This time, Pep Guardiola may really retreat from a league he remade

NEW YORK – Pep Guardiola was only six months into his tenure as the Manchester City manager when he declared, on the second day of 2017, “The process of my goodbye has already started.”

Members of the club’s hierarchy spoke in similar terms in those days. They did not imagine that he would be there for the long haul. They were just determined to enjoy it for the length of his initial three-year contract. Anything beyond that would be a bonus.

As much to his own surprise as anyone else’s, Guardiola, 54, has stayed for almost a decade. He has led City to six Premier League titles and has won the FA Cup twice and the League Cup four times, as well as adding the Champions League, the European Super Cup and the Club World Cup in 2023.

But now, there is a growing belief that this will be his last season in Manchester.

City’s supporters will hope he can be persuaded to stay, recalling that his departure was widely predicted before he extended his contract in the months of November 2020, 2022 and 2024.

But the mood seems different this time. A final decision will not be made until closer to the end of this season’s campaign, but City are advancing contingency plans to prepare for that scenario.

Whenever the curtain falls, the legacy Guardiola leaves behind will be enormous. It is not just about the trophies he has won with City. It is also his influence as the leading proponent of a possession-based playing style that was thought by many to be incompatible with English football values when he arrived in 2016. It is now deeply ingrained in modern coaching circles.

Nobody in today’s football does it better. The Spaniard has had a huge transfer budget at his disposal, along with players of the quality of Kevin de Bruyne, David Silva, Sergio Aguero, and now Rodri, Phil Foden and Erling Haaland, but this has not just been an exercise in checkbook management.

Guardiola has built brilliant teams and made them even greater than the sum of their expensive parts, while Chelsea and Manchester United, with comparable transfer budgets, have done nothing of the sort.

To win six Premier League titles in seven seasons, from 2017-18 to 2023-24, is a level of domination without precedent in English football. So, too, is the number of games City have won and goals they have scored in those title-winning seasons.

Just as he did in Spain during his four years in charge at Barcelona, Guardiola has redefined expectations about excellence in the Premier League, when looking at the record books and when analysing the brilliance of his team’s play.

The past 18 months have brought an interruption to the domination, with City finishing third in the Premier League last season after an alarming slump, and the new campaign has not been without its hiccups. But having moved on from experienced players such as Ederson, Kyle Walker, Ilkay Gundogan and de Bruyne in the summer, Guardiola has moved towards a new crop of younger players and appears to be managing the transition well.

Why would he decide to leave now? It is unclear. But perhaps, as with Jurgen Klopp in his final years at Liverpool, Guardiola briefly felt invigorated enough to sign a new contract in 2024, only to find himself drawn back towards his initial instinct. In the cases of Guardiola and Klopp, there was a loyalty element, too, a desire to press ahead with the start of a rebuild. Committing to seeing that cycle through to some kind of conclusion is a different matter entirely.

It is a mark of Guardiola’s unexpected longevity in Manchester that at one time, early in his tenure, the club’s former midfielder Patrick Vieira, who was coaching New York City FC in Major League Soccer, was regarded internally as a prime candidate to succeed him. So was Mikel Arteta, who was his assistant in Manchester before leaving to take the Arsenal job in December 2019. The former City captain Vincent Kompany, now in charge of Bayern Munich, was thought to be emerging as a potential Guardiola successor as he led Burnley to promotion to the Premier League in impressive style in 2023.

Right now, there are strong indications that the City hierarchy will place Chelsea coach Enzo Maresca high on their list of candidates should Guardiola step aside. That is an intriguing prospect, not least because the Italian has spent most of his 18 months in charge of Chelsea battling to convince the outside world that he merits the faith the club has shown in him.

Maresca is instantly identifiable as a follower of the Guardiola doctrine. He has frequently described Guardiola as a “genius”, having worked under him first when coaching City’s under-23 team and then as an assistant at the first-team level; Guardiola, for his part, recently described the 45-year-old as “one of the best managers in the world” in a press conference.

So many of today’s leading coaches have been influenced by Guardiola – in many cases directly. The coaches of Chelsea (Maresca) and Arsenal (Arteta) worked alongside him at City, as did Paris Saint-Germain coach Luis Enrique at Barcelona. The coaches of Bayern (Kompany) and Real Madrid (Xabi Alonso) played under him and learnt from him. Cesc Fabregas, whose reputation as a coach is growing at the Italian club Como, played under Guardiola at Barcelona. So did Barcelona assistant Thiago Alcantara. Liverpool coach Arne Slot is another devotee, having told Dutch magazine Voetbal International in 2023 that Guardiola’s approach “gives me the ultimate pleasure in football”.

This level of influence at the very highest level of the game is not normal. Successful coaches regularly inspire great respect and admiration among their peers, but Guardiola’s influence – direct and indirect – is unparalleled in the modern game.

The positive aspect of that, for City, is that identifying coaches who follow a similar football philosophy should not be as difficult as it once would have been. The trouble is that any coaches modelling themselves on Guardiola run the risk of being seen as Guardiola Lite.

Perhaps the most underrated aspect of Guardiola’s management is the insatiable appetite he has fostered in his teams. The intensity with which he works – day after day, week after week, season after season – is obvious, as are the demands he puts on his players to ensure that the team’s standards do not slip. Winning six league titles in seven seasons, when competing with teams of the quality of Klopp’s Liverpool and, more recently, Arteta’s Arsenal, speaks volumes.

There is a large elephant in the room: This glorious City era has unfolded against a backdrop of serious allegations about the club’s financial conduct. With a resolution to the Premier League’s investigation expected soon, there will be an assumption in some quarters that any decision on Guardiola’s future might be pinned to the outcome.

City’s huge commercial growth in the years under investigation enabled the club to attract Guardiola and all those top-class players in the first place, but his record in Barcelona, Munich and Manchester leaves the impression that if he had not joined City, he would have had comparable success elsewhere.

It is obvious to say he will leave a void at City when he departs. It is equally obvious to say that his departure could create an opportunity for rival clubs to exploit. There must have been times in recent seasons when other managers found themselves counting down the days on Guardiola’s contract at City, only for him to sign a new one.

But that last two-year contract extension always had the look of a “steadying the ship” gesture – designed to help City through a difficult period both on and off the field rather than a resounding statement of long-term intent. Even at the time, the theory was proposed that this season might be his last.

Guardiola looked exhausted then, showing signs of the pressure that was taking a toll in what proved to be his most arduous season in Manchester. He has looked much more relaxed so far this season, but perhaps there is a parallel with Klopp two years ago. There are dark, lonely times in management, so when someone can see light at the end of the tunnel, that can sometimes have a liberating effect.

City’s supporters will hope that he can be persuaded to give it one more year. But after 9½ years, the process of Guardiola’s goodbye seems to be starting, so the task of finding his successor must be confronted with added urgency. Whoever is chosen, whoever accepts the challenge, Guardiola will be the ultimate hard act to follow. NYTIMES