Apologies for the long post, but there are two decent articles about us in the Sunday Times. Elsewhere in the paper, Martin Samuel mentions that Leicester's KC "ran rings around the league" at their hearing. Perhaps things are looking up!
Jonathan Northcroft:
In March, when Arsenal left the Etihad with one point, Pep Guardiola made a few of his own.
Television showed him berating Jack Grealish at full-time. He was flinging his arms, poking Grealish’s chest and blocking Grealish off when he tried escaping the rant.
In the post-match press conference a question was, “What was that about?” Guardiola replied with leaden sarcasm. “I do it for the cameras and my ego,” he said snarkily. “Always, I try to criticise the players and let them feel how bad they are.”
The response underlined two things about management’s most intense yet successful figure. One, he is no comedian, but also two — he is not going to let anyone mess with how he manages players. He’ll rant if he wants. If he browbeats a £100 million star the outside world has no business asking why.
Grealish started Manchester City’s next game, so disapproval was only temporary but what is it like for those who err enough to be cast out of the team? “F***ing awful. It’s like you don’t exist,” said a source close to one of his former players. They speak of a coach players revere but a “character so complex it’s a challenge for them to navigate it”.
Fans of fantasy football will know the phrase “Pep Roulette”. It describes the danger of drafting in City players because you never know who’s going to be in or out of their team. You could write a book on the mysteries, chapter one: John Stones. Guardiola never ceases to speak admiringly of him, yet every season Stones is out, then not, then out again — like the sun on a Manchester day.
Guardiola has managed 299 Premier League games and made 924 alterations to his starting XI, making him the Erling Haaland of rotation, in terms of racking up numbers. At no other club, since he began at City, has the rate of line-up change been close. Sometimes the rotation is tactical and sometimes it’s about managing loads but sometimes it’s a verdict: a player has fallen short and a period of reflection on the bench is required.
Mikel Arteta, whose job when City No2 often involved putting his arm round players, knows Guardiola’s ways. So too Raheem Sterling. The Pep Revolution, a book by the Guardiola confidant, Martí Perarnau, details a bust-up between Sterling and Guardiola in March, 2021. Sterling questioned being substituted against Southampton, leading to “furious exchanges” in the manager’s room and Sterling storming out, being called back, then storming out again “leaving Pep sitting alone in his office. With the lights out. Simmering with rage.”
Sterling paid the price for a dip in his finishing — and having the temerity to challenge selection. “Guardiola makes a point of never justifying his line-up. To anyone,” Perarnau writes.
Cut from the squad for the next match and a substitute in City’s following one, Sterling toed the line and played a further 15 months for City before leaving on good terms.
Fallouts with Guardiola don’t have to be fatal but continually challenging his authority is. Ask Mario Mandzukic, who repeatedly questioned Guardiola’s demands at Bayern Munich in 2013-14.
Guardiola cut him, Bayern’s top scorer, from the German Cup final squad, allegedly imparting the news with a barb — “I wish you success at your new club” — and duly selling the Croat.
Ruthlessness is a trait that, like so much, Guardiola inherited from Johan Cruyff who gave him his Barcelona debut aged 18 against a third division team. At half-time Cruyff eviscerated him, scoffing: “You were slower than my granny.” He was substituted and thought he would never play for Barcelona again.
In his first coaching job, with Barcelona’s B team, he turned to Cruyff for advice. There were two players he couldn’t control. “The problem is they’re the two leaders in the dressing room and the best players. I will lose without them on board,” Guardiola said.
Cruyff’s response was blunt. “Get rid of them. You might lose one or two games, but then you will start winning and by then you would have turfed those sons of bitches out of the team.”
Since then there has only ever been one exception to Guardiola’s uncompromising rule, something he spelt out while at Bayern. “This year everybody will run as I want them to,” he said. “I say how things are going to be, and you listen. There is only one player in the world who doesn’t have to, and that is [Lionel] Messi.”
From game one at City on August 13, 2016, when he ditched the England No1 Joe Hart for reasons of style, Guardiola hasn’t wavered from the stance that only those who meet his standards will play. Those might be technical, physical, tactical, behavioural or mental. There are second chances, but you have to take them.
Grealish has done so twice. In December 2021, he and Foden were pictured on a night out after both scoring in a 7-0 defeat of Leeds United. They were axed from the starting XI for the next two games but both knuckled down and grew in importance on the pitch.
Guardiola remembers of Cruyff that “he would push and push you and then he would protect you” and showed the latter side of his own management when Foden was going through some personal strife. At home one day, out of the blue, Foden’s doorbell rang, and there was Guardiola who gave him a hug and came in, not to talk about football but life.
Guardiola reciprocated with Grealish by defending him from press criticism during the rest of that 2021-22 season and was further rewarded by Grealish’s stellar 2022-23. But the incident in March came in a 2023-24 campaign during which Grealish was left out of the matchday squad on six occasions and started only ten Premier League games. City staff spoke of him turning up in pre-season with a seemingly complacent attitude and Guardiola’s response was to demote him. He said Grealish’s playing time “depends on him”.
However this season, having from the start been eager and honed, after even working with a personal trainer while on holiday, Grealish is very much back in favour.
There are some binary reasons for being dropped. Gaël Clichy claims Guardiola has a rule that if players weigh two kilograms more than their considered maximum weight, they won’t train with the first team. Sergio Agüero and Kalvin Phillips are among those to be sidelined because of perceived weight issues. Indeed, Guardiola told City’s squad, on his first day at the club: “I’ve been watching you, you’re a team full of fat players.”
A more subjective issue is body language. “He does mention it a lot,” Nathan Aké said.
“Body language is everything in life,” Guardiola said in February. “If you cannot be happy doing your job, you cannot improve.” His stance is no “bad faces, bad behaviour” and how players carry and apply themselves in practice is crucial to the Catalan. The former City player said if he was on the team-sheet he knew it meant one thing — that he had been the best in training in his position all week.
But also that during the week you were quite sure how you were being viewed. Guardiola could be jumping all over you in training, expressing affection — then by the time you were showered and changed barely acknowledge you.
Another source with inside knowledge of Guardiola’s methods makes a comparison. “He doesn’t have the personality of a Fergie or Shankly but he’s like Bob Paisley. In that great Liverpool team, if you were ever dropped it could be six months before you got back in. It’s the same at City. They’re all trying their best because levels are so high you just don’t want to be out of the picture. They might all have moments of hating Pep but ultimately love how he makes them better and wins.”
Right now? Perhaps Kyle Walker is the one hoping desperately his number comes up. He has only completed one of City’s five games, with Rico Lewis preferred in others because of ability to come into midfield. Walker has been here before, getting his head down and battling back into the side in 2022-23, after Guardiola introduced inverted full backs and dropped him, saying: “He cannot do it. To play inside you have to make some educated movements.”
Guardiola is open to being disproved. Gabriel Jesus was signed in 2017 to put pressure on Agüero, whom the manager believed was being half-hearted out of possession. “He’s not Messi and Pep will not tolerate his team becoming 10+1” Perarnau wrote. Guardiola took Agüero for dinner at Salvi’s pizzeria in John Dalton Street and said: “Sergio, it feels sometimes you’re 100 per cent with us but sometimes you’re not.” Agüero responded the right way — significantly upping his pressing game.
But for those not on board with “Pep Roulette” there is no way back. Aymeric Laporte was jettisoned after conveying displeasure about losing his place and suggesting he might be better off elsewhere — a big no-no in Guardiola’s world. João Cancelo was furious about being eased back after the 2022 World Cup, then substituted on his return and dropped for the next game and did not hide his discontent in training.
Matters came to a head after two bits of insubordination: walking straight from the team bus to sit in the City dugout, alone, after being named as a substitute against Wolverhampton Wanderers and slumping to the ground, with his earphones in, as Guardiola spoke to the squad. Within days he was on loan to Bayern Munich and now he’s in Saudi Arabia. As they say, the wheel turns.
And then this from David Walsh, their Chief Sports Writer, who says he doesn't support a particular team:
Still I watch endless hours of the game. Last week Liverpool, Manchester City and Arsenal in their Champions League matches and it will be like this until May. Not having a team doesn’t diminish the joy of a good game or make one a less avid watcher. Indeed there is much to be said for having the freedom to pick and choose.
And here’s the conclusion: City are the most watchable team in the Premier League: the intelligence of their approach, the tactical discipline, the skill and, perhaps more than any other quality, the togetherness. For all the talent, they are willing to roll up their sleeves and fight.
Success generally corrodes. Not in the case of this team. Indeed the relentlessness of their ambition may be Pep Guardiola’s greatest achievement.
For a better understanding of how he keeps the team hungry, watch episode three of the Netflix series Together, Treble Winners, which tells the story of City’s 2022-23 season.
It is January 11, 2023. We are inside the away dressing room at St Mary’s Stadium. City have just lost 2-0 to Southampton in the Carabao Cup. Guardiola has seen something in the performance that he despises: “Tell me the explanation for today? Tell me? Do you think it is normal? Honestly do you think it is normal? Today, what we have done today? For this club, do you think it is normal?”
The players sit in silence, afraid to look away, even more afraid to catch his eye. “For the guys that travel, that don’t have money to pay their heating at home, do you think it is normal? [In] 2½ days we go to Old Trafford. They’ve had ten years of wanting to kill us. They have something that, now, we don’t have. They have hunger. They are starving. We are not.”
Standing in the middle of the room, he looks from player to player, taunting them with his stare. Come on, speak if you have the nerve. None of them do. Before walking out, he leaves them with a last withering dismissal. “Maybe I was confused,” he says, not needing to explain he had once thought of them as a team with character but perhaps he was wrong.
They lost that Manchester derby and five days later were 2-0 down to Tottenham Hotspur at half-time at the Etihad Stadium. By now, Guardiola has fallen out of love with his team. Inside the dressing room he tells them they have no passion and that he now believes they don’t want to win the Premier League. He then turns towards Rico Lewis.
“Eighteen years old, we have the guy with passion and energy. He got ten fouls. He got up. He fought against [Pierre-Emile] Hojbjerg and nobody defends him. He wants the ball. He’s aggressive without the ball.”
Accused of not helping their teenage team-mate, the senior pros wince. Guardiola looks again at Lewis. “Do you think I give presents? I don’t give presents. You deserve it.”
From there to the end of that season, City were almost unbeatable.
In Arsenal, they have a serious opponent. Without any allegiance, I am greatly looking forward to it. A stress-free watch.
