On this day seven years ago, Pep Guardiola took charge of his first Premier League match. It was an uninspiring 2-1 win over Sunderland, in which a late Paddy McNair own goal secured all three points for the Spanish boss.
City would win their first six matches of that campaign, before falling to a third-place finish. The critics who believed Guardiola's tiki-taka style would never work in the English game piled on.
“If he thinks he’s going to turn up and outplay everybody in the Premier League, and that teams are going to let his Manchester City side have the ball for 90 per cent of the time and pass pretty patterns around them so they can get a result, then he is absolutely deluded.” Stan Collymore now infamously wrote in the Daily Mirror.
“In fact, he is beyond deluded. And if he thinks he doesn’t need to teach tackling or one-on-one combat in training then he’ll be going back to Spain with his tail between his legs.”
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That criticism now looks like some of the worst analysis the sport has ever seen, but it wasn’t just Collymore. His words were the most cutting and succinct but the former Nottingham Forest man was just summing up the general feeling of an English media desperate to kick Guardiola to the curb. He’s made them all look very, very silly indeed.
His biggest decision was getting rid of Joe Hart for Claudio Bravo, and, when that didn’t work in his first season, he brought in Ederson. He’s not looked back since. With a sense of ruthlessness, he sent the old underperforming guard of Willy Caballero, Pablo Zabaleta, Aleksander Kolarov, Bacary Sagna, Gael Clichy, Jesus Navas, Fernando, Samir Nasri, Wilfried Bony, Nolito and Kelechi Iheanacho to the scrapheap.
In came Bernardo Silva, Ederson, Kyle Walker, Danilo, Benjamin Mendy, and, in the following January, Aymeric Laporte. A hefty portion of his own signings have been superb, four of those six signings picked up in 2017 being still at the club today. Since that point, there's been relentless dominance from Manchester City.
They’ve only lost one Premier League title in the last six seasons, finishing second to Liverpool in the Covid-19 intterupted season. He set a new points record, equalled the record for most wins in one season and set a new goal difference record. It’s been nothing short of relentless. Only Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United in the 1990s has dominated English football in the same manner. If he wins the league this year, he’ll become the first manager in the history of England’s top flight to win four consecutive league titles. In fact, no team in the history of English football has won four leagues in a row.
Guardiola’s leading this City side into uncharted territory, and last season they got to match their biggest rivals. The treble marked the crowning glory of his tenure so far. Despite the five Premier League titles, two FA Cups and four League Cup triumphs, the Champions League was the one missing for both Guardiola and the club.
Pep wanted to prove he could do it without Lionel Messi, and the pain of losing the 2021 final to Chelsea was washed away on a magical night in Istanbul. Man City are European champions, but where does Guardiola go from here?
There was a slight inkling that after that final, and the treble, he would call it a day at City. After all, he only spent four years at Barcelona, and three at Bayern Munich. When he joined City, even after a couple of title wins, people questioned how long he would actually spend in the Manchester rain.
Seven years on, it turns out he bloody loves it. And he’s not done yet.
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