Pep Guardiola returns to the place where his Champions League nightmares began

Pep Guardiola is a failure. By his own admission, anyway. The Manchester City manager has started to take a criticism levelled at him – or, more accurately, his Champions League record – and adopt it, while mocking it. Sometimes there can be a surreal element to Guardiola’s rationale: he deemed himself a failure last month on the grounds that Julia Roberts preferred to watch Manchester United. By any objective criteria, Guardiola is a huge success. But for a perfectionist like the Catalan, there may be a feeling of failure about his European record since 2011. When he claims, as he has, that he would rather win the Premier League or that the domestic division is harder to win, it only serves to underline that European glory is the prize he wants most.

A return to the Allianz Arena should secure him a 10th Champions League semi-final as a manager; it may also remind him of the start of a sequence. If it is a dozen years since Guardiola’s Barcelona won the 2011 final in such a manner to suggest they were the finest team ever, Roberto Di Matteo has lifted the Champions League more recently than Guardiola. This is his 10th campaign since leaving his boyhood club: whether with Bayern Munich or City, his European runs have ended in disappointment. His case to be deemed the greatest manager ever is weakened, despite the prospect of an 11th league title in 14 seasons, without conquering Europe again. He is aware that he has not won the Champions League without Lionel Messi: that Messi has triumphed in both the Champions League and the World Cup without Guardiola embellishes his claim to be the outstanding footballer in history.

There is a case for arguing City have been the best team in Europe in at least two seasons under Guardiola but they have never been champions of the continent. Before then, three years in Bavaria were expected to bring the 52-year-old his third Champions League, not least because he inherited a team who had just done the treble.

His might have been the best Bayern side since the 1970s yet the two managers to secure them the ultimate prize in the last two decades, one with the side bequeathed to Guardiola, the other with one shaped by him, were Jupp Heynckes and Hansi Flick – the first already aware the current City manager would take his job, the second an assistant promoted into the top post. There is no cult of Heynckes or Flick, but then the most successful coach ever in the Champions League is the quadruple winner Carlo Ancelotti. Few deem him the greatest manager ever but, in his own way, Ancelotti is the anti-Guardiola.

Guardiola’s three years in Munich set the tone for his time in Manchester. His Champions League exits can be divided into cruel near misses and days when it went catastrophically wrong. In 2016, Bayern lost a semi-final to Atletico Madrid on away goals; City, too, would go out on away goals in 2017 and 2019. That second leg featured a crucial missed penalty by Thomas Muller, just as Sergio Aguero missed from 12 yards in the first leg against Tottenham in 2019.

The 2014 semi-final second leg against Real Madrid was, according to Guardiola in Marti Perarnau’s book Pep Confidential, “a monumental f***-up. A total mess. The biggest f***-up of my life as a coach.” His decision to play 4-2-4 backfired horrifically. In the 2015 semi-final against Barcelona at the Nou Camp, Guardiola tried man-marking all over the pitch: he was forced to change in the first half, with Bayern pulled all over the place but somehow still drawing 0-0. Yet they went on to lose the game 3-0. The notion of Guardiola overthinking things, something else he references regularly now, stems from his time at Bayern.

His odder choices at City – Ilkay Gundogan on the right wing at Anfield, three centre-backs against Lyon, Raheem Sterling in the 2021 final – form part of a bigger picture that includes Bayern. The themes can be the same: City can concede goals in spurts in such games but Bayern let in two five minutes to Real and three in 17 to Barcelona even before Liverpool scored three in 19 at Anfield and Spurs two in four at the Etihad Stadium. The days where it all went wrong, from Liverpool to Lyon, are new chapters in a story that started in Bavaria.

Guardiola is the manager who prizes control and yet his Champions League exits feel anarchic: they were at Barcelona, too, with the almost freakish nature of defeats to Inter in 2010 and Chelsea in 2012. But, considering his teams often boast excellent defensive records in domestic leagues, they can be porous on such occasions. It is partly explained by the high calibre of the opponents, but Guardiola’s Bayern conceded 12 goals in six semi-final matches.

Now a first return to the Allianz Arena ought to be a procession. With a three-goal lead, Guardiola ought to be in the semi-finals. But then he always was with Bayern and Barcelona and since 2011 he has never progressed any further. In a curious parallel with an old enemy, Guardiola’s quest for a third Champions League began to go awry when he joined a European superpower with an expectation of continental dominance: Jose Mourinho lost three semi-finals in three seasons with Real. Then Guardiola did with Bayern. Mourinho will probably never win the Champions League again. Guardiola might but, in his 10th season of management since leaving Barcelona, his wait goes on.