It wasn’t quite without fanfare but when Manchester City announced, 10 years ago on Sunday, that Pep Guardiola was to be their manager from the next summer, it was a banal, bald press release that brought English football the news that would change it for ever. That was a simpler time, pre-Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency, and before centre-halves in League Two would split wide for the keeper to pass out from the back to the holding midfielder, dropping in to receive the ball as a false 9 came deep to link with full-backs stepping into midfield.
“It’s not about coaches adapting to English football,” said Jordi Cruyff in 2016 as Guardiola began to make his mark on England. “It’s about English football adapting to the new things of the game.” And yet that typical Cruyffian confidence looked like hubris when Guardiola’s Manchester City got hammered 4-2 by Leicester, 4-0 by Everton and experienced Champions League humiliations at Barcelona and Monaco in that first season.
Ten years on, you have to admit Cruyff Jr was, like his father, Johan – Guardiola’s inspiration from their time at Barcelona – 100% right. We now know that English football revolves around Pep rather than the other way around. “All credit to Pep,” Jordi told me recently while recording a forthcoming episode of the It Was What It Was podcast, and I reminded him of our conversation. “If you look at the Premier League nowadays you see a lot of teams playing from the back, taking all kinds of risks, and every cross in the box there are six or seven players trying to finish it. Even smaller clubs that historically had a different way of playing are more open, [commit to] crazy attacks and just go for it. When Pep arrived he had that romantic way of playing and I think a lot of people didn’t expect the level of results he would get. They introduced the Barça style to Manchester City and City brought that to the whole of the Premier League. But what helped Pep a lot was patience of the ownership [of the club], that they weren’t emotional.”
Indeed, it is probably worth reminding ourselves of that first season, when Guardiola, having been massively hyped, won nothing and struggled to make the top four. Before he arrived at City he had lost 42 of his 408 games (10.3%) at Barcelona and Bayern Munich, where, between the two clubs, he won six league titles, two Champions League titles, four domestic cups and three Club World Cups. In his first season in England he lost 10 of 56 (17.9%), allowing an entire panel of pundits who had asserted that Lionel Messi couldn’t do it on a wet, windy night in Stoke a smug smile of vindication.
Perhaps peak Pep defiance (conceit?) came after his side were played off the park by Leicester with a long-ball, counterattack style in December 2016, with two late City goals making the 4-2 scoreline more respectable than it was in reality. Guardiola was challenged about his side failing to win a tackle in the first 35 minutes. He didn’t quite laugh in our faces but preached with the self-assurance of a missionary abroad, wholly unconcerned about local belief systems. “I’m not a coach for the tackles,” he replied. “It’s another aspect of football but in the end we’re not going to win or lose for the tackles.” He sniggered at the end of his reply, as though bewildered by our basic lack of understanding.
Eighteen months later, when Guardiola’s team had amassed 100 points in his second season and were celebrating the first of six Premier League titles, I reminded him of that exchange and asked whether he had realised his response was slaying a sacred cow of the English game. “I understood completely,” he said. “That is cultural, because the way we play in England is with more physicality and more long balls, which creates these kinds of actions.”
Yet by then he was also keen to be more conciliatory. “Of course it’s necessary to win tackles,” he said. “Tackling is a part of the game. People think it’s just pass the ball, possession of the ball. No, no, no. We speak a lot about how we have to defend. But my concern was that we hadn’t lost against Leicester because we didn’t win the tackles. We didn’t win for other reasons.”
Indeed, though English football has changed beyond recognition, Guardiola also changed after that first season. The signing of Ederson in 2017 allowed him to incorporate a long pass over the press as an alternative to playing out; playing four centre-halves in his backline in 2022-23 chimed with the more robust path football was taking; and Erling Haaland and Gianluigi Donnarumma are not players you can envisage thriving in the Barça of 2011.
Nothing could illustrate more the coming together of two cultures over the past 10 years than Guardiola’s unlikely bromance with Neil Warnock, high priest of the long ball, set piece and putting it in the mixer. Warnock, 77, has become a regular visitor to the City training ground and Guardiola has even had him address his players. “He’s been the best manager in my lifetime, the most influential,” said Warnock. From a man who took on Sir Alex Ferguson, José Mourinho and Arsène Wenger it’s quite the compliment. “[I thought that] even more so when I went to the club for a couple of days. I didn’t know he was that intense!”
Having conquered England, Guardiola has been keen to reach out to the Premier League’s tactical founding fathers. “It started when Kyle Walker told me: ‘The gaffer would like you to come and have a chat,’” says Warnock, who had taken Walker on loan from Spurs while at Sheffield United and QPR. “So I went across to a game and we had a good chat and it just stemmed from there really.” Guardiola was so enamoured he attended An Evening with Neil Warnock when the show went to Manchester, bringing an assistant and going backstage after.
“The reason why I say he’s the best?” said Warnock. “He still picks my brains. He picks everyone’s brains. He’s taking in information all the time; you can see his mind working. He always wants to learn. When he’s on the training ground it’s not just a matter of going out there for half an hour. I’ve never seen anything like his intensity.”
There is something wistful in Guardiola’s relationship with Warnock, a throwback to a forgotten era the City manager yearns for. When he asked Warnock to address players such as Kevin De Bruyne, Haaland and Bernardo Silva, the former Sheffield United manager didn’t hold back. “I said to them: ‘I bet you’re glad I’m not your manager. I’d have you kicking the ball from over there to over here,’ pointing at the 18-yard box. And everyone laughed their heads off. After training Pep said: ‘Please come have a coffee.’ And he told me: ‘The way you talked to the players, nobody does that nowadays. There’s no humour. It’s all data, computer, stats.’”
The irony is that this Pep anniversary coincides with the first concerted push back against the Cruyffian tactics, with set pieces, long throws and direct football proving the antidote to City’s domination. Warnock feels a degree of vindication, baffled as to why it has taken coaches so long to realise that trying to match Guardiola played into his hands. “I’ve been asking that question for about three or four years. What people have to realise is they can’t match Pep’s City in passing around the back. I said to Russell Martin [at Southampton]: ‘You can’t do that.’ And when he went to Rangers, everyone who comes to Ibrox sits back, [so] you have to move it quicker. In the Premier League it became: ‘This [Pep’s way] is the way football is.’ That’s a load of rubbish, that! Football is about winning games. It’s like Amorim and the Celtic guy with the bloody clipboard. I’m looking at that and thinking ‘Oh my goodness.’”
But Guardiola and his philosophy may not be done quite yet. Warnock believes he will ape Sir Alex Ferguson and want at least one more title before calling time on the colonisation of English football. “I don’t think he’ll call it a day now until he’s shown people he is the best. I don’t think he’s one of those who will call it a day when he’s not doing well. I think he’s one of them who will do well again, show people why he’s the best and then call it a day.” It may not quite be the resounding battle cry of “Ten more years!”, but there may be one last blast of Johan Cruyff’s football before Guardiola leaves, having changed us utterly.
