Pep Guardiola is reportedly set to leave Manchester City this summer after 10 hugely successful – and even more significant – years in English football.
The impact Pep Guardiola has had on English football is incomparable.
From the top of the Premier League right down to the lowest reaches of the amateur game, his influence can be felt, and with rumours swirling this week that he will leave Manchester City once this season is over, it’s natural to wonder whether we will ever experience a more significant figure.
If reports are to be believed, Guardiola is preparing to step down as City manager after 10 years in charge. In that time, he has enjoyed unrivalled success, winning six Premier League titles – one of which came with a record 100 points – five League Cups, three FA Cups, three Community Shields, and one historic Champions League title as part of City winning the treble in 2022-23. At the time of writing, he is still hoping to add a seventh Premier League title this season.
Rivals point towards the resources he has had at his disposal, suggesting many others could have won as much while being able to spend as much on transfers and wages as City can.
But while his detractors argue about counterfactuals, there is no question the Premier League is losing a genuine, bona fide legend, simply because of how much football has changed since he arrived and, undeniably, as a direct result of his actions. Realistically, it is impossible to do justice to the extent of Guardiola’s impact on the game, much of which came from his steadfast commitment to his style of football in the face of adversity when he first arrived, and then his vast success in the years that followed.
When he arrived back in 2016, he immediately set about transforming the way City played, and the face of that change was Joe Hart. The City goalkeeper was hugely popular with the fans and was England number one at the time, but he couldn’t, in Guardiola’s eyes, play the passing game that his goalkeeper needed to. Claudio Bravo came in from Barcelona and swiftly ousted Hart almost solely because of his passing ability.
Bravo was a disaster. He recorded an utterly dreadful save success rate of 55.9%, which was by far the lowest of any goalkeeper to play at least 10 games that season. Guardiola was derided as unnecessarily idealistic; a romantic whose football worked when he had Xavi, Andrés Iniesta and Lionel Messi, or when he was trying to win the Bundesliga with Bayern Munich. In the Premier League, it was said, he had been ‘found out’. He ended his first season in charge of City trophyless.
Of course, that season quickly proved the exception rather than the rule. He spent big that summer on a new goalkeeper in Ederson – arguably the most transformative signing of his entire reign – and City won the League Cup as well as the Premier League title with a record 100 points in his second campaign in England. The critics had been silenced.
Everywhere, meanwhile, others were copying his work. Passing out from the back became more common before eventually becoming the norm, inverted full-backs grew in popularity, and more managers dared to use playmakers in central midfield positions. Over the years since his arrival, football has changed irreversibly.
The number of passes played shot up after his arrival and stayed high for most of his reign, before a dip in the last two years…
…while goalkeeper habits have been transformed, with goal-kick distances getting shorter and shorter, and far fewer of them ending in the opposition half.
Guardiola was one of the first to introduce the concept of the goalkeeper acting as an extra outfielder in build-up play to ensure a numerical overload when his team had the ball, and he was the most prominent and most successful to do so. As others copied, the base level of technical ability of goalkeepers has shot up. Nowadays, goalkeepers are unrecognisable from those of a decade ago – and that applies at every level of the game, from the Premier League right down to Sunday League football.
In both the Premier League and the Championship, goalkeeper pass completion rates have risen, which is a result of both more short passes being played and the increase in footballing ability of those between the sticks. It is unthinkable now that any budding goalkeeper would grow up without being able to play with the ball at their feet, and Guardiola was key in that happening.
He was extreme in his approach, able to do so with the backing and clout of City, and with the players to play that way. In his second season with the club, his side averaged more successful passes per game (661.6) than any other team has in any season on record (since 2008-09) in the Premier League. They also had more possession on average that season (71.9%) than any other team has had in any Premier League season over the same period.
Under Guardiola, City consistently played a more extreme passing game than ever seen before in the Premier League. Ranking all managers’ individual seasons in every year since 2008-09 for successful passes per game, Guardiola’s City hold each of the top seven positions, and the other three seasons under him are all in the top 21.
It is no coincidence that all but one of the top 26 occurred after Guardiola came to England, the exception being Michael Laudrup’s Swansea City in 2013-14.
Swansea’s appearance here shows that the game was already heading towards a more possession- and passing-focused style of play before Guardiola arrived, and there’s a chance that it would have ended up as the game we now recognise as modern-day football if he had never come to England.
But it would surely never have been transformed quite so dramatically, quite so quickly, had the Spaniard not been present.
There is no question that the Premier League, and English football in general, has Pep Guardiola to thank for making football into the game we now know.
So, as City prepare to wave goodbye to their most successful ever manager, it is not just them who should be feeling this loss.
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