Goodbye Mister Pep

Pep Guardiola, we're told, is leaving Manchester City at the end of the season. His success makes him the defining manager of the era, but the power that his club wields also raises questions.

As with so many things these days, you do wonder somewhat about the timing. Few other Premier League clubs are cast in the image of their manager to extent that Manchester City are Pep Guardiola-shaped, and it’s inevitable that there will be conjecture on this season-defining story becoming public property a couple of hours before Arsenal’s not-quite-decisive home Premier League match against Burnley.

Was this a pre-emptive veil to cover the Premier League title slipping from their grasp for a second season in a row? Probably not, but it’s tempting (and, more importantly, fun) to think that it might be. When Andoni Iraola confirmed that he would be leaving Bournemouth at the end of the season, he did so in the middle of April and their world didn’t stop turning.

So, first of all, the roll of honour. Six Premier League titles, three FA Cups, five League Cups, three Community Shields, a Champions League, a UEFA Super Cup and a (pre-absurd expansion) FIFA Club World Cup. Twenty trophies in ten years. It’s a staggering record, half the number that Alex Ferguson managed with Manchester United, but achieved in not much less than one-third the amount of time.

There are questions to be asked about some of this, in particular that Champions League record. Given the resources at his disposal, one trophy in that competition and one appearance in the final isn’t much of a return for a decade in charge.

It should go without saying that winning this competition isn’t easy, but his record is no better than that of Bayern Munich, Chelsea, Liverpool or PSG over that time, and substantially inferior to that of Real Madrid. Of course, when you’ve got the riches of a nation state behind you, whether that explanation still holds could be considered debatable.

Still, though, it’s difficult to argue that he isn’t the defining head coach of his era. An average of two trophies per season, every season for a full decade. And stylistically, the game has reshaped itself around his gravitational pull. The way in which the game is played at the top end has changed to try and counter him and his teams.

And yet, and yet. There are 115 asterisks hanging over these achievements. The Premier League’s failure to resolve the charges brought against Manchester City are a stain on everybody who’s come into contact with them. We’ve seen financial chicanery at Everton, Nottingham Forest and Chelsea resolved in a relatively timeous fashion.

But by the end of the summer it will have been three and a half years since City were charged, without any resolution. We’ve been told that it’s complex - and there is common assent that City’s inclination is to throw every legal trick in the book at it - but it remains a cloud hanging over the League itself that this still hasn’t been concluded, especially considering that it took a four-year investigation to bring the charges in the first place.

Now, there are a number of perspectives that we can apply to this situation and how it applies to Guardiola himself. It has already been argued that his previous comments about leaving the club “the day after”, should they be found guilty of the charges, could have something to do with it all, although this does seem like a bit of a stretch, given the absence of any evidence whatsoever beyond speculation that the Premier League is actually going to find them guilty of anything, or that - as with Chelsea - the punishment will end up being the lightest possible slap on the wrists.

What is slightly surprising is that City seem happy to go with Enzo Maresca as his replacement. Maresca is, of course, a disciple of Guardiola, but his post-City career trajectory hasn’t exactly been sparkling. Taking Leicester back into the Premier League is a thing that happened - their financial mismanagement was also quickly dealt with, though on this occasion it was by the EFL rather than the Premier League - and he too won two trophies in his one full season at Chelsea.

But there are asterisks next to those trophy wins, in that they were the UEFA Conference League and the (post-absurd expansion) FIFA World Club Cup, while his record in the competitions which really matter to clubs with Chelsea-esque ambitions wasn’t quite as sparkling. His team finished fourth in his full season at Stamford Bridge, and they were fifth when he was sacked on New Year’s Day.

They negotiated their way through the group stages of the Champions League on his watch, but it’s doubtful that they’d have done much better against PSG in the quarter-finals with him in charge, although, given that they lost that tie 8-2 on aggregate, it’s similarly difficult to argue that he’d have done much worse, either. Chelsea have been a basket case over the second half of this season, but whether that reflects well or badly upon him is debatable. Their appointment of Xabi Alonso from the 1st July demonstrates that football people will always go where the money is, if nothing else.

If nothing else, the timing of all this does at least add a little spice to this evening’s trip to Bournemouth. I wrote a preview of this match for Fotmob, so if you want know roughly what I think about that match you can do so. The mathematics of their situation haven’t changed. City need a win, or Arsenal are the champions, and Bournemouth have now been unbeaten for almost half - 16 games! - of the Premier League season.

Enzo Maresca is a huge gamble, and the owners of Manchester City surely already know that. As ever in football, there are two versions of that decision that we can write in our heads; evolution rather than evolution, or hiring another bald European guy who studied at his feet because they lack the imagination to think up anything different. The only thing that we can with much certainty is that they’ve become a very different football club as a result of him being there, and that they will be a very different football club again once he’s departed.