the box. He can track back and defend and, because he comes from the tactically astute RB school, having played for Salzburg, he knows what he needs to do for the team.”

If there is a way of making a better use of the City No.9’s talents, you can bet that Guardiola is already working on it. As Bernardo Silva puts it: “He doesn’t stop, he knows that the game is always evolving, so he doesn’t let other teams to adapt to us. Every year, he tries something different so other teams can’t get used to the way we play.” 

If anything, that is an understatement: depending on the opponent, he will introduce one or two tweaks in every match. In one of his most revealing statements, in a speech to the Catalan parliament back in 2011, he described the joys of analysing opponents on DVD. He would watch for hours until, he said, “finally the brilliant, terrific moment comes that gives sense to my profession. It might just be a minute, but the instant comes when I say ‘That’s it, I have it, we have won’.”

As next season is widely expected to be his last at City, fans and journalists are already beginning to contemplate Guardiola’s legacy. Curtis says: “If you watch YouTube highlights of any top-level English football from the 1990s, the football is truly prehistoric and one dimensional. The Guardiola/ Ajax/ Barcelona school is now dominant in the English game. To see the likes of Brighton, Luton, Bournemouth passing it out from the back, where once they would have adopted route-one tactics to survive, is quite a sea change. Guardiola deserves more praise for the influence he has had. When he has gone and City come back to everyone else's level, he may be appreciated more for what he has done. A peerless coach, football thinker and innovator.”

Even as a United fan, Jim White admits that “Guardiola has helped transform a club that was once shot through with ineptitude and built a team in his own image.” Such success does, he suggests, come with a few asterisks – “115 to be precise” – referring to the number of charges of financial irregularities levelled against City by the Premier League, all strenuously denied (and to be assessed by an independent panel this November). The dilemma for Guardiola’s admirers is summed up nicely by Klopp: “Everybody knows about the 115 charges, but I have no idea what that means. No matter what transpired at Manchester City, Guardiola is the best manager in the world. If you put any other manager in charge of that club, they don’t win four league titles in a row.”

Although Guardiola has managed three of Europe’s wealthiest clubs – Barcelona, Bayern and Manchester City – the quality that has really defined his football career was already evident when his idol Cruyff discovered him at La Masia. In the summer of 1990, the Dutch coach needed a midfielder and, told that Guardiola was the best in the academy, went to watch him in the B team. Unfortunately, the youngster wasn’t playing. When he asked, “Why isn’t he here?” he was told: “He’s too weak”. As this was precisely the kind of remark Cruyff had heard on his ascent through Ajax’s youth system, he replied: “You don’t have to be strong if you’re good.” 

There are different ways of assessing speed and strengthen football, and the Dutchman felt that Guardiola’s slim physique and lack of pace had made him clever: “He didn’t have any other choice. You must have a lot of technique, move the ball quickly, avoid a collision – and to do that you must have good vision. It’s a domino effect.” Paco Seirul-lo, the club’s fitness coach at the time, described him as “the fastest player at Barcelona”, adding: “Over five or 20 metres in training, Sergi is much faster. But if I create a situation that demands a calculation in decision-making, such as evaluating the position of several team-mates before changing the direction of play, Guardiola was first.”

And that is the principle that Guardiola has relied on to build so many great teams. Although renowned for his tactical experiments – in his final season at Camp Nou some observers characterised his determination to use fewer and fewer defenders as a kind of self-martyrdom – he has always maintained, slightly disingenuously, that football is essentially a simple game: “It’s all about the foot obeying the head.”