Football has a habit of making mortals of gods. No matter how crammed your trophy cabinet, how clear your parent company’s bank account, or how extensive your soccer sabermetrics, the game can send a serial winner crashing towards untold depths of despair and humiliation. One minute you’re on Mount Olympus, sipping from the same goblet as Michael Jordan and Serena Williams, the next you’re wandering the land of the “cooked” and the “washed” – constantly humiliated by teenage shitposters, drawing away to an already relegated Southampton, and giving yourself the full Tyler Durden treatment in the dressing room.
For Pep Guardiola, this is a very new state of being. He is not Steve Bruce. He is not used to this kind of thing. After a storied (but slightly overlooked) playing career, the proud Catalan became a rare manager that innovated, and won. For the best part of two decades, he appeared like a man who’d signed some kind of pact, cracked some kind of code. Now we see him after a very rare failed season, with only the FA Cup final to recover some of his much-diminished glory. So, Pep, where did it all go wrong?
Until now, pretty much everything he did worked out. Not only did he pick up pretty much every honour going at Barcelona, Bayern and Manchester City, he could also veer into experimental territory and come out on top, as close as football has come to a Brian Wilson or a Picasso. The man who gave you Dani Alves bombing the wing then gave us Nathan Aké staying put and cutting into midfield. He then perfected the “false nine” before suddenly splashing big on Erling Haaland, the kind of striker who only touches the ball when white netting is in sight. While some Spanish managers stayed true to the tiki-taka ethos that Pep pioneered, he has publicly admonished it as “rubbish and pointless”. He won the league playing Fabian Delph at left-back, and essentially changed what a goalkeeper needs to be forever.
At his pomp, Pep’s power was so strong that he had the power to destroy careers as well as make them. When the likes of Joe Hart, Raheem Sterling and Kalvin Phillips were tossed aside, they went into sharp and brutal decline. Like any great man of history, he could give you life, and he could take it away. He demands the highest standards in every department, and from every player, wielding the kind of power that makes most managers seem like mere employees. Pep’s City wasn’t so much a club, as a royal court.
But this season, his empire began to crumble. City look to finish the season somewhere well outside of the top two. At time of press, they have lost nine games, crashed out of tournaments and spent high sums of money for an array of obscure players in January. While Haaland has remained steady and clinical, Ballon D’Or winner Rodri has been injured all season, and Pep’s gambit of bringing back İlkay Gündoğan didn’t work. While Pep’s castaways (Cole Palmer, Liam Delap, Morgan Rogers, Romeo Lavia among them) have erupted, his squad has creaked and spluttered.
Pep enters tomorrow’s (17 May) FA Cup final – his only chance to claw back some glory from the season – not so much a different manager, but perhaps a different man. He doesn’t seem quite as distressed as he did in the winter, but he does cut a more humbled figure. His eyes look a little glazed, a little distracted. He seems very fallible, very beatable, but also, rather zen, perhaps resigned to the concept that, sometimes, things fall apart.
Maybe he knew it had to happen eventually. No football manager has ever really sustained that level of success for that long. Carlo Ancelotti won everything in his time, but he’s also had the kind of disasters, sackings (and a spell at Everton) that Guardiola could never entertain. Jürgen Klopp and Alex Ferguson essentially quit when the going was good, and as good as they are doing right now, you can well imagine that a spell in the Saudi League, or in charge of the Austrian national team, may come one day for Arne Slot, Hansi Flick et al. A football manager only has so long at the top, and Pep was already riding his luck.
Saturday’s result is perhaps by-the-by for City’s board. A win against Crystal Palace doesn’t prove much, and a loss only confirms what we’ve seen all season. There is a much bigger question at play, one which cannot be answered in one game: do they stick with what they knew, and cleave to Pep? Or do they cash out and move on?
There are two prevailing schools of thought here. One is that, in football, decline is a hard thing to reverse. Perhaps no other industry is as P45-friendly. The prevailing wisdom is that when things are not working, it’s time to go; cut it off at the joint, nip it in the bud, send the loser packing.
The other theory is that football is in a bit of a flux period right now (or perhaps even a more general decline). This year’s Premier League has been a bit of a stinker, with Liverpool winning it on low-battery mode while falling in every other competition. The Champions League was fairly unmemorable before the semi-finals, and a Ligue 1 goalkeeper (PSG’s Gianluigi Donnarumma) is seriously being touted for the Ballon D’Or. As good as PSG and Barcelona are, football appears to be waiting on another revolution, a tactical tweak or prevailing ideology to take the game to the next level. The kind that Pep Guardiola has always been very good at uncovering.
Here, you can see why City seem to be erring towards keeping Pep on. There are some interesting young managers out there, but there are also some who have failed remarkably when trying to innovate at big clubs (see Thiago Motta at Juventus). The most natural successor, Xabi Alonso, will most likely go to Madrid, so it looks like City are sticking with their troubled demagogue, having given him a new contract last November. But that the contract is only for two years suggests that both parties have their eyes on other suitors.
Guardiola’s track record, his obsessive nature and belief in progression suggests he’s the best-placed person to come up with a new idea, to take City back to glory. But you have to wonder if he has the hunger anymore. But then again, who knows what a taste of silverware can do for a man’s appetite.
[See also: Sven-Göran Eriksson’s struggle]
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