The Incredible Inside Story Of Pep Guardiola’s Decade At Manchester City

Jack Grealish had rolled on the floor in agony. It was a training session on the eve of Manchester City’s FA Cup final against rivals Manchester United in May 2023 and Pep Guardiola’s side were closing in on a historic treble.

Grealish had injured his hand — he wore a bandage on his fingers during the final itself — and the manager spotted an opportunity to rally his troops. According to one onlooker, he challenged his players over their readiness to fight before dropping to the floor to make his point and rolling around, grabbing his hand and screaming, feigning the injury that had befallen Grealish. Meanwhile, Coldplay watched on from the gallery.

This was just another day at City during Guardiola’s remarkable 10-year reign.

Guardiola came to love Manchester City, and the city of Manchester. His achievements at the club, the moments he experienced and the support he received mean that it was a wrench for him to decide to leave.

During his decade in charge, he has made the extraordinary appear routine. Four Premier Leagues in a row, four Carabao Cups in a row, a domestic treble — none of that had been done before. Six Premier League titles in seven years, in an era when the norm is that champions immediately lose their hunger and drop down the table the year after.

One source close to a key player of the Guardiola era — speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships, like some others in this article — says the manager had intended, a couple of years ago, to stay at City until he had won 10 Premier League titles, partly due to his love of U.S. sports and milestones, and partly because it had seemed like a reasonable aim, until last season’s crash.

He will be remembered as a true genius, a wild, intense, football-obsessive. Many people he worked with loved him; others, not so much. He is a complex man who can be high one moment and low the next, somebody who motivated his players with moments of inspiration but frustrated others by leaving them out of his teams when they closed in on trophies.

According to his friend, the Oasis guitarist and songwriter Noel Gallagher, Guardiola has been looking back on his time at City as the best 10 years of his life.

“On Saturday after the match, he was quite reflective,” Gallagher tells The Athletic of their conversation after the FA Cup final on May 16. “For the first time, I thought, ‘I think he’s leaving’, because he was going on about this being the best decade of his life.

“He went from 45 to 55, which is a big, significant time of your life. I’m in my late fifties now, so turning 50, I know what that is like. To spend that time at the top of your game in a foreign country, although he calls it home, and he’s been going through personal stuff in his family life, so it’s a big change for him. But he was in a very reflective mood. For once, he didn’t talk about the future and I thought maybe that’s a clue.”

Pep Guardiola and Rayan Cherki embrace on the pitch after this season’s FA Cup finalMichael Regan – The FA via Getty ImagesHe has lived that decade at a frantic pace. One source describes Guardiola as a “Hollywood actor” when he stands up in front of his players to deliver their instructions, although he regularly changes his mind.

“There is one story that perfectly sums up his obsession,” Ilkay Gundogan, captain of City’s treble-winning team, tells The Athletic, speaking about another incident. “One morning, Pep came into the video room with incredible energy. He had this ‘new idea’ and spent 45 minutes passionately explaining a complicated tactical change he wanted us to try on the pitch.

“We were all listening intensely, trying to process it and we went out to train, but after about 45 minutes of trying to make it work, he suddenly stopped everything. He looked at his screen, looked at us, and just said: ‘Forget everything I just told you. All of it. It was nonsense. It doesn’t make sense.’

“We just stood there, stunned! We went back to playing a normal rondo and training as usual. But that was Pep. He is so honest with himself that if he realises an idea isn’t perfect, he kills it immediately. Of course, the next morning, he arrived with a new plan that actually worked perfectly. It showed me that even the best in the world is constantly questioning himself.”

Gundogan was Guardiola’s first signing when he arrived at City, with the club putting pieces in place long before he arrived. He was consulted on Kevin De Bruyne and Raheem Sterling when they signed in 2015, while he was still Bayern Munich manager, and he called Aymeric Laporte to try to convince him to sign in 2016, telling him about the planned arrival of John Stones.

Gundogan, who lived next to Guardiola in City Suites in the part of Salford that is effectively Manchester city centre, has come to regard his former manager as a “mentor and a friend” after eight seasons together, and is well placed to describe how the 55-year-old changed during his time in England.

“I think he became more ‘human’ and a bit more relaxed with the players,” the German says. “In the early years, he was 24/7 high intensity, every second was about perfection. Over time, especially after we won more titles, he started to trust the group more.

He realised that sometimes the players need a bit of freedom or a day off more than a tactical meeting. His communication became more about the emotional state of the team rather than just moving pieces on a board.”

Guardiola can be a hard man to read, even for those who have worked with him most closely.

“Our relationship was always nice,” Fernandinho, who won four Premier League titles at City under Guardiola and captained the team for two, tells The Athletic.

“I always came to him and gave him a hug and a kiss and asked him some things and then tried to talk to him respectfully. But honestly, doing the job that he does, sometimes he was really stressed and sometimes relaxed, depending on the situations of many things inside the club, not just the results, many things inside the club. Obviously, we weren’t aware of some things that were going on but you can see the body language.”

Fernandinho was 31 when Guardiola joined the club — he thinks he would have been a far better player had he worked with the Catalan earlier — and he explains how Guardiola’s early training sessions set the tone for the next decade.

“It was a simple 11-v-11 and normally in training the first action was like, ‘OK, we start the game relaxing and then after we’re gonna see what happens’,” he says.

“The first touch of the ball, I don’t remember who did it, he whistled and stopped the session and said, ‘Listen, if you’re thinking you’re gonna play that way, it’s impossible. From the first minute to the last minute, we go full gas’.

“The message was really clear because most of the players were used to going through the game or the session and in some actions we go full gas. But with him, since the first session, he says from the first whistle you have to go full gas.

“This was the first impression we had with him and after that, every training session was in that way.”The importance of having the right attitude was something he also hammered home in the very first player meetings.

“As we walked in, the first video we did, he showed the replay of Kevin De Bruyne,” Bacary Sagna, who cherishes his one season with Guardiola at City, tells The Athletic. City had qualified for the Champions League on the final day of the 2015-16 season under Manuel Pellegrini, a 1-1 draw at Swansea seeing them squeeze into the top four.

“What happened is we were disappointed about that because if you are a competitor, you cannot be pleased about coming third or fourth in the league. We reached the semi-final of the Champions League, so I think you cannot be pleased with that, so even though we reached the target of qualifying, the disappointment was bigger.

“Pep paused on Kevin De Bruyne celebrating. As soon as the referee blew the whistle, he paused, and only Kevin raised his hands, both of his hands. And he was like, ‘Guys, I have a question. How come only Kevin was celebrating, you guys just qualified for the Champions League, and none of you are celebrating? None of you are happy? Only Kevin is celebrating?’

“He said to us, ‘I want guys like him, happy to have achieved something. And this is not normal, because you did achieve something. Of course it is not what you expected but you qualified for the Champions League, which is massive for this club.’ He said this is where I want to take you guys, to celebrate the little details. And I was like, I should try to be more positive, enjoy football and enjoy moments like this.”

Guardiola worked hard in those first months to establish a close bond between the players, implementing strict rules designed to ensure certain behaviours became second-nature. He cut off the wi-fi so players spoke to each other rather than look at their phones, and mandated that they eat breakfast and lunch at the training ground.

He also ensured foreign players spoke English, with non-native speakers having to sit exams before his first Christmas in Manchester, and he was strict on players’ weight.

“We had to respect our weight,” Sagna says. “If we were 1.5kg over, he would not like it. You were out of the squad, you were running on your own until you got back to the right weight.”

Sagna laughs as he thinks back: “Maybe then he might include you again in the training session — but he will not forget.”

Guardiola also set about teaching the fundamentals of his philosophy, the seemingly small changes that lead players to say he transformed their way of playing the game.

“Something that shocked me, the first session I did, we were doing a rondo, five against two,” Sagna says. “And then at some point, I’m outside, two players were pressing the ball and then suddenly, the ball is coming to me, and I make a backheel, like a flick behind my leg to the player on my left side.

“And they say, ‘Baca, middle’, but I didn’t lose the ball. I was like, what? He said, ‘Baca, go to the middle’. I was confused. He said, ‘No back flick — if you open your body before, and you see the player on the left, you would not need to do the back flick’. And I was like, ‘Oh my god, yes, he’s right!’.” He laughs again. “It’s something very little, but it changes the whole situation.”

Sagna recently stepped down from his first coaching job, in charge of Banaat, a women’s team in Dubai, having led them to the title.

“When I walked in, they were complaining a bit, saying they didn’t want to do this or that, and when they didn’t want to do something, I was telling them, ‘Girls, this is not coming from me, you are learning indirectly from Pep Guardiola’,” he laughs.

“And the minute I said that, I swear to God, they are not complaining. ‘The way I teach you is copy-paste from Pep Guardiola’.”

One standout example of Guardiola trying to impart his methods during the first season centred around Sergio Aguero, the club’s beloved star striker who had already secured legend status thanks to his last-gasp winner against Queens Park Rangers in 2012 that delivered their first Premier League title.

He and Guardiola clashed several times during their first two seasons together, sources around the team at the time tell The Athletic, with Aguero believing Guardiola wanted to sell him because he did not train hard or press enthusiastically.

Aguero said recently that he was close to a move to Chelsea, only for the club to block it. He even had a meeting with City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak in the summer of 2017, a year into Guardiola’s reign, where he was assured he would not have any issues going forwards, although manager and striker continued to clash as Aguero was left out of big matches.

Fernandinho sheds some light on how the two eventually met in the middle.

“It was easy because Pep’s masterclass was finding solutions,” he says. “If you have a player like Aguero, you just can’t throw him away, and he solved it because he built the team for Aguero to make two runs to press and the rest of us used to do the hard part of the work.

“For example, the first season during the goal kick, the players could not receive the ball inside the box yet, so they had to receive the balls outside the boxes. And then, Aguero, he has two runs to do. The first one, if he goes to the defender and the defender passes the ball back to the goalkeeper, Aguero makes that run as well. So, he forces the keeper to play the ball where we were, obviously we knew we were going to press over there.

“Pep prepared the team for him to run as little as possible, to press, and the rest of us, we were much younger and full of energy, we did it for him.”

Guardiola himself had feared the sack during that first season. According to biographer Marti Perarnau, he went into a game at West Bromwich Albion believing failure to win would have forced the club to act. Those were clearly before the days when he realised City were fully committed to giving him everything needed to succeed, not least their fullest backing, even in difficult moments.

“One person who is massively important for City is the chairman, Khaldoon,” treble-winner Aymeric Laporte tells The Athletic. “For me, he’s one of the greatest people I ever met. If I was him, maybe I would treat some players so bad, because of the result or because of failure or whatever. And this guy always shakes your hand, checks on you, ‘How are you, how are your family?’, so polite, and for an important person like him, with that power and everything, that makes a lot of difference.”

“The way the club managed his situation gives him more safety and I think that’s normal,” Fernandinho adds.

“He was always trying to do something new in tactical ways because he knew he could take some more risks, because the board always tried to trust him and the players trusted him, everyone in the club trusted him.

“Obviously, he knew he had some pressure, but at the end of the day he was free to make some decisions when it didn’t matter which results he was going to have.”

Last season, when City won just 11 of 31 games in all competitions and often looked physically incapable of playing a full 90 minutes, Guardiola felt under pressure again. It was a season that he had not come anywhere near experiencing before, and he has talked about how awful he felt heading into the final day of the season needing to beat Fulham to seal Champions League qualification.

“He seemed to be really frustrated,” Gallagher says.

“He would send me messages where he was almost trying to explain himself, explain what was going on. I’d never ask him anything outright about his job, I’m a fan, I’m just glad that I know the guy, but he would go out of his way to explain himself.

“There’s all the 115 things and that would be draining for anybody. Personal things going on, it’s exhausting at the best of times but imagine having a whole football club moulded in your image, you are the man, you cannot be seen to be weak in any kind of way. And you’ve got the whole football community rejoicing at the fact we started to stumble a little. Imagine being the figurehead for tens of thousands of people every week. I guess it would be draining for anyone.”

Training-ground sources suggest he turned his intensity in on himself in a search for answers. Support from his assistants suddenly vanished. Carlos Vicens, ostensibly a set-piece coach, stepped up and effectively became Guardiola’s No 2, alongside his other duties, but he was stretched too thin.

Juanma Lillo has been incredibly close with the Catalan since his playing days and had been an important part of City’s success in a previous spell as assistant manager, and even after he had left the club, given he helped Guardiola plan the 4-0 rout of Real Madrid and the final victory over Inter during the 2023 Champions League triumph. After losing assistants Enzo Maresca and Rodolfo Borrell that summer, Guardiola essentially demanded City bring Lillo back from his managerial role in Qatar. The club made it happen, even agreeing to bring in Inigo Dominguez, Lillo’s own assistant, as part of the deal.

But last season, things changed. Dominguez never managed to ingratiate himself with the players and Lillo became detached. He had never learned to speak English, which was not a problem previously as his personality and body language usually did the trick with those who did not speak Spanish, but even his usefulness to Guardiola waned.

Some around the club were left with the impression that Guardiola became lonely. Guardiola had separated from his wife, and rarely had peers to spend time with. Visitors to the training ground felt he had wanted them to stick around longer, so he had somebody to talk to. It paints a rather sad image.

During his reign, he was often in a bad mood, or at least paced around the training ground with his brow furrowed, lost in his own thoughts, even when results were going well, which they usually were.

Gallagher says he “perked up” towards the end of the season, and he started to get his mojo back during last summer, as a new-look team bolstered by new signings and arrivals in the coaching staff took part in the Club World Cup in the United States. He was enthusiastic about what he already felt would be his final season in Manchester but, even so, he had dinner with friends nearer the start of the season and appeared utterly exhausted.

Those close to him say he invests so much energy into football during the season that it takes him weeks during the summer to reenergise. The reason he stayed so long in Manchester, despite many of his closest staff having felt the job was done long ago, is his relentless drive to go again, always motivated by the next challenge, whether the team are high or low.

The energy returned in a big way this season, to the extent there were credible rumours as recently as in the past two weeks that Guardiola wanted to stay after all. That would have been a major shock behind the scenes, because while the public were generally in the dark, with Guardiola insisting he had one year left on his contract and suggesting he would stay, City had expected for months that he was leaving, and had made preparations far beyond tying up the services of Maresca as his replacement.

Guardiola may have honed his approach to player interactions over the years but he is still the excitable, sometimes strange, figure he always has been.

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Bernardo Silva, possibly Guardiola’s favourite ever player according to some close to him, is still known as ‘Bernardiki’ around the dressing room, even among new players, because that is what Guardiola called him two years ago, during one of his regularly strange training-session exclamations. That is one of the more family-friendly ones.

In recent weeks, he has been thrilled with his players’ progress during the business end of the season. “I’m so excited to watch you play,” he has shouted. On other occasions, he has used colourful language to question whether they are up for the fight.

This season turned out to be one of the biggest challenges of his career. He has gelled together new, young players, many of whom are not naturally suited to his approach to football, at a time when he was trying to reintroduce the energy to the team that had been lacking last season.

He brought in Pep Lijnders, Jurgen Klopp’s former assistant at Liverpool, to act as another intense presence on the training pitch and get the team running again.

Sources around the first team even believe Guardiola handed over extra responsibility to Lijnders in training sessions and matches at the start of the season, letting the Dutchman introduce principles he did not necessarily believe in himself.

There was never any disagreement between the two; it was merely that Guardiola was so keen for a refresh, and perhaps to change his own approach, that he was open to new ideas. Nevertheless, City have gradually moved back towards the Guardiola way of doing things as the season has gone on, departing from the open, counter-attacking manner of the opening months and back towards control.

“This season there have been many, many different ways, like never happened before in my career,” Guardiola said on Monday. “I always have more or less one slight detail that I will change. But on the other side, it has been fun. It has been more entertaining, I would say.”

He spent much of this season making efforts to foster the kind of mentality in his new squad that had defined previous all-conquering sides.

“What I like is the reaction of his mates,” Guardiola said after Gianluigi Donnarumma made a potentially disastrous mistake in City’s eventual victory over Arsenal in April.

“They were there to help him, that is what we worked on this season incredibly.

“When I see the teams that concede a goal and everybody is complaining and everybody is for themselves, I don’t like it. And they were together.”

This has been a mantra he has hammered home this season. In September, he had a message for his players after their victory over United in the early-season derby at the Etihad Stadium. He spends between 60 and 90 minutes preparing a 20 or 30-minute meeting, one of the reasons people close to him wonder how he still finds the time to do it all.

Coaching courses would recommend short, sharp meetings these days, but Guardiola’s go against that, and he ensures his coaches have all the right clips and that they stop them at exactly the right time. He will often repeat the same messages day after day, so the players have no excuses.

The day after September’s derby, one source who was present describes how the manager did not want to highlight what his players had done — the focus was instead on Bruno Fernandes. The Portugal midfielder was livid with his United team-mates for their role in Phil Foden’s opening goal, openly berating them as City celebrated.

Guardiola had the clips prepared so he could send a message to his players that while Fernandes is a fine player, displaying such a negative attitude towards his team-mates would not be accepted at City. Guardiola is not averse to public shows of dissatisfaction with his own players during matches and this was another reminder of the standards he expects.

After City beat Arsenal in that Premier League clash in April, the source described how he highlighted Donnarumma’s quick throw to Nico O’Reilly. More specifically, Rodri’s reaction. The Spaniard immediately turned and sprinted towards the Arsenal goal, whereas Martin Odegaard lightly jogged for 10-15 steps.

The fact Rodri got to the Arsenal box first meant William Saliba had to move across and cover him, making Erling Haaland’s job easier at the far post. Guardiola’s message was that City would beat Arsenal to the title because of Rodri’s extra desire.

Ultimately, it did not happen, his players running out of gas, yet even as the final weeks of the Guardiola era played out, he seemed as energetic as ever, and it would not be a surprise if he seriously did consider staying on.

He spoke, on the morning after City won the Champions League for the first time, clinching that treble by beating Inter 1-0 in Istanbul, about feeling like Lionel Messi did after he won the World Cup with Argentina. “Ya esta”, he told Argentine reporter Vicente Muglia. ‘It is done’. And yet he immediately discussed his plans for the next season.

He had come close to leaving City earlier that season, but signed a new deal at the end of 2022. When he signed his latest contract in 2024, he had not told his staff, and had been planning to leave at the end of the season, alongside director of football Txiki Begiristain.Guardiola talked at the time about being effectively addicted to the job, saying in an interview that he knew he should step away and enjoy a quiet life, but that he could not.

He talked about the thrill of sitting down and finding solutions, and one of the underrated aspects of his reign has been his ability to reposition players with great success, from Fabian Delph and Oleksandr Zinchenko as left-backs, De Bruyne as a false nine, Stones as a modern-day libero, and Matheus Nunes born again as a right-back.

He could not stick with all of his ideas, though. It is staggering enough that Bernardo was used at left-back in an important game at Arsenal in 2023, even more so when you learn the original idea was even more far-fetched.

“In the beginning, his first idea was to play me at centre-back, and I actually trained at centre-back,” Bernardo tells The Athletic.

“Arsenal away, the one where I played left-back. So Nathan (Ake) was playing left-back, me and Ruben (Dias) centre-backs, and when he called me to his office, I just thought, ‘Wow…’ He said, ‘Can you do it?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I will try for sure. You know it’s not my natural position, but I will do it if you want me to do it.’

“Then we trained after one day and he said, ‘I think it’s better if we change, Nathan comes to the centre and you go left-back.’ Even then it probably seemed crazy to do that, especially in such a difficult game against Arsenal, who were top of the league at that time. And we won that game and it was nice. It’s nice to have the trust of your manager to play in any position on the field.”

Nothing comes for free in football and while another Premier League title would have represented a fitting finale for Guardiola, a domestic double is a romantic way to wrap things up — he became the first manager in English football history to win the domestic cup double twice.

It could be argued he has not so much embraced the cups as embraced winning, but he certainly has fallen in love with the quirks and characters of English football.

“One of the most enjoyable memories I will have from this country is when I play FA Cup away at League One or League Two clubs,” Guardiola said before their game with Salford City this season.

“Always, it was incredible. That experience there when you arrive at the stadium on the coach and all the fans sing, ‘Who are ya?! Who are ya?!’. This kind of vibe with the long balls, honestly I promise you, will be one of the memories I will take for the rest of my life.”

After that game, he invited Karl Robinson into his office, the fifth occasion they have crossed paths.

“He shocked me, he really did, even last season the way he invited me in for a drink,” Robinson tells The Athletic.

“Ryan Giggs was with me and when Ryan walked in, Pep’s eyes lit up, and he was like, ‘Wow.’ He was just intrigued. It was incredible the questions he was asking — about old games, Barcelona games, his Man United teams, speaking about what it’s like at our (Salford’s) level, how do you find this and that, just intrigued about League Two and League One, baffled by the amount of games we play lower down.

“You could see the level of respect Pep had when Ryan walked in the room, it was insane. He was really open. We asked him multiple questions and he was brilliant.”

Guardiola is effectively a nostalgic romantic. He loves figures like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods — he says the process of drinking wine and glancing up from his laptop to watch Woods in majors made him a better manager. Golf is his passion. Those who have played with him say his handicap is around 10, and during City’s pre-season stay in Orlando two years ago, he played a round and had a one-hour lesson with English pro Danny Willett.

In 2018, he famously missed the moment that City were crowned champions for the first time, when Manchester United lost to West Brom, because he was playing with Tommy Fleetwood.

“Without a doubt, Pep is one of the best humans I’ve ever met,” Fleetwood tells The Athletic. “I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with him surrounded by the people he loves most, and that’s when you see the true Pep. He’s happiest with his family and those closest to him.

“Pep has taught me a great deal about life without ever knowing it. His humility and presence, just the way he treats people, all of it leaves an impression.“The world sees one of the greatest minds in football but the people around him get to see an even greater human being.”

Gallagher has no interest in golf but has seen Guardiola’s passion close up. “He’s really, really curious about successful, professional people,” he explains. “He invited me to lunch at the Etihad campus and Rory McIlroy was there using the fitness thing, some special cryogenic f***ing snow room or whatever it was.“Pep was basically interviewing Rory McIlroy while I was just sat there thinking, ‘he’s a f***ing United fan, what’s he doing here? Use their training facilities’. I think he is into body language and the mindset and how people carry themselves. I’m not a fan of golf at all but it was fascinating to see the two of them talk about golf and the mental side of it.

“When he came to see us play at Heaton Park, he couldn’t believe we were just clowning around backstage about 10 minutes before we went on, and he was like, ‘You’re going to go on like this?’ and we’re like, ‘Yeah, well I’ll probably go and brush my teeth before I go on but this is pretty much it, yeah’. And he was like, ‘Oh my god, f***ing hell, do you realise how many people are there?’ And it’s like, ‘Yeah, but this is how we do it’. We like everybody around and getting in the spirit of things and he was fascinated by that.”

Guardiola’s feelings towards English football were initially shaped by the few games he saw on Spanish TV as a youngster, which explains why he has a special fondness for the FA Cup, as the final was one of the few games shown.

He is in awe of old-school British managers like Neil Warnock, Sam Allardyce and Tony Pulis. Two years ago, Guardiola sent Kyle Walker to invite Warnock up to his office after the long-serving manager had been working on a television broadcast, and started peppering him with questions. They have become friends since.

“It’s just how he is, he is always wanting to learn things even at his age and when he’s as good as he is, he’ll still pick your brains,” Warnock tells The Athletic.

The 77-year-old refuses to be drawn on what Guardiola wanted in the first place but he does say that he grilled him about man-to-man marking, something that has become increasingly widespread in the Premier League since their first meeting. It would not shock anybody if he was getting pointers on something he felt would soon become very important.One manager asked to talk about their experience of Guardiola by The Athletic politely declined, pointing out that they had found him to be cold in their matches against each other.

A long-serving Premier League manager who has faced Guardiola multiple times says he has not been invited for a glass of wine for years, and believes the Catalan could have, given his profile, given up more of his time to share his experiences with British managers.

That part can probably be explained by the fact Guardiola would not want to give his opponents even the slightest help in beating him.

Others, like Robinson, are glowing in their praise. Michael Flynn, who coached Newport County for their FA Cup meeting with City in 2019, had been doing his coaching badges with Mikel Arteta, Guardiola’s assistant at the time, and explains just how caring the Catalan can be.

“We had a good chat before the game, and then afterwards he was going to come up, but somebody let off the fire alarm,” he tells The Athletic. “So he had to go and I was a bit gutted that I didn’t get to see him. But then he messaged me, he got my number off Mikel and we’ve been in touch ever since.

“I’ve been up, I went to Man City, watched the game against Luton Town (in 2024). He treated myself, my wife and my boys amazingly. We watched training, I sat with him after the game in his office. He’s a class above. He’s fascinated. He loves all football. He lives and dies football.”

Guardiola has been speaking nostalgically of late, in a way that, in hindsight, makes it obvious he had made up his mind about leaving long ago.

“I think I tried, with my staff, since I arrived 10 years ago, to make this club, from the first pre-season in America or Asia or wherever, believe that ‘we have to win’,” he said less than a fortnight ago.

“We have to try to win. It’s not choose competitions or choose games or nothing. The work ethic and everything. All of us, the chairman, the CEO, sporting director, myself, in all competitions we have to inoculate in our bodies, ‘We have to do our best every game’.”

“When we arrive in the FA Cup, Carabao Cup against a League One team or whatever, I work harder. The players know, ‘Be careful guys, if we are not who we are, we will be in trouble’. It’s easy against Madrid in the Champions League or Arsenal here at home playing for the title, you know the players will be there, fans will be there, but that is the moment that defines the club. The consistency during 10 years in all competitions has been really, truly extraordinary, extraordinary.”

His has been a one-man crusade against complacency. After the first title was secured by mid-April 2018, thanks to a vibrant team including De Bruyne, Silva, Aguero, Leroy Sane and Sterling, he called the players in after a boozy night and told them not to slack off because the next target was to get to 100 points or beyond. Some were still drunk.

Heading into the game at Southampton on the final day, they needed a win to reach the century.

“We were so under pressure by the management, like Pep, Mikel, everyone there wanted to reach 100 points, yes or yes,” Laporte says. “And the last game of the season, I felt so bad when it was 0-0. Gabriel Jesus scored but we were maybe in the 90th minute or something, so it was like a loss, like we were losing the Premier League. Unbelievable… 100 points — 97, 98 is OK, but it’s not the same.

“Did you see the celebration? It was like we were winning the Premier League in that moment. Crazy, crazy.”

Many City fans believe that ‘Centurions’ team remains the best of the Guardiola era, thanks to the speed of their play. For most of City’s titles after that, the team has played with more control, generally slowing the game down and picking their moments to attack. It is a change that was necessary.

“The first two or three seasons we were so automatically playing one touch, two touches and the opponents knew that,” Fernandinho says. “After that, he changed a little and he said, ‘No, you have to control the opponent’s movement as well, you don’t need to play always one touch or two touches.’ One of the basics of his principles was ‘control the ball well and then you can pass the ball’, but after a while he changed a little bit, even the training sessions. ‘Keep the ball more at your feet, choose the best path, choose the best action, and then we drive forward compact, the whole team compact.’”

There is no doubt Guardiola has fostered a relentless, intense environment that has kept City at the top of the game, barring the occasional dip, for a decade.“I would say he lives this sport 24 hours a day and is completely immersed in it,” City defender Josko Gvardiol tells The Athletic.

“He has his own vision and sees football in a special way. Many times, he would change the entire tactics on the day of the match, and in the end, everything would turn out well. The way he says it will be, that is how it usually turns out.

“During the transfer, when he called me and we spoke, the conversation was very short, but we clicked immediately. In those five minutes, I got a feeling that it was the right step.

“He is a special coach, and I think every footballer would love to have the opportunity to work with him.”He has become more and more aware of the importance of giving his players time off, regularly granting them three days on the rare occasions they are not playing in midweek at the end of the season. It is an approach that some around his staff feel can lead to the players losing rhythm, but he values the benefits of them being able to switch off and spend time with families.

Training sessions are often light when fixtures pile up, but when they can train, the intensity can be brutal.“I was gobsmacked,” Warnock, who saw one first-hand, remembers. “They train for two and a half hours on the day before a match. And it wasn’t just like walking through things and preparation, it was really intense, it was good. I really enjoyed watching it but I kept thinking, ‘What would my lads be saying now?’. ‘Gaffa, do you know we’ve got a game tomorrow?’ It was really intense and really good. The likes of Haaland as well, bloody hell, people used to think he doesn’t work hard but I’ll tell you now, he works as hard as any striker I’ve ever seen in training.”

The messages passed on to his players in those very first meetings and training sessions in 2016 have been reinforced day by day for 10 years.

Sessions the day after a match allow those who played a rest, but high intensity is expected of those who did not play and academy players. After one match against Wolverhampton Wanderers in December 2021, when City had won 1-0 but had played sloppily in the final minutes, Guardiola bellowed at the subs and youth teamers who had not actually contributed. ‘This is the Premier League!’ he screamed in a bid to keep concentration levels up.

One City player, who wishes to remain anonymous, explains how that kind of schedule was especially difficult to deal with for players who were not being selected.

“You have to be strong in your mind because it’s full-time work and if you play and are winning almost every single game, it’s easier. You play, you win, you play good, you’re happy. If you don’t play, you are happy because the team win but you don’t play, you come back at 4am, you wake up, you do the warm up, train hard, train late, come back home. It’s difficult and to be consistent all the time like this, it’s tough.”

That is one of the reasons why some players have left the club feeling jaded. That is compounded by the fact Guardiola has, in several cases, barely communicated with players he has left on the bench for weeks on end, adding to their frustrations.

Guardiola’s view is that players should use their disappointment in the right way, have a positive attitude and be ready to contribute when called upon. It has become known as the ‘no bad faces’ policy.

“You cannot create something when people who are not playing regularly are creating problems,” he explained in December 2017.

“Bad faces, bad behaviour from those guys; when that happens, forget about it. You cannot stay if it happens. But the guys who didn’t play regularly here and are now playing more, they are exceptional. Without that, you cannot do it.”

Fernandinho laughs when asked about having to keep team-mates motivated when they were left out of the team.

“Many times, yeah,” he says with a knowing chuckle. His mind immediately turned to City’s 2020-21 season behind closed doors, when Manchester’s strict lockdown policies made life tough for many players, some of whom were already upset about not playing. Despite blitzing their way to the league title and Carabao Cup thanks to an incredible 21-game winning run, and reaching the Champions League final, at least five senior players wanted to leave the club that summer, for one reason or another.

“During the 2019-20 season, it was really hard for us because we lost the league by 15, 19 points (18), which wasn’t cool for me personally,” says the Brazilian. “And then everyone went through a difficult time. For example, I couldn’t travel home to Brazil with the Covid restrictions.

“I felt obligated to represent the team in the best way possible. I knew the way Pep likes to work and we always expect him to bring something new to the team, but to do that, his mind needs to be free.

“Dealing with some issues in a football club is not easy if you are focused 100 per cent on the tactical way. That’s why I went to him and said, ‘Don’t worry, you take care of the team selections, and then I will take care of the rest’, because I knew the players respect me and they listen to me. However, there were some situations where the players were really down because they weren’t in the starting XI.”

Over the years, players and other sources around the team have said that legendary players have not always been treated in the right way by Guardiola in their final year at the club. Guardiola famously sidelined Yaya Toure, but others later felt that David Silva, Aguero and Fernandinho were treated coldly in their final seasons, despite their status. Guardiola had loud, angry rows with De Bruyne, Fernandinho and Sterling, among others.

Fernandinho, of course, still speaks glowingly about the manager to this day.

Throughout Guardiola’s time at City, the ends have always justified the means; the squad has always finished seasons strongly, even in years when they did not win the title. Winning runs were normally found whenever they were needed, like the 14 in 2019 that secured the second title of the Catalan’s reign, the 21 across all competitions in 2021, and the second showdown with Liverpool in 2022, when they came from 2-0 down on the final day to beat Aston Villa in the final game and seal the title by a point.

Gundogan was brought off the bench and etched his place into City folklore by scoring twice, including the winner, on a day that came as close as you can get to Aguero’s title clincher against QPR.

“To be honest, before I came on, I was actually quite frustrated that I wasn’t in the starting XI for such a massive game,” Gundogan says. “When you’re sitting on the bench in a title decider, it’s hard to swallow. But when Pep finally called my name, that anger turned into a ‘nothing to lose’ mentality and I went onto the pitch with total freedom because, in my head, the game felt almost gone anyway. I just played without fear.

“To be fair, I don’t remember every single detail of those celebrations because the whole thing felt completely unrealistic, like a dream. But I remember Pep gave me a huge hug and whispered something like, ‘I knew it. I knew you’d be the one’.”

There can be no doubt Guardiola’s methods are regularly unorthodox; after defeat at home by Crystal Palace in 2018, he was speaking with a friend near the dressing room and asked him what he thought about Stones’ performance. He liked what he heard, got Stones’ attention and asked his friend to say it to the England centre-back.

“We’d always be at the match and someone would come up from the club and say, do you want to come downstairs and see him?” Gallagher says. “And I’m like, well, I’m with six f***ing geezers here, do you know what I mean? You end up with my mates from the council estate in his office drinking beer, and he’s talking to… the f***ing King of Spain was in there once, you know what I mean? I’m sure somebody said it was the King of Spain.

“We were all welcome. There are Spanish footballers in there constantly, and he was very, very welcoming and open. You could ask him anything. I would never ask him about the game but my mates would go, ‘Oh what happened there?’, and he wouldn’t be suspicious of anybody. I think he’s got a great heart. Although he’s ruthless, I think he’s quite open and welcoming as well, in his heart.”

Guardiola was often good with the club’s academy when asked to help out — for example, he took pictures with the club’s newest under-nines signings the day after City beat Arsenal in April — but everything was geared towards making the first team as good as possible, even if noses were put out of joint along the way.

Before Guardiola arrived, City prided themselves on housing their academy players alongside the first-teamers, offering them a glimpse of the level they want to be at. Guardiola, however, never wanted to be seen to be handing out any favours, and wanted his players to be in as high-quality an environment as possible.

He also wanted things to be kept secret; at the end of his first season, a giant curtain was put up that stopped anybody at the club from seeing their indoor match preparations. Staff whose offices backed onto the outdoor training pitches, but were not part of the first team, were under no illusions that they should not stand at the windows and watch, and security guards patrolled to ensure that did not happen.

Guardiola was a big champion of the club’s youth prospects, but did insist they met the high standards of the first team. His attention to detail, obsessive nature and incredibly long memory meant that he would often feed back information on individual players to academy staff that he had noticed while watching youth-team games on television.

This would often include alerting staff to certain mistakes a young player was making in matches, in his opinion. Former academy employees feel the Catalan was always harsh in his judgement of highly-rated centre-back Stephen Mfuni, based on his performances in training during City’s pre-season tour in 2023. Coaches reminded Guardiola that Mfuni was only 15 at the time and was going up against Haaland, but when Mfuni made his first-team debut against Exeter in the FA Cup in January and repeated an action that Guardiola had previously flagged, it was hard to argue with his assessment.

Guardiola will often slap the back of his hand across the chest of youth coaches and ask, ‘Is he ready, is he f***ing ready?!’, and will be particularly excited if he is told about a holding midfielder, as that was his own position when he played. He does not chastise youth players for making technical mistakes in his sessions but if they display bad attitude, he will stop the sessions and make it clear that such behaviour is not tolerated.

In shadow matches in training before games, youth players are asked to mimic City’s upcoming opponents, and Guardiola’s assistants will have several meetings with youth coaches to ensure the youngsters know exactly the kind of things the players they are imitating do and do not do.

Before a Manchester derby in 2022, for example, Guardiola told Oscar Bobb, a naturally aggressive and intuitive presser, to forget his instincts and simply jog towards opposition defenders and then stop before engaging, because that is what he felt Cristiano Ronaldo would do.

In preparations for this year’s Carabao Cup final against Arsenal, Guardiola instructed the young goalkeeper and defenders not to play incisive passes into midfield, as he felt Kepa Arrizabalaga and the central defenders would not be able to play them in the match at Wembley, where City outfoxed their opponents by not pressing, instead waiting for them to make mistakes.

He also holds young players to high standards, arguably impossible ones in some cases. In 2022, four City players could not go on the pre-season tour of the United States because they did not meet Covid-19-related entry requirements. Instead, they travelled with City’s under-23 squad in Croatia, and beforehand Guardiola called them to his office.

Samuel Edozie, a youngster training with the first team at that point, arrived first, entered and sat down on one of the three chairs. Guardiola was annoyed, and immediately asked Edozie if he felt he deserved a seat more than Stones, given everything he had done in his career, or Foden and Grealish.

Liam Delap had decided he had no future at City after he had been led to believe he would play in the Champions League game against Sporting CP in 2022, a season in which he was aiming to break into the first team. City had won the away leg 5-0 and were in a position to rest first-teamers, but Delap never came on. Instead, Guardiola brought on Scott Carson, the incredibly popular third-choice goalkeeper who was vital to the dressing room but played a total of two matches in six years, that being the last.

Guardiola, ultimately, wanted his first-team players to be in the best condition possible, which meant intense training sessions, often supported by high-potential, fully plugged-in youngsters.

Fernandinho reinforces how such a seemingly trivial matter can make a big difference, and he cited it, without prompt, when discussing the remarkable turnaround in City’s fortunes during the 2020-21 season, when they were eighth around Christmas but then won those 21 matches in a row.

“The training session the day after the game is always the toughest one because everyone is down and then you have to put some energy in for the training to be good,” the Brazilian says. “I remember some of the young players who came to training with us, they weren’t good enough because they were acting like it’s boring, and I came to Pep’s assistants, Rodo and to Juanma, and I said, ‘Listen, we need to pick some young players who want to be here, to bring some energy for us in the training season’.

“If you go that way, at the end of the season, you’re going to lose the league again, because tomorrow if there is one player suspended and someone needs to play, they won’t be ready, or if someone is injured, we need to increase the level.”

Guardiola was recently asked when he realised that City was the club for him, and he took the opportunity to heap praise on City’s player care department, pointing out that every detail is looked after so the players can live peaceful lives and focus on football.

“That is why we are consistent in the Champions League for the last 15 years and always fighting for titles,” he told reporters, “because there are systems around the players and bubbles that feel good.”

Laporte explains how it works in practice: “There are people inside that take care as if you were their own children. If you need anything about anything, tickets for singers, a house to rent, change the wheels on the car, everything. You need a taxi to go home, everything, you have everything you need. You have proper food on the coach. Everything you need. You can sleep in the training ground. This is fantastic, everything you need. The food there is unbelievable, fresh, everything fresh. The chef, very easy to ask for everything, so yeah, that is the main difference.”

Guardiola wants the first-team staff to feel involved, as displayed when he called over a huge entourage to join the players and have their pictures taken after City won this season’s FA Cup. The manager is very keen for those in the first-team building — chefs, kit men, security guards — to feel involved.

“I think the way he looks after his staff is remarkable because every season his staff are really motivated,” Fernandinho says. “He always tries to compliment those people who are working really hard behind the scenes. The connection those people had with the players and the management was really nice and those things made him really special because everyone loves him, everyone respects him. Obviously, he was the boss, but the way he treated people, I think, was different as well and most of the people, they would die for him.”

He has split huge financial bonuses with those staff and made the case during Covid that nobody, including staff not directly involved with the first team, should be put on furlough or laid off. Ahead of the Chelsea game in April, he asked one of the club’s long-serving kit men to give the pre-match speech at Stamford Bridge.

Two years ago, he gave a tearful speech in front of the squad following their Manchester derby victory in which he told the group that Clive Wilton, the head of the club’s facilities department, had been diagnosed with cancer.

Guardiola was often at loggerheads with ground staff, though, over the length of the grass and state of the playing surfaces at the Etihad and the training ground, with the Catalan asking for things that the staff did not feel were possible.

Eventually, they told him that the grass had been cut to his stipulated length of 23mm, even though it had not been, because they felt he would not know the difference anyway. He also used to rage about the impact of summer concerts on the stadium’s pitch, although he often attended. The reason Coldplay were watching training was because they were using the padel courts at the training ground — back when Guardiola arrived, people still had to explain what padel was.

A lot has changed during the course of that decade. City have risen to the top of the European game and redefined greatness, accomplishing feats that had simply never been achieved, and may never be done again. And yet Guardiola’s time at the club cannot be measured simply in numbers and statistics and should not be seen as a carefree march to silverware.

His decade in England is defined by tense battles, with opponents and sometimes his own players, by the lows of Champions League defeats by Tottenham Hotspur and Real Madrid, by title races that had the nation gripped for months, by the glorious highs of the final days against Brighton & Hove Albion, West Ham and especially Villa, by the cup final against United in 2023, by Rodri’s winner in Istanbul, by the footballing perfection of that ‘Centurions’ team, and the reinvention of everything that came after.

Hundreds of players and thousands of staff have made massive contributions to it all, but none of it would have been possible without Pep Guardiola.

Sam Lee is the Manchester City correspondent for The Athletic.