Pep Guardiola’s biggest strength is Man City’s Champions League flaw | Football | Sport
Pep Guardiola’s Man City reign has been littered with ugly exits from Europe (Image: Getty)
Football is a simple game: 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes, and at the end, Real Madrid almost always knock Manchester City out of the Champions League. The only difference this week was that 21 players were on the pitch for most of the second leg.
There was a familiar feeling to City’s latest exit from Europe’s most prestigious competition. The opponents, for starters, given it was the fifth consecutive season the two sides had met in a Champions League knockout tie.
But it’s almost as if it had all of Guardiola’s shortcomings from his time as City boss in Europe sprinkled into one. A major surprise starting XI decision in the first leg, resulting in an all-but impossible scoreline to overturn heading into the second.
The most frustrating part, as far as Guardiola and City will be concerned, is that in the second leg, they were good, really good. Even with 10 players, there’s an argument that across the 90 minutes, the Blues were the best team on the pitch.
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Ultimately, it was something out of his control that completely swung the tie, with Bernardo Silva’s red card and the resulting penalty extinguishing any realistic hopes of wrestling the game back from 4-0 down on aggregate. But that’s been part of the problem with Guardiola in Europe: trying to control the uncontrollable.
Guardiola’s biggest strength in the Premier League – six titles in 10 years – is his greatest flaw in the Champions League. Across a 38-game season, you can control the uncontrollables, at least to a much greater effect than in the Champions League.
It’s why Guardiola, just minutes after City crashed out of this year’s competition, pushed back on the idea that Real Madrid has been his biggest test. Instead, the 55-year-old used it as another opportunity to reminisce on the heavyweight battles with Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool.
When quizzed by the Spanish media, Guardiola remarked: “No, no. Jurgen Klopp‘s Liverpool [was my biggest challenge]. You were in Spain, you didn’t know what that was like. Real Madrid…They’ve knocked us out more, but they know how we’ve played.”
Will one Champions League win be enough for Man City when Pep Guardiola leaves? (Image: Getty)
There’s also a touch of irony that when Guardiola did win his first and only Champions League title with City, it was by finally embracing some of the chaos that has seen his adversaries flourish in the same competition. The 2023 Champions League-winning team is perhaps the most anti-Pep team he’s had during his City career. In the final against Inter Milan, Guardiola started with four centre-backs in defence, a wing partnership of Jack Grealish and Bernardo Silva, and a target man striker in Erling Haaland, whose on-the-ball ability was much more limited than some of City’s other forward options.
It worked a treat, and City were crowned champions of Europe. The following season, they were unlucky not to progress into the semi-finals after another ding-dong battle with Real Madrid. Just this week, Guardiola described the quarter-final clash at the Etihad in 2024 as the “most unfair defeat” of his City tenure.
And that’s the other side of this particular coin: the best team in Europe doesn’t always win the Champions League. Liverpool in 2005, Chelsea in 2012, and Chelsea in 2021 (at the expense of Guardiola’s City), just to name a few.
So who’s to blame? The man himself didn’t deem it fair when asked whether one Champions League title in 10 years should be considered a failure in the post-Real Madrid debrief. In characteristically sarcastic fashion, he said: “Yeah, you’re right. I should’ve won six Champions League titles to be recognised [as a successful Man City manager]. Yeah, yeah, for sure.”
There are certainly tactical and personnel decisions that Guardiola has made (Lyon in 2020, Chelsea in 2021, Real Madrid in 2026) that have contributed to City’s shortcomings. But if Guardiola is a failure for one Champions League title during 10 years in England, the same must be said for Klopp’s one in nine, Alex Ferguson’s two in 26, and Jose Mourinho’s none in nine.
