Pep Guardiola: Football’s greatest manager or sportswashing stooge? ...Middle East

Pep Guardiola will depart English football as one of the most influential tacticians and successful head coaches of all time.

Guardiola is expected to leave Manchester City at the end of the season after 10 years and 17 major trophies.

He will also move on before the Premier League has reached a verdict on the 115 charges which loom over the most momentous period in City’s history.

The i Paper‘s football writers reflect on his legacy.

Best of all time? There’s one other candidate

Daniel Storey, chief football writer

Pep Guardiola is the greatest coach of this century and one who has made a larger difference to modern football tactics than any other too, even if he was standing on the shoulders of giants who were also his idols.

Any praise for him typically comes with “115” in the replies; I get that. A guilty verdict would absolutely taint Manchester City as a club. But I also don’t think it negates any of Guardiola’s coaching proficiency, just as I don’t think that Carlo Ancelotti and Jose Mourinho were any worse managers due to Chelsea’s proven illegal payments. A coaching master is still a coaching master.

The greatest ever? More complicated. My personal preference in that sphere is for those who built clubs up and took them to unthinkable glory – and I would obviously side with Brian Clough at Nottingham Forest here – but then that’s not something that is possible (or even asked of managers) now. Clough was unique and so was his work.

Guardiola is a freak too, though. He ushered in an age of tactical thought and sheer obsession with the game that others before him shared. But he also combined that with vast success that largely spanned football’s progress (if we can call it that) into a capitalist behemoth and thus asked so much more of managers and asked them to do it under so much more pressure.

‘Financial doper’

Kevin Garside, chief sports correspondent

The greatest coach of all time? Since we are obsessed with hierarchies, Pep Guardiola would be up there, a visionary who introduced a new way of seeing, a style that showed beautiful football could also be winning football.

Guardiola would readily agree that his insane output, 416 wins in 591 games at Manchester City, 20 major trophies, would not be possible without the players at his disposal, which brings us to the inevitable tension behind the numbers.

Whether legitimately or not, Guardiola benefitted from financial doping. We await the outcome of the Premier League’s inquiry into 115 charges of financial impropriety brought against City, all emphatically denied by the club, to determine the nature of any stain that might attach, nevertheless, when you have your pick of the talent, bring in players like Antoine Semenyo mid-season, to augment an already stacked hand, you have half a chance of beating the house.

As we have seen across the city at Manchester United, spending big, though necessary, is not a guarantee of success. Guardiola’s gift is not just to see the shape of things but to teach it, to bring his players along with him, even those that are on the bench.

A brave human rights advocate – despite the obvious

Kat Lucas, football news editor

In terms of tactical influence at every level of the game there is no one who comes close to Pep Guardiola. The trophies are almost an aside. He is the greatest manager of all time bar none.

Pep is also not accountable for the fact that the UAE are allowed to own a football club or that said club stands accused of 115 financial breaches. That is not to say that he did not benefit from those two facts and that will always leave an asterisk over a tainted period of City’s history, but it should not diminish what he did with the players he was supplied with. Guardiola also spoke out about human rights abuses in Gaza and argued for Catalan independence.

That did not sit well for some for as long as he collected his wages from Sheikh Mansour, but there are few friendly billionaires owning football clubs and he has been one of the few managers to use his position to advocate for those causes.

‘The GOAT? Undoubtedly’

Mark Douglas, north-east football correspondent

The most enduring image of Pep Guardiola was not the one of him puffing a cigar on Manchester City’s title parade in 2022. Nor was it the club commissioned portrait of him flanked by five trophies in 2024. It was sat across from Neil Warnock, rapt and looking genuinely delighted to be in the company of one of English football’s great warhorses.

You see Guardiola didn’t just conquer English football, he loved it. He embraced it and deified it and that’s why his impact should not be taken for granted. Spawning thousands of copycats and earning respect from journeymen like Warnock and Tony Pulis, no overseas manager has influenced the way this country thinks about the game as much as him.

It’s also why Guardiola was able to enjoy as much success as he did. He spotted trends and started them, but it all came back to how hard he worked to understand English football. Given his status in the game, that’s pretty remarkable.

People will talk about the resources he had and 115 and they are undoubtedly part of the story. But City’s rivals also have baked in advantages courtesy of football’s rigged financial fair play rules and couldn’t do half of what he did. Manchester United have been well and truly knocked off their perch and none of us should shed tears about that. The GOAT? Undoubtedly.

‘He has eclipsed my hero’

Pete Hall, north-west football correspondent

Like all millennial Manchester United supporters, Sir Alex Ferguson means everything to me. Until very recently, I have always been of the firm belief that nobody will ever match his incredible legacy. He would be untouchable, forever. As much as it pains the fan in me, Pep Guardiola has eclipsed my great hero. He is the greatest of all time.

Legacy is about more than trophies. Guardiola has shaped how an entire generation of ardent football followers think about the game. Nobody else has ever done this, not Ferguson nor anyone, to his level before or since. I’m not just talking about goalkeepers playing out from the back on Hackney Marshes, either.

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What even are full-backs anymore? I thought interest in domestic cups was on the wane, too? Guardiola has kept me guessing for 10 years, and I still don’t have the answers.

As someone not naturally attuned to respecting anything a City manager does, the main reason I revere Guardiola so much is his hunger and unrelenting desire to keep coming back again and again.

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