Pep Guardiola, Manchester City and the Champions League itch he cannot scratch

The Manchester City players were very quickly struck by the difference. Although Pep Guardiola had been so reassuringly calm at the height of a nerve-shredding title race with Liverpool, that instantly changed the week of the Champions League quarter-final against Tottenham Hotspur. There was now a tension. Guardiola seemed gripped by it, agitated.

Some at City believe it influenced his more surprising tactical decisions around that tie, particularly the conservative make-up of the first-leg midfield. Guardiola had after all been dwelling on this. He’d spent the previous summer obsessing about the reasons City had collapsed against Liverpool in the 2017-18 Champions League, trying to hardwire a solution into his team. He was that obsessed with the competition. One high-level source says it had become a “fixation”. It didn’t fix things. It may even have had the opposite effect. City went out to a weaker team, by the tightest of margins, and it has all fed into a deeper tension underlying this season.

It may even form this whole Champions League season’s defining theme. Can Guardiola finally claim that first ever European Cup for City, and a first for himself outside Barcelona?

Worse, it may be a tension only heightened in the first month of the campaign, despite the ease of City’s group. That is because, off the pitch, there remains the real possibility the club could get a Champions League suspension - potentially up to three seasons - if found guilty of lying about violations of Financial Fair Play regulations.

If that is the case, some other possibilities will come all too close to reality. That the best team on the planet for the past two years won’t actually prove they are the best in Europe. That Guardiola will again leave another club that has afforded him every advantage without the one trophy he was supposedly signed to bring. That he will become known as the manager who couldn’t win it without Leo Messi. That he will never get the third European Cup that would really reflect his place in football history.

In the present, in public, the City boss has naturally attempted to strike a different tone.

“I’ll be the same guy if I don’t win it,” Guardiola said on the day of this season’s draw. “It’s not going to change my life.”

But it may change his legacy.

Those who know Guardiola say he is all too aware of this. They say he really does have a singular fixation with the Champions League, because of everything it represents.

This is after all a man who has immersed himself in the lore of the competition, and spent hours with colleagues and rival managers discussing its history and greatest teams. This is a man who describes his first European Cup victory, and only one as a player, in 1992, as his “greatest memory”. Winning it as a manager, however, gave him “the greatest satisfaction”.

This is a man who couldn’t sleep the night before that 2009 victory in Rome. By the end of the next night, walking onto that Olympic Stadium pitch to savour the moment, he turned to his long-time colleague Manel Estiarte. “We are the European champions! It feels like we’ve just written our names in history.”

This is what he is all too invested in.

And this is what a similar Champions League obsessive in Sir Alex Ferguson recognised as long ago as 2012, when Guardiola had won two in four years. Writing in Guillem Balague’s biography of the Catalan, ‘Another Way of Winning’, the great Scot said: “If I had arrived in time to advise him, I would have told Pep not to worry about it: a failure to win the Champions League is not an indictment of his manager abilities or of his team.”

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For Ferguson to say this is all the more pointed, given he speaks from the same excruciating experience, and may well represent Guardiola’s future. Long recognised as one of the greatest ever, Ferguson never won more than two. It long pained him.

Guardiola may even suffer from the same ironic flaws as Ferguson. The very brilliance that ensures he utterly dominates domestically may actually under-cut him on the continent, because his sides are built for the longer run. The attempt to then adapt that for sudden-death knock-out then leads him to second-guess himself; to create unnecessary problems.

It is almost a self-defeating brilliance; an obsessiveness about the profession that at once makes his career but breaks him on such nights.

It is also difficult not to feel this is deepened by his history with Barcelona, and not just because of the great 2008-11 side against which everything else in his career is judged.

Guardiola was always the ultimate Barca supporter, his basic football obsessiveness naturally lending itself to an obsessiveness about his club, that was only amplified by his sense of Catalan identity. Guardiola the player would often go around schools encouraging pupils to read the region’s poetry. Guardiola the pedant would spend the night before the 1992 Champions League final arguing with Julio Salinas about the exact number of steps at Wembley, the older teammate enjoying just winding up that very sense of obsessiveness.

“I’m telling you!” Guardiola shouted, until Andoni Zubizarreta told him to shut up.

He just consumed it all. And yet, through it all, there was always the knowledge that the sport’s most special prize belonged to Real Madrid more than anyone else. They’d won the European Cup more than anyone else. That’s who it was most identified with. The worst part for the young Guardiola was the knowledge that, while the European Cup was a permanent testament to Madrid’s greatness, it was a persistent reminder of Barca’s capacity for calamity.

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They found so many ways to flounder.

One of the most infamous actually followed one of the most famous photos of Guardiola. It was after the stirring 3-0 semi-final against Gothenburg in the 1985-86 semi-finals, when the then 15-year-old ballboy was pictured trying to embrace Victor Munoz, the scorer of the decisive kick in the penalty shoot-out. It seemed, after 31 years, it was finally to happen. They’d just delivered the kind of victory that suggests destiny. They were then set to play in Seville, against Steaua Bucharest, who couldn’t bring any fans from communist Romania.

And still they lost, on penalties.

To the teenage Guardiola, and so many other Barca fans, the club seemed cursed in the competition. Director Joan Gaspart described it as “a terrible trauma”.

The neurosis about the competition only deepened… but release was not far. It came just six years later, with Guardiola in the centre.

After Johan Cruyff’s ‘Dream Team’ beat Sampdoria 1-0 in the 1992 final, their 22-year-old midfielder was the one to present that grandiose trophy to the Barcelona crowd from the Generalitat Palace.

Guardiola did so with a prepared phrase, that intentionally echoed the words of former Catalan president Josep Tarradellas, and similarly represented the end of a long wait for nationalist outpouring.

“Citizens of Catalonia, here I am,” proclaimed Tarradellas, on his return from exile after the death of General Franco.

“Citizens of Catalonia,” Guardiola began, “here it is.”

That is what it represented: validation, vindication, release and the ultimate recognition.

Barcelona, with everything the club themselves represented beyond football, were a European superpower.

There is thereby more wrapped up in that great trophy for Guardiola than most.

It was also why making Barcelona the European superpower between 2008 and 2011 wore more heavily on him than most.

This was “the dream”, he’d tell his staff. It just required so much conscious mental effort. He would agonise for hours about European games. This was his most intense love, obsession and ambition all combined, to the point it brought him close to combustion. He eventually had to just walk away, rather than risk dropping off.

The seemingly constant political storm at the club hardly helped, because it created problems way beyond his control.

And this is part of the problem for him with the Champions League, and how it plays on his neurosis with it.

The fundamental of Guardiola’s entire football philosophy, after all, is control. Of possession, of space, of flow, of games.

All of that in itself is a logical extension of Guardiola’s micromanagement, of his will to predict every possible way a game can pan out.

Just think of some of his signature performances in the competition, particularly the peak that Barcelona’s 2011 final against Manchester United represented. Guardiola’s side were in total command. They would play to such a relentlessly oppressive level the opposition just could not cope.

This very ideal, properly executed, is a virtual guarantee of victory over the course of a league season. It just doesn’t allow enough errors. It is what Guardiola so works for all season… but then so second-guesses on single nights.

The problem with the Champions League is that just one error is enough to explode all of that, to send an entire season spinning out of control. Single ties that mean so much can swing so much, on single incidents beyond anyone's control. It is the “glorious contradiction” at the core of the competition: set up to decide the greatest, but in no way designed to confirm the greatest. There's too much blind chance involved.

This was something well articulated by Bayern Munich chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, when trying to explain away Guardiola’s first Champions League elimination with the club, and worst overall: the 4-0 humiliation to Madrid in 2013-14.

“With the quality of football nowadays, all it takes is one bad day and you’re out of the Champions League. That’s what has happened here. In the league you could lose a game 4-0, but if you’re in good shape you can then go on to win the next 10 games. In the Champions League, it’s much more cut-throat.”

It feels like a contradiction Guardiola still hasn’t completely got his head around.

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It is why, since Barcelona, he has so often stressed to his players the “fine line between success and failure”. It is why, in stark contrast to a results absolutist like Jose Mourinho, Guardiola has reframed what success means to him. Staying in contention in the major competitions until the end of a season is all he feels you can guarantee. “We have done what we had to do.”

Thereafter, instant intangibles - an impossible clearance, an incorrect offside, a volcano erupting, a missed penalty - have a decisive influence.

Those are the limits of control.

“Chelsea didn’t win the European Cup because [John] Terry slipped when taking a penalty,” Guardiola says in bemusement in Balague’s book. “He slipped! I’ve given the players that example a thousand times.”

He’s also repeatedly told them how the knock-outs are “dangerous”, how, “fuck, you can’t afford to give away even five minutes in the Champions League!”

And yet his teams, even at their best, have repeatedly done this. They’ve just gone missing. It happened against Inter in 2010, Madrid in 2014, Barcelona in 2015 and Liverpool in 2018. It was as if they were stunned that things suddenly went out of control, so temporarily lost it altogether.

It is also the curiosity with Guardiola sides in the Champions League.

They have either gone out by the slimmest of margins, or the largest. Never in between.

Little wonder it further wracks Guardiola’s mind.

Less wonder his entire approach to the competition now feels an attempt to find a compromise, to try to contain the uncontrollable.

There is now a genuine argument that only feeds the neurosis about it, however, and leads to those decisions that actually constrain his team’s best qualities. There’s a danger it makes it all a self-fulfilling prophecy, ensuring the destiny of perhaps the greatest manager ever is not, in fact, to have the best record in the greatest club competition.

It is to remain frustratingly unfulfilled, to be the manager who couldn’t win it without Messi.

There is evidence this is something else that has played on his mind. At one City function, a senior club figure was asked whether Guardiola had ever requested the signing of Messi. “It’s a controversial topic for Pep,” the official smiled, revealing it was something Guardiola had vocally mulled over. He ultimately wants to do it without Messi, though, to prove he can.

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It is of course not a surprise that the two produced the greatest team ever. Messi is so good, and has - yes - such ball control, he erodes the uncontrollable in such ties.

“Messi is the one who makes the difference,” Guardiola once said.

He now has to find that way to make the difference himself in the Champions League, to reclaim control of his legacy.

He could maybe do with listening to one figure from 27 years ago.

“In cup finals it is fear, or holding something back in reserve, which can defeat you. The worst that can happen in a match like this is that nobody wants to have a shot, score the goals or assume responsibility for winning because nerves dominate their choices. We need to be brave. I’ve no doubt that a couple of hours before the match I’ll have butterflies in my stomach, but we have to show what we are made of, how good we are.”

Those were the words of a 21-year-old Guardiola, on the eve of his first Champions League win.

The current Guardiola could do with listening. It might, however, be something he can’t control about himself.