Would it have mattered to posterity if Pep Guardiola had not won the Champions League again? Would it have mattered if he had remained stuck on two European titles, his last triumph Barcelona’s sumptuous 3-1 victory over Manchester United at Wembley in 2011?
We can tell ourselves that we know what Guardiola is, how he had transformed football and our understanding of what is possible; that we know the magnitude of Arrigo Sacchi, who won two European Cups, and Rinus Michels, who won one, and Valeriy Lobanovskyi, who didn’t win any; but, still, it feels appropriate to have it confirmed, just as it was fitting to have Lionel Messi’s greatness confirmed at the World Cup.
And this is a tragedy of football’s modern age: this season has seen the consecration of an all-time great player and an all-time great manager, and yet it will be remembered as the season when sportswashing won. Messi won in Doha, played for a Qatari club and shills for Saudi tourism. Guardiola won in Erdogan’s Turkey, manages an Emirati club and was an ambassador for Qatar. And that cannot but taint their genius.
Three Champions Leagues/European Cups pulls Guardiola level with Bob Paisley and Zinedine Zidane, one behind Carlo Ancelotti. The assumption in 2011 was that he would keep racking up the European titles but, even after his 12-year hiatus, there seems little reason now, so long as he remains at City, why he should not go on to equal and probably surpass Ancelotti. City are a club built in his image with extraordinary resources and a marketing department that has secured a series of incredible sponsorship deals; they are the best side in the world and their pre‑eminence should continue.
Comparing that to, for instance, the achievement of Brian Clough at Nottingham Forest, suggests the folly of becoming too obsessed by adding up trophies. Besides, Guardiola deserves more than to be defined by his Champions Leagues alone. He has changed what is considered possible in football. His appointment at Barcelona in 2008 marked the beginning of a new era.
Football was in a period of astringency. The dominant managers were José Mourinho, Marcelo Lippi and Rafa Benítez. Greece had won the European Championship just four years earlier. The game was ripe for revolution. Improvements in pitch quality, especially, but also in ball and boot technology, meant that a first touch could be taken for granted. The liberalisation of the offside law and the crackdown on the challenge from behind made life easier for technical midfielders: as defensive lines dropped deeper, the playing area in effect increased, and it became harder for opponents physically to intimidate midfield creators. It was Guardiola who recognised the potential of that, who realised that the game could become almost entirely about the manipulation of space.
The whole ethos of the game changed. Before 2008, there had been only one season in which the knockout stages in the Champions League yielded an average of more than three goals a game. Since then there has been only one season in which it did not. Nobody has had such a profound impact on how the game is played since Michels – who, of course, via Johan Cruyff, has had a huge influence over Guardiola.
But as well as innovation and influence, football is partly about numbers and ticking off the silverware – at least for managers of elite clubs. That Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick never won an Oscar, or that Martin Amis or Dame Muriel Spark never won the Booker, is a quirk at the end of their careers; it says more about the politics and subjectivity of such awards than it does about them. Football has a very clear and objective measure of who deserves to win: goals. Style and process are hugely important, and results at times don’t give the full picture, but ultimately the game is about scoring more goals than the opponent, or at least not scoring fewer. And Guardiola, over 10 seasons, kept failing to do that in key European ties.
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There was some bad luck, there were inexplicable collapses, but most of all there were baffling tactical decisions, most notably the use of Ilkay Gündogan on the left in a 4-4-2 at Liverpool in 2019, the adoption of a back three against Lyon in 2020 and leaving out Fernandinho against Chelsea in 2021. Overthinking became the great Guardiola glitch. When tactical tweaks work, such as restoring John Stones to right‑back on Saturday, of course, they are not overthinking but merely thinking. Had he not won a third Champions League, overthinking might have been his legacy.
As it is, it feels as though his career has entered a third phase. There was the young radical, who won two Champions Leagues and changed how the game was played; there was the mature coach with the flaw, the fear of being countered against that paradoxically opened him up to the counter; and now perhaps there is the serial winner, burnishing his already gleaming legacy with further silverware.
He has a rare longevity: 14 years between his first and most recent Champions League is a year short of Jupp Heynckes’s mark and five short of Ancelotti. That speaks of his capacity to evolve: Guardiolismo is a philosophy in constant flux. This City – Erling Haaland, Stones pushing into midfield, and often four centre-backs – is just its latest incarnation.
Guardiola would have been considered a great even if he had been stuck on two Champions Leagues for ever. If only to head off the most tedious of quibblers, this third comes as welcome confirmation.