Football journalist and author Guillem Balagué discusses Pep Guardiola's achievements at Manchester City as he prepares to leave the club.
The first thing to say about Guardiola’s departure from City is that the timing, the decision, all of it, that was his.
Nobody at Manchester City wanted this, nobody pushed. If Khaldoon Al Mubarak had found a way to convince him to stay, he would have tried it.
But Pep had made up his mind, about seven or eight weeks before the announcement he mentioned it to the club, and he asked to keep it close because he remembered what happened to Klopp when he announced he was leaving Liverpool: it happened in January, and after the initial positive reaction, the team’s form tailed off badly through the run-in.
Pep wasn’t going to let that happen.
Ten years is a rounded number, a good moment to hand over a young squad, rebuilt and ready, to whoever comes next with the instruction, implicit or otherwise, to follow what was built at City, his legacy.
But to get why leaving felt like the right time, you have to understand what staying cost him. This was not a man who enjoyed his successes and moved on refreshed. After each title, each historic night, his instinct was always the same: think again, invent again, go again. He sacrificed everything to football and never truly allowed himself to feel what he won. The rest he is now going to take is long overdue.
And the reason he lasted ten years rather than five, which was his first idea, has as much to do with the people around him as with anything on a football pitch. Manel Estiarte, Edu Mauri, Joan Patsy. Ferran Soriano. Khaldoon. Without that emotional group holding him together in the worst moments, he would have been gone years ago. He felt every failure as entirely his own, imposed demands on himself that nobody else needed to enforce, and when the weight of that became unbearable, it was the people around him who pulled him back.
There were two moments when he genuinely wanted to leave. Year five. Year seven. Both times he was convinced to stay.
Both times, looking back, it was the right call because what he built in the years that followed those crises was some of the best of what he produced at City. Sport, he believed, is about getting up when you are down and trying again. You only truly fail when you stop trying.
But before the triumphs, before Istanbul and the treble and all the rest of it, there were nights that tested that belief to its absolute limit.
The first time came in March 2017, in a departure lounge at Nice airport, past midnight. Monaco had just knocked City out of the UEFA Champions League — a 3-1 on the night that completed a 6-6 aggregate that left everyone breathless. He had arrived at City only the previous summer. The squad transformation he wanted hadn’t happened yet. There weren’t enough young legs or enough brave spirits he needed to compete on the biggest European nights.
What happened in Monaco was really a character failure, more than a tactical one, and he knew it, and he said so, to himself more than anyone. His players had shown fear. You could see it in their faces when the UEFA Champions League anthem played before kick-off.
Monaco dismantled them in the first half, the lead from the first leg evaporating, the team soft at the back and lost going forward. The second half started better but was not enough. In the departure lounge afterwards, Pep sat with dark circles under his eyes, turning it over. He compared it to a 0-4 he had suffered with Bayern against Real Madrid, one of the lowest points of his career. He couldn’t work out which was worse. The torture was how far the team was to what he wanted to build. And, he felt, it was all down to him.
Within days, City played Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea. The team that had been flattened by Monaco showed up brave and aggressive. He got them back up but that first campaign nothing was won. One thing became clear though: Pep knew what had to be done and the first Premier League arrived the year after with plenty of records, as well as the Carabao Cup.
Three seasons later, in August 2020, Lisbon hosted the pandemic UEFA Champions League, a quarter-final against Lyon that City were expected to win comfortably. They didn’t. Lyon were dangerous on the counter, City’s rhythm was slow, and a defensive error late on handed the French side a third goal that made the scoreline look worse than the game.
Khaldoon found Pep in the hotel corridor afterwards and put an arm around his shoulders. Pep’s eyes were glassy. He wasn’t hearing anything. He asked the chairman to sack him, he should.
In a beautiful resort hotel outside Cascais, inside at dinner, nobody ate. The pain in that room was every European elimination stacked together, four quarter-final exits in a row, the same ceiling appearing each time. His staff split around the table. One argument: if this is where we keep falling, this is our level. The counter-argument: our players are as good as Leipzig, as good as Lyon, we are close. Pep sat in the middle of it, saying little. Khaldoon gave a short, vibrant speech, and embraced him again.
What Pep understood, and couldn’t fully articulate yet, was that something was missing, some final layer of collective belief that had to be built. The argument at that dinner table, painful and unresolved as it was, was part of building it.
The Porto final in May 2021 is still misread. Chelsea 1-0, a Kai Havertz goal just before half-time, and afterwards the story became entirely about the decision to play Gündogan as a holding midfielder instead of Fernandinho or Rodri.
Pep had watched the game back twice before drawing his conclusions, and the goal had nothing to do with Gündogan’s positioning. It came from a Chelsea mechanism Tuchel had been constructing all season — drawing opponents to the right side of the pitch and then releasing down the left, creating structural disorganisation. Chilwell received on the left, Walker committed and couldn’t recover, Stones followed Mount out of position, Dias was pulled wide, Zinchenko was caught between two duties. Havertz ran into the space that was left. Gündogan wasn’t near it. Fernandinho or Rodri wouldn’t have been either.
Sterling missed an open goal from close range and the one shot City managed on target was the sum of their threat.
Two players had expressed anxiety about the line-up the evening before, and that unease had moved quietly through the group. By the time the team reached the stadium, there was a tiny loss of the easy confidence they had carried through the season. That was the conclusion with hindsight.
The plan was bold and coherent with everything Guardiola believed, but it had disturbed an emotional ecosystem that was functioning well, and on the night of a UEFA Champions League final, fractional is enough.
The criticism afterwards was total and, in Pep’s view, wrong, but he took it anyway.
Two years later, Istanbul, the UEFA Champions League final, the treble. The thing that had been missing, finally there.
The trophies are the record, but the hard nights are what helped Pep get there.
