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Forgive me father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession.
Thirty-three per cent possession against Arsenal. Five shots. Gianluigi Donnarumma getting more touches than Phil Foden. And at this point, we have to acknowledge that Pep Guardiola is one of the principal reasons this kind of possession pornography exists in the first place: a serendipitous consequence of reinventing the game at exactly the moment we could start measuring the ways in which he was reinventing it, and exactly the moment we could beam it around the world in meme-sized fragments.
The Guardiola supremacy of the late 2000s and 2010s was, among much else, a supremacy of numbers. Xavi completing all 185 of his pass whims against Real Betis. Robert Lewandowski creating 62 goal events in a single season. Manchester City beating Forest County with 102% ball tilt.
The numbers themselves were always largely irrelevant. What mattered was the way in which they were deployed: as a plot device, a form of punctuation, a number in service to the wider narrative. Guardiola teams would beat you once on the pitch and then again in the aftermath, a congregation of clerics and hype men explaining how Pep-ball was not simply more effective but somehow more beautiful, more virtuous, more moral.
And so perhaps there is a certain irony in the fact that Guardiola’s fate is now to be damned by the same tools. Never mind that City were dominant against Napoli last Thursday, or that they will probably suffocate Burnley to death in time-honoured fashion on Saturday.
Something has definitely shifted here, and it shifted long before City ended the Arsenal game in a rugged 5-4-1. Fast breaks are up; possession is down; the average passing sequence is shorter than in any of Guardiola’s 10 Premier League seasons. Of course, the apparatus still exists for City to play controlled possession football if they choose. But these days it increasingly resembles a plan B rather than a plan A, an old ritual being sacrificed on the altar of a new faith.
What is the new faith? The new faith is Donnarumma punting for territory, quick long balls for a stampeding Erling Haaland, transitions and lightning breaks, the midfield combat zone often bypassed entirely. The new faith is Abdukodir Khusanov recast as a crunching right‑back, a man who appears to have taken Rico Lewis’s job by eating him. From Dani Alves to Joshua Kimmich to Kyle Walker to Khusanov: this feels like a pretty neat encapsulation of the personal journey Guardiola has taken over the past 15 years.
The demeanour, too, has changed. The Pep of cigars and evangelism and good times has gone, replaced by a more scowling and sardonic touchline presence. For the first time he seems to be dressing his age. The scratches and blotches on his face are a kind of stigmata, the eyes etched with suffering and longing, the blinks and twitches of a man in the tortured process of recanting all he once preached.
In a way, this is the most interesting part of City’s transition over recent months. The disintegration of last autumn forced Guardiola to search deep within himself for answers, and for once he seems to have concluded the answers are elsewhere. “Today, modern football is the way Bournemouth, Newcastle, Brighton and Liverpool play,” he said in January. After the Arsenal game, he said: “I have to prove myself again with a different strategy.”
Many have concluded on this evidence that Guardiola is moving into his Arsène Wenger phase, or perhaps his José Mourinho phase: the ageing revolutionary stubbornly outstaying his welcome, his outdated ideas curdling as the world keeps spinning. But it’s a comparison that doesn’t really stand up. Ageing managers generally double down on their principles, become more extreme and grotesque versions of their original selves.
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And this is how most of us age, right? Wenger’s Arsenal never stopped trying to sign flighty No 10s and passing the ball into the net. Mourinho has cleaved so strongly to his anti-dogma that it’s become a form of dogma in its own right. Why die by your ideas when you can die by a painful low block and Fred in midfield? Even Carlo Ancelotti’s later Real Madrid teams felt like a kind of parody: the ultimate hands-off coach gradually relinquishing control until he managed to disappear entirely.
What Guardiola seems to be doing, by contrast, is actually much more daring and apostate. This is not a coach taking refuge in his principles so much as one departing from them entirely. And we are in largely uncharted territory here, for more reasons than one.
No coach has ever reshaped the game like Guardiola; few coaches ever accumulate sufficient time, personal capital and self-awareness to be able to tear down the cathedral they built. Jürgen Klopp was in the process of doing so at Liverpool but burned himself out before he could complete the job. Louis van Gaal’s later career – winning the Eredivisie playing 4-4-2 with AZ, demolishing the Spanish positional game at the 2014 World Cup – is perhaps the closest modern parallel.
For perhaps a decade football has been wondering if Pep-ball would ever be killed off; it would be the richest of ironies if the coach who did so was the one who created it. Perhaps time and tide will come for Guardiola before then. Unlike his previous tactical evolutions, this is not a change being made from a position of strength. He looks tired and weathered these days, his players less responsive to his ideas, and there is a chance this counter-revolution descends into chaos.
Either way, we may just be about to enter the most fascinating chapter of the Guardiola dynasty: the painful and spellbinding sight of a man clinging to the edge, and finally deciding to let go.
