Like all Indian mothers, my mother too has a fair share of complaints, but at the top of them was my dropping out of engineering school. Now, like most folks from the Indian middle class, a term as bogus as the Holy Roman Empire and income tax returns, we grew up with the notion that getting into engineering school and doing an MBA was the sure-shot way out of penury. Sadly, some of us are never meant to take the tried-and-tested route, and one can blame a lot of people, including yours truly, for not finishing engineering school, but the one I hold most dearly responsible is Pep Guardiola.
It was the night before an important exam when Guardiola's Barcelona faced off against Sir Alex Ferguson's Manchester United in the 2009 UEFA Champions League final in Rome, which we watched in a packed common room in college. At that time, Cristiano Ronaldo was the world's best player, and United had won in Europe the previous season and were looking to become the first team to win back-to-back Champions Leagues in the new format. But Guardiola and his band of merry, menacing imps, including a young lad named Lionel Messi, had other ideas, as they proceeded to dismantle Sir Alex's European and English champions in a way that made one truly comprehend the basic thesis of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction. Those were heady days, when United used to win the league at a canter, and it was shocking for everyone to see Messrs Rooney, Ronaldo and Co given the runaround like they were a Sunday league team.
Guardiola's Barcelona added a new layer of paint to Cruyff's Sistine Chapel of Total Football that day, which wouldn't just become the USP of sportswashing authoritarian regimes around the world but also left me in a state of trauma that made me question my own raison d'être and eventually led to me missing my exams and never becoming an engineer. Now, obviously, one is exaggerating for effect, but what Messi and Co did that day truly elevated Pep Guardiola's legend in the hallowed halls of footballing legacy.
Now, as a Red Devil, whose team were again dismantled two years later, in 2011, this time at Wembley, one is condemned to hate everything Guardiola stands for, but one will try their best to channel one's inner WB Yeats and cast a cold eye on Pep Guardiola's Manchester City legacy, where he elevated the noisy neighbours to one of Europe's pre-eminent teams. The Guardiola legacy at Manchester City can be divided into three categories, like the Clint Eastwood starrer that ostensibly inspired Sholay: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
The Good
In the BBC drama United, assistant coach Jimmy Murphy, played by the brilliant David Tennant, explains the footballing philosophy of the Busby Babes when he says: 'Football is a simple game. You win the ball. You pass the ball, you score a goal. All else is embellishment. Thank the good Lord we don't embellish on natural beauty. The ball's round to go around.' Guardiola's footballing philosophy, one can argue, is the opposite of this: the love child of El Loco Marcelo Bielsa and Dutch maestro Johan Cruyff.
In a piece titled If Marcelo Bielsa did not exist it would probably be necessary to invent him for The Guardian, Barney Ronay argued that Bielsa wasn't Jack Kerouac, the novelist inspired by the Beat Generation, but Neal Cassady, the 'pure idealist' who inspired the guys, among whom was Pep Guardiola. From Cruyff's Total Football, Guardiola inherited the geometry and from Bielsa, the fever. Guardiola played at the base of Cruyff's Dream Team, modernising the idea of Total Football, where everyone should be able to do everything.
Before Guardiola, City had won the title. They had already had Agüero in injury time, but what they lacked was a footballing constitution. Guardiola took what was a sportswashing project and made it a football philosophy that was copied across the land, across divisions, in a country that once worshipped at the altar of speed and aggression. It didn't go immediately to plan, as players struggled, with many quick to point out that Guardiola's legend was fraudulent, that the Premier League would humble him the way it had done philosophical pretenders before, the managerial equivalent of not being able to do it on a rainy night in Stoke. But soon the machine started humming in a way it had never hummed before, at least not in this part of the world.
Ederson showed goalkeepers weren't just there to prevent embarrassment, often inviting the press and making opponents look silly. Holding midfielders did much more than just hold on to possession. David Silva and De Bruyne turned up in spaces where defenders began questioning their life choices. A hundred points and 100-plus goals started becoming the norm as the footballing beast kept altering with false nines, inverted full-backs and John Stones stepping into midfield. Across town, his great rival Jurgen Klopp turned up with his own philosophy of gegenpressing, the ideological antithesis of tiki-taka, and their battles were legendary, producing intense ideological and footballing clashes that would eventually reach 100 points. Mikel Arteta, his apprentice at City, also went over to Arsenal to challenge the metronome, eventually becoming champions, though he did it in a very un-Guardiola way that would suggest that he worshipped at the altar of Jose Mourinho instead of Pep Guardiola. But even in that imprint was visible Guardiola's hand. Football was, to paraphrase Murphy, no longer a simple game.
The Bad
Nike has always been exceptional at football ads. There's the airport ad where Brazilians put the Joga in Bonito while waiting at the airport. There's the one where Eric Cantona, Paolo Maldini and their peers face off against the Devil and his team. There's the cage tournament hidden from the world, but one of the best ones in recent memory is an animated ad titled The Last Game, which imagines a dystopic world where football has become so regimented that it is overtaken by clones who never take any risks, leading to the death of football. O Fenômeno, the Brazilian Ronaldo, must find all the world's best players, only the ones contracted to Nike, to defeat them. That fictional dystopia is a little too much like the real nature of the game thanks to Guardiola's influence. The problem with Guardiola's football is the same problem with organised religion: too many boring priests spoiling the broth. At times, even Guardiola teams look rather dull, like watching paint dry. Man didn't invent football to pass it sideways.
Fabio Capello, a man who never shies away from calling a spade a spade, once said: 'You know what I don't like about Guardiola? His arrogance. The Champions League he won with City [against Inter in 2023] is the only one where he didn't try anything funny in the decisive matches.' Guardiola had the tinkerer problem, particularly in the Champions League, and it's not his problem that everyone tried to behave like a La Masia knockoff because of his influence, or as he shot back: 'I listen to everything that people say about me. Everything. So be careful. I am controlling you.'
Now let's be clear: Guardiola's football wasn't Catenaccio, but the reason the Premier League was loved was because it was a cocktail of chaos where a Frenchman would talk about sardines after kicking a racist stranger, or where the league's best player looked like someone who had consumed more chip butties and pints than your uncle but could still chip the goalkeeper from the halfway line. In the regimented Guardiola world, those mavericks ceased to exist. Football became too regimented, too complete, too much about structure and too little about the joie de vivre that made young children dream of becoming global superstars. After all, what kid dreams of becoming a falseback whose job is to press forwards? Take Jack Grealish, the foul-winning king of provocation at Aston Villa who inspired Jamie Tartt's character in Ted Lasso, but soon became a secure, tactically valuable and non-anarchic expression of footballing morbidity. Or Erling Haaland, who might be a Nordic goal machine seemingly powered by Mjolnir but was once an excellent dribbler as well. By making footballers carbon copies with preset templates, we ended up with a boring league where one needed to rack up 100 points just to compete.
The Ugly
And finally, the ugly. In a piece in ESPN, Mark Ogden argues that Pep Guardiola shades Sir Alex Ferguson as the greatest manager of the Premier League era. He does so by running the rule over various parameters like dominance, trophy haul, style of play, youth development and rivals. Even without accounting for the fact that Ferguson inherited a second-from-bottom team and Guardiola one that was backed by a petrodollar nation state, Ogden misses one important asterisk in Guardiola's Premier League legacy: the 100-plus breaches of Financial Fair Play rules. As The Economist notes, City's transgressions include failing to accurately report the club's accounts, thus avoiding 'financial fair play', which saw City spend $2.5 billion and took the team from 'mediocrity to dominance' in the last 14 years, during which City won seven titles.
In recent years, both Everton and Nottingham Forest have received points deductions. The problem is that if City are found guilty, that could lead to a points deduction or even expulsion from the league. And if City are cleared or receive a light punishment, it would make fans and clubs question the 'sporting integrity of the competition'. The long wait for justice has also raised questions about diplomatic interference, given City are owned by Sheikh Mansour, where a negative verdict's ramifications would be far beyond football and spill over into the UK's relationship with the oil-rich oligarch state.
A negative verdict could also plunge English football into a crisis similar to the Calciopoli scandal of 2006 in Italian football, from which the league never quite recovered. The scandal cast a shadow that Italian football still hasn't shaken off. Serie A remained condemned, and the knock-on effect has also seen Italy qualify for a World Cup only once since winning it in 2006, in 2014. Guardiola has always been City's staunchest defender in the court of public opinion, arguing for the basic principle that one was 'innocent until proven guilty' and that City had been 'condemned' by rivals before any verdict had arrived. He had even said that he told the management: 'If you lie to me, the day after I am not here.' And now he's not here.
It would be harsh to say he is running away. He has been here a decade and will soon have a stand and statue to go with the 20 trophies, and the question will remain: did he walk after finding out the truth? Or did he leave before his visage could be tarnished, and before the paperwork darkened the glow of his footballing legacy? And that asterisk will remain on his legacy.
Postscript
As for this Red Devil, all one can say is thank you, Pep: for the memories and for, in your small way, ensuring that one didn't end up becoming an engineer followed by an MBA, which allowed one to live a life with far more meaningful pursuits: like writing about football, instead of writing 'approved' on emails and filing JIRA tickets. And perhaps that makes his legacy positive: at least for yours truly.
