Pep Guardiola: The Man Who Forever Changed Football | OneFootball

One could have thought of a more romantic ending to Pep Guardiola’s iconic decade-long tenure at Manchester City.

It was a spell in which Guardiola won six league titles and a Champions League title amongst his twenty trophy wins at the club, cementing his legacy for football fans as perhaps the best manager in football history.

In Pep’s last two seasons with City, the Spaniard won just the singular FA Cup, League Cup, and Community Shield trophies. While no club’s fans have the luxury of being able to complain about a season that won them two pieces of major silverware, it all just feels a bit underwhelming.

ALL HAIL GUARDIOLA

Pep wasn’t even allowed the luxury of being able to announce his own departure, with Fabrizio Romano informing the world of the Manchester City manager’s replacement before the Spaniard had even said a peep about leaving the club.

It’s a painful reminder of how quickly image in football can change, and puts into perspective just how much of a fickle sport football truly is. From being football’s best manager just three years ago, you can now place Luis Enrique, Xabi Alonso, and maybe even managers like Hansi Flick and Vincent Kompany as more attractive managers than the Spaniard.

While the image of one of football’s greatest managers is already significantly reduced from what it was a mere three years ago, one can only imagine how it’ll look after Guardiola’s reportedly planned one-year sabbatical following the end of the season. Will it look like how fellow great boss Jose Mourinho’s did after his three consecutive lacklustre spells at Spurs, Roma, and Fenerbahce?

All this talk, and yet Pep Guardiola will inarguably go down as the most influential manager of the 21st century. His stint at Barcelona started just 24 months following the end of his playing career, as a relative novice in management after just a year taking charge of Barca’s B-Team.

All those doubts, all that inexperience, but Guardiola would end up winning a treble in his first year. And he’d do it in a way that embodied him; bold squad decisions that would end up as his signature, and a beautiful pass-first style of football that seemed almost too perfect to the eye.

MANAGING MESSI

Watching Barcelona became a kind of healing potion for anybody who watched. That one-touch, Tiki-Taka style from some of the sport’s greatest ever technical players, like Xavi, Iniesta, and Busquets.

And who could forget that False 9, the short guy from Argentina with a face that looked like he was just happy to be there, almost like he was a fan plucked from the crowd pre-match who got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play alongside his idols. But he obviously wasn’t.

He dribbled past everyone. Made professional La Liga defenders who had played and perfected the sport since they could barely walk look like cones. It never even crossed his mind. They just existed in that particular place at that particular time. But they couldn’t stop him. Messi knew that. They knew that. And it was one of the most beautiful things any football fan has ever witnessed.

He, along with Pep’s style of play, made for one of the most spectacular, eye-catching, and most of all, successful stretches of four years in history. From 2008 to 2012, Pep’s Barca would win two Champions Leagues, three La Ligas, and two Copas del Rey as part of fourteen trophies won in that stretch.

Pep’s “Prime Barca” is still referred to by football fans as the gold standard of elite teams. They would go on to break many other great records, such as:

AN INFLUENTIAL STYLE

It was no surprise that Pep’s style of play would go on to be the most influential style that football had seen in decades. The Spaniard’s influence would spread over the following decade, to all levels of football, across the world.

In professional football, all the way to soccer for six-year-olds, passing drills became the new best way to develop your team.

As Pep would go on to spread his wings with Bayern and then Manchester City, more and more clubs would start to mimic his style. As time went on, clubs would start getting better at it, and Guardiola would end up falling victim to his own success.

Especially in England, the Spaniard was scapegoated for having “ruined football” by having his style of play replicated – or attempt to be replicated – by countless teams in the English football pyramid.

All of a sudden, you were seeing teams in the Conference and League Two playing tiki-taka football, and it was dominating the space that was previously dominated by defensively solid, route one football. Pep’s football dominance was to blame for this, even though during his time at Bayern, he stated that he loathes “all that Tiki-Taka”.

Anybody with a bit of Pep Guardiola’s DNA tried their hand at management. Barcelona would hire long time Guardiola assistant Tito Vilanova after the Spaniard’s departure in 2012. Arsenal would hire another Guardiola assistant, Mikel Arteta, in 2019, to lead their new project. Xabi Alonso, who played under Pep for two years, was hired by Bayer Leverkusen in 2022 despite just three years of management experience with Real Sociedad B.

Enzo Maresca, another former Pep protege, was hired by Leicester and Chelsea, and has now ultimately become the Pep replacement next season at City. Xavi, former teammate of and player under Pep Guardiola was hired by Barcelona in 2021 to be the “next Pep”.

Vincent Kompany, another former Pep talent was hired by Bayern Munich, despite getting Burnley relegated. Even Luis Enrique, longtime teammate of Pep and inheritor of his Barcelona team two years after he left, won a treble with the Blaugrana, got hired to the Spain team, and would go on to win PSG their first Champions League with one of the deepest, best collective squads in recent history.

But they all go back to Pep.

As the “Pep disciples” began to gain more success, more and more of Pep’s European rivals began to hire them as managers. 2024 was the Golden Year of Pep disciples for the biggest clubs in Europe, as in that calendar year alone, Barcelona, Arsenal, Chelsea, Bayern Munich, Leverkusen, and PSG were all managed by former understudies of Guardiola.

Clubs were – and still are – scrambling to get any manager they can with a little bit of Pep DNA in them. Even Real Madrid, the antithesis of anything Barcelona, and the most frequent victims of Pep’s famous Barcelona side, hired Pep disciple Xabi Alonso, and were looking at Enzo Maresca this summer as the club’s new permanent manager.

And, surprisingly, most hires of these types of managers were great for clubs, and usually came with success – we’re even seeing a battle of two of them in the Champions League final this year.

However, from the rise of the disciples came the fall of the master. Most of Pep’s students, while using his style as a base for their games, would add personal twists to better suit their clubs. Mikel Arteta took Pep’s game and made it a defence-first, grit-and-grind style of play.

Luis Enrique took Pep’s game at PSG and added high, unrelenting pressure. Vincent Kompany revolutionized Pep’s attacking style, making room that wasn’t previously there for flashy wingers such as Michael Olise and Luis Diaz.

In all of these innovations, and subsequent successes, Pep’s style, as successful as it was, became outdated, despite the Spaniard’s best attempts to adapt to the changing football landscape around him.

And so, as it happens with every major innovation and craze, it eventually gets ‘out-innovation’d’, and becomes the style of yesteryear, leaving behind with it everyone who refuses to change. The Spaniard’s famous, pass-first style hasn’t quite become outdated, but the spins put on it by some of Europe’s best managers, a vast majority of whom took massive inspiration from Guardiola.

In fact, look at the list of managers from the start of this article – Alonso, Kompany, Enrique, Flick – the German is the only one who never took inspiration from Guardiola, playing a heavy metal, gegenpress style of football that can be more closely compared to Jurgen Klopp. Other than that, all three shared a long time with Pep, learning with and from him. Even managers that I didn’t mention, like Arteta and Maresca, aren’t too far from that top tier of coaches.

This, eventually, all leads into what Pep Guardiola’s legacy will end up becoming. The Spaniard will, deservedly, end up remembered as being one of the top, top managers of all time, up there with Sir Alex, Wenger, Busby, and so many more.

However, Pep’s legacy will end up as so much more than that. It will become one of unparalleled influence throughout the football world. Pep’s disciples, despite pushing Guardiola’s end as a football manager closer, will boost his legacy far beyond the end of his managerial career.

As more and more appear, and thrive at the top of the football landscape, it all goes down to the kid born in the small Catalan town of just 7,000 that started it all.