As Manchester City’s last great team collapsed in the autumn and early winter of 2024, Pep Guardiola would get so agitated by the defeats he would claw at his own face, turning up to post-match interviews with his head covered in red welts.
Yesterday, as City threw away a 2-0 lead to draw 2-2 with Thomas Frank’s Tottenham Hotspur, the most excited he got during the game was when he was shouting “What is the matter with you!?” at his number 10, Rayan Cherki. The player’s apparent crime was to have decided to shoot rather than pass after dribbling his way into a dangerous position.
Cherki, who had already scored City’s first goal, had only been prevented from putting the team 2-0 up by a fingertip save by Guglielmo Vicario. The officials didn’t notice the save, maybe Pep missed it too. Either way, Cherki patiently absorbed the harangue from his boss, then turned away and grinned. He’s used to this sort of thing by now.
Guardiola doesn’t like Cherki’s off-the-cuff style, as he made clear back in December after Cherki set up a goal for Phil Foden against Sunderland with a rabona cross.
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Cherki probably didn’t help the situation by revealing somewhat gleefully after the game how he had specifically ignored Guardiola’s instructions to stay wide, preferring to improvise his own solution in the moment. “I felt I needed to move inside, it was the right moment, and I managed to deliver a great pass.”
(Cherki seems not to take Pep too seriously, which is a nice thing to see in a player of his age. It’s easy to be cowed by a figure as distinguished and domineering as Guardiola. If only Jack Grealish had been able to regard Pep with the same healthy level of not disrespect exactly, but ironic detachment, and if only he had been able to hold on to that confidence in his own way of doing things, his career might not have fizzled out the way it has.)
Guardiola didn’t argue that it wasn’t a good pass – it had led to a goal, after all. But he did make it clear that he thought Cherki’s choice of a rabona was a stupid decision.
“I never saw Messi do these kind of things,” Guardiola said. “What I admire the most [about Cherki] is not the skills. I never saw Messi make a cross like he has done. Messi’s the best player who ever played this game and I never saw those kind of crosses. I like the simplicity because I learn from Messi that I never make a mistake with the simple things.”
Okay, so Lionel Messi isn’t a rabona guy. But Messi – though he might be the best – isn’t the only great player who has ever lived, and Messi’s interpretation of how football should be played is Messi’s own interpretation, not the law of football’s god inscribed on stone tablets.
Does Messi himself think less of certain team-mates of his, such as Luis Suárez, Neymar, Ronaldinho or Ángel di Maria, because they liked to throw in the odd rabona? Would Guardiola seriously class these as dumb or wasteful players? (Relatedly: would he give out to Luis Suárez for doing a rabona?) Does Guardiola think Diego Maradona was an idiot because he played rabonas all the time? Are the likes of Ronaldinho and Maradona not also worthy of imitation for a guy like Cherki?
In any case, why is Guardiola quibbling with his most exciting player’s choices of when and how to pass and shoot? Doesn’t he have bigger problems to think about – such as why has his new team, which has been reinforced by more than €500 million of new players in the last 12 months, has failed to cohere into anything remotely resembling his successful teams of the past?
On Friday, for the second time this season, Guardiola missed a City pre-match press conference for “personal reasons”. Covering for him, his assistant, Pep Lijnders, revealed that his boss’s “understanding of the game is from a different planet” and raved about Guardiola’s undimmed passion for the game. “The quality lies in how to touch the heart of players and how you prepare them to play in a certain way.”
Lijnders is the former assistant to Jürgen Klopp and in 2022 published a book called Intensity, a 400-page hymn to Liverpool’s unique intensity that appeared just as the legs fell off their midfield. He hasn’t lost his gift for poorly timed outbursts of enthusiasm.
Because “the passion... to prepare the players to play in a certain way” is precisely what seems to be missing from Guardiola’s City at this moment. “In general it was a really good performance,” Guardiola said after Sunday’s away draw. But compared to the standards set by the City teams of 2019 or 2023, it was appalling. Without Cherki’s annoying flashes of skill, this would have been City’s worst defeat of the season.
Maybe it’s because Guardiola is not getting through to his new players, maybe it’s because they’re simply not as good as the ones they’ve replaced. Either way, the distinctive Guardiola football identity, established with such clarity over so many years at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and City seems to have vanished from the earth.
His team’s struggles reflect a wider defeat of Guardiola’s vision of the game. The title is going to be won by the team coached by his former protege, Mikel Arteta, who has turned decisively away from the methods he learned at Guardiola’s side.
The objective of the Guardiola teams was always to pull the opponent apart with fast and fluent passing. Their signature goal was an unmarked tap-in from a low cross or cutback. In Guardiola’s mind, the game offers no clearer illustration of having systematically outplayed your opponent.
Arteta’s new approach is ground and pound: pin the opponent back and batter them into submission with a barrage of crosses and set pieces. Their signature goal starts with an inswinging corner and a couple of players pinning the goalkeeper.
You suspect that Guardiola, whatever his diplomatic public statements, must despise what Arsenal are doing. Remember that Pep’s great Barcelona team treated set pieces with lordly contempt. They essentially tried to wipe them out of the game, taking every corner short – an example that was followed by many teams at the time. Barcelona never wanted to launch balls into the box because that meant gambling with possession, which went against the whole idea of what they were doing. Set pieces to them were nothing more than annoying interruptions to the actual football.
Now Arteta and his coaches have taken the part of the game Guardiola discarded, considering it beneath his interest, and forged it into a weapon to win the title at Guardiola’s expense. It’s not an irony the senior man will enjoy. Indeed, it’s becoming awkwardly apparent that he enjoys very little about the Premier League in 2026. It would be best for all concerned to call it a day.
