Pep Guardiola and Thomas Tuchel meet again in trophy-defining rivalry

For all that was made about a famous dinner with Pep Guardiola when Thomas Tuchel was a young coach, this great meeting of tactical minds, the German found it changed once he became an equal of the Manchester City manager. Or, more pointedly, when he started to beat him.

Tuchel found that Guardiola wasn’t quite so open or friendly, more distant. He even chuckled about it to Chelsea staff.

You could perhaps understand why Guardiola was aggravated at that point. He had been beaten by Tuchel’s Chelsea in three successive games in 2020-21, the last of them his most painful defeat at City yet, the Champions League final in Porto at the end of that season. It was all the worse because everything seemed to finally be building to Guardiola’s moment of deliverance at the club. Instead, there was Tuchel, his tactically robust team a very awkward obstacle in the way that caused it to come crashing down.

It might well be much the same this season.

Everything again seems to be falling into place for City, after all. There is a treble in sight. They are coming to sensational form at the right time, a consequence of Guardiola's conditioning programme. They now have the free-scoring individual in Erling Haaland that can make that sudden difference in knock-out games, or any of those where it's just not happening. And while City are on the more difficult side of the draw, it had been difficult not to think the Abu Dhabi project were by far the strongest side.

Chelsea have been in disarray. Real Madrid and Karim Benzema had not been the force they were last season, even if the grand caveat is the very lesson of that season is to not take them lightly. Bayern probably looked the most adept in Europe but with a certain fragility that came from Julian Nagelsmann’s own uncertainty.

No longer. Bayern have a dangerous focus again. The German champions have hired a manager very clear in his idea, which has also made him one with the most impressive record against Guardiola. Tuchel is not so much the Pep whisperer as the Guardiola silencer.

It is almost the worst possible scenario for City in these specific circumstances. Part of the reason that Bayern acted was because they know Tuchel can deliver a sixth Champions League for the club. He delivered the first of his career, in 2021, by forcing Guardiola into tactical decisions he didn’t want to make.

That was the game-theory chain reaction of those initial victories over City in the Premier League and FA Cup.

It is also something Bayern are finding now. At Chelsea’s Cobham training base, Tuchel immediately set about firming up the tactical structure at the back. It for a long time made the team very difficult to get at. City found they couldn’t play through it.

This is what he has immediately done at Bayern.

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There’s also a further twist here regarding Guardiola. The Catalan has long been seen as someone who makes tactical decisions for his own self-indulgence rather than what is good for the game - not least with that midfield in the 2021 Champions League final - but those who know him insist this has always been misplaced. They argue it’s the opposite. Guardiola just considers every possible outcome so deeply that he convinces himself he has to go down certain routes. It was exactly this that happened in Porto in May 2021. Tuchel’s previous approach had that much of an effect on Guardiola, meaning the City manager had to think about new ways to open Chelsea. It only led them to the same old result.

By contrast, those who have worked with Nagelsmann say he was much more prone to the self-indulgence that Guardiola was often wrongly criticised for. Some of the younger Bayern Munich players did like that, but a core of the squad often felt a lot of the tactical moves were needless and fitted with a lack of maturity in the manager.

Tuchel has already set about stripping this down, making Bayern more tactically streamlined. It came across in that brutal and brilliantly quick 4-2 victory over Borussia Dortmund in that first game. This is the kind of clarity that Tuchel can bring.

The uncertainty, nevertheless, is whether he can instil it quick enough for a Champions League tie as complex against Guardiola’s City. Tuchel has been considering it since he took the job. The German cup elimination to Freiburg would seem to show he’s not quite there yet.

There’s also the grand caveat that, by the end at Chelsea, Guardiola seemed to have worked out Tuchel. He’d beaten him twice in a row.

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The first, most pointedly, was with clever tactical use of the forward line in a way that just unsettled and disrupted Tuchel’s defence. The German found he had been out-thought, in a way that continued into their next meeting up in Manchester.

It resets the dynamic for this grand Champions League fixture, but it is of course different to those City-Chelsea games in so many ways.

It’s a different and arguably better Bayern team, for one, with more attacking weapons than that Chelsea - especially in terms of pace up front.

There’s also the argument, with the way the dynamics in these duels work, that it’s Tuchel’s turn to unveil something new. He has spent the last two weeks thinking about it. It may again give Guardiola a lot to consider.