Sport
Is Pep Guardiola’s era in the Premier League coming to an end?
The moment all Manchester City fans are dreading is in sight. Pep Guardiola is getting ready to walk away from the Etihad Stadium whether at the end of this season, or next, when his contract expires.
Reports in The Athletic this week suggested there is a growing feeling he will depart sooner rather than later, and that City are already preparing a succession plan. Enzo Maresca, currently in charge at Chelsea, is said to be a candidate.
On the surface, that would make sense. Although luring him from a domestic rival would be far from easy, Maresca is a Guardiola disciple, who has worked at City as part of his staff and shares similar playing principles in terms of possession dominance. But his
temperament and tactical flexibility have left a lot to be desired at Chelsea, and were he to carry the baton in a more pressurised environment, he would be found wanting quite quickly.
There has long been an unfair assertion about Guardiola’s success. His critics like to point out that he has always had either the best players at his disposal, or the biggest budget. Given he has worked at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and City, it is an easy belief to hold, but nuance is rarely included in the discourse. At Barca, in his first senior coaching role at the age of 37, he turned a dysfunctional team full of ageing, demotivated stars into treble winners in 12 months, blooding young players like Pedro and Sergio Busquets and taking Lionel Messi’s game to new heights. That team is now arguably seen as the greatest to ever play football.
At Bayern, he inherited treble winners and maintained domestic dominance while changing the way they played. Every year at City, he seems to balance the egos of a lot of top players who consistently jostle for playing time, while maintaining standards and changing the culture of the team when talent comes and goes. The assumption that this simply happens because of the level of quality and resource is a fallacy, proven wrong by the difficulties faced by Arne Slot at Liverpool after spending £450m on new players as Premier League champions this summer.
This is where Maresca would fall down, too. City’s is only a more pressurised environment because despite spending heavy amounts under Todd Boehly at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea are not close to challenging for either the Premier League or Champions League. Maresca did win the Conference League and Club World Cup, but neither should be considered success alone due to the outlay. Maresca’s team are also heavily reliant on individuals like Cole Palmer and Moises Caicedo to function; Guardiola has been defined by his ability to adapt and evolve; even going back to his days at Leicester City, Maresca has been accused of being too stubborn and unreactive.
That doesn’t even factor in the critique of his man-management skills, which Raheem Sterling and Axel Disasi would have strong views about. Whoever replaces Guardiola will face an impossible task, and sustaining his levels of success would be a tall order. But his career has spanned almost two decades at the elite level, and the fact he is still the very best in the world proves how good he is, regardless of the tools at his disposal. Maresca is far from the only coach to have been influenced by Guardiola; Mikel Arteta is another former City coach to thrive at another English outfit, Xabi Alonso could be available soon and Cesc Fabregas is flying with Como in Serie A. There are plenty of suitable candidates, but in a way, that isn’t an issue. More pertinent is that nobody can replace Guardiola in terms of his standard and that could have a lasting impact.
