It is hard to imagine Manchester City without Pep Guardiola.
Lifelong City fans who fondly remember the pre-Guardiola days, for better and for worse, may crinkle their nose at that statement because, ultimately, the club were around long before he arrived in 2016 and will be around for even longer into the future.
But the 55-year-old Spaniard has not just spearheaded City’s rise to the very top of the world game through his accomplishments in the dugout, he has established a culture within the club, set expectations for those on the outside and has essentially been their spokesman, fighting their corner in the face of off-pitch controversy.
He has had such an impact on City, and English football generally, over the past decade that his influence inevitably draws comparisons with Sir Alex Ferguson’s time across town at Manchester United. Considering Ferguson was in charge at Old Trafford for an additional 16 years, that is a feat in itself.
Ferguson will probably always win the argument as the Premier League’s greatest manager thanks to that longevity and the extra silverware which came with it, but Guardiola is surely the most transformative, owing to the way his style, and variations on it, has been adopted across the nation from grassroots to top flight.
It is only now, as the football world gets used to the idea he intends to leave City this summer, as reported on Monday by The Athletic, that his and his players’ achievements can begin to be fully digested.
No other English club had ever won the title with 100 points, been champions four years in a row or completed the domestic treble.
Guardiola’s City teams achieved all three, and on Saturday he became the first manager to win the domestic cup double twice. With a small miracle, they could make it his second domestic treble by winning the title on Sunday. They won the Premier League six times in seven seasons between 2017 and 2024, when only Ferguson’s United (six times, including two runs of three in a row) and Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea (once) had previously retained that trophy. The norm, in fact, is for defending champions to fall off dramatically.
City also became only the second English team to win the treble of Premier League, Champions League and FA Cup, and the first to do so having qualified for Europe as domestic champions the previous season.
The point being, Guardiola’s time in charge at the Etihad Stadium has been remarkable, and it would be ridiculous to expect that level of success again, no matter who takes over. Enzo Maresca, who worked alongside Guardiola as assistant in that treble season and went on to achieve promotion with Leicester City and win the Club World Cup with Chelsea, is set to replace him.
He had previously managed City’s under-23 side, having been recommended by former boss Manuel Pellegrini, and was identified by former director of football Txiki Begiristain as a potential successor to Guardiola as long as six years ago. City are looking for continuity, seeing little need for major changes, and were always impressed by the Italian’s work.
Pep Guardiola has won a raft of trophies in his time at City (Naomi Baker/Getty Images)
Put like that the appointment makes sense, but Guardiola will be an incredibly tough act to follow.
As much as the football and the trophies, he has come to be City’s statesman, usually the only employee to defend the club in the face of the financial charges and judgements that have come their way.
“If we are guilty we will go to the lower divisions like before, we will call Paul Dickov and Mike Summerbee,” he said famously of the 115 charges levelled at City in 2023. It may be that the best chance of keeping Guardiola beyond this summer would have been for a serious guilty verdict to have come City’s way in the past few months, sparking a defiant reaction that could tempt him to get City back up the divisions.
When people think of City now, they think of Guardiola. And when people think of Guardiola, despite his huge, lifelong connection to Barcelona, they think of City. It is not easy to separate the two.
The obvious comparison is with Ferguson’s departure from United in summer 2013, one that was exacerbated by their chief executive David Gill’s exit at the same time. The task of replacing by far the two most influential men at the club proved essentially impossible — 13 years on, they have still not managed it.
Nobody at City expected Guardiola to stay for as long as he has but as the seasons went by, leading figures at the club began to realise just how big a job it would be when the time came to replace him.
For years now, they have worked hard to ensure City’s off-pitch structures are strong enough to absorb anyone’s departure, no matter how sizeable or sudden. When Omar Berrada left in 2024 to become United’s CEO, for example, they never intended to recruit a replacement, they just shuffled people around and moved on.
Key figures at the club long knew Begiristain was going to step aside last year, and he himself played a key role in interviewing for his replacement, with Hugo Viana eventually being brought in from Portuguese team Sporting CP and more recently, Roel de Vries, chief operating officer for the broader City Football Group, was succeeded by its chief financial officer Ingo Bank.
And while thoroughly-considered plans like those do genuinely make City better equipped to deal with the kind of Ferguson-Gill departures that derailed United, what will determine the success and reputation of the club over the coming years will revolve around who the next manager will be and how successful they are.
How is ‘success’ going to be quantified in the post-Guardiola era?
The last time City did not reach the FA Cup semi-finals, at least, was in 2017-18, his second year in charge. They have qualified for the Champions League every season since 2010-11 under three different managers, and have now done so 10 times out of 10 under Guardiola after already securing their place for 2026-27. Even in the Catalan’s ‘worst’ seasons, his first one and penultimate one, City placed no lower than third in the Premier League (and they finished both of those campaigns strongly, providing a sense of optimism).
Thanks to 2008’s transformative Abu Dhabi United Group takeover, City enjoyed success in the years before Guardiola arrived. They won the FA Cup in 2011 and their first Premier League 12 months later, both with Roberto Mancini as the manager. His successor Pellegrini then won the title and the League Cup in his 2013-14 debut season, and the latter competition again in 2016.
It was the stuff of dreams at the time.
Nobody would now suggest that period was underwhelming, but would a return of five trophies for City in the next six years, including a couple of seasons where they barely compete for the title, be considered acceptable in the context of what Guardiola has overseen? He is on an average of two per season, after all.
United have won five trophies — two FA Cups, two League Cups and a Europa League — since Ferguson left, feats for which most clubs would bite off your hand, and yet the overwhelming consensus is they have been light years off their former levels.
Liverpool seemed to have hit the jackpot when Arne Slot won the title in his 2024-25 debut campaign after replacing Jurgen Klopp, but their struggles as champions have hugely frustrated fans and he has faced calls to be sacked from those who celebrated his achievements 12 months ago.
With the greatest of respect to Klopp, who transformed Liverpool’s fortunes after his 2015 arrival and made them a truly formidable side, he oversaw plenty of seasons that tailed off long before the trophies were handed out, yet he had enough credit in the bank to avoid the kind of criticism levelled at his successor.
Jurgen Klopp offered the most sustained challenge to Pep Guardiola, but could not match his success (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Perhaps that suggests the personality of a manager is a major factor in judging whoever comes next.
Ferguson, Guardiola and Klopp are huge characters who galvanised fanbases, and that does not come easily. Erling Haaland is a genuinely marketable superstar at City, but Guardiola has been the centre of attention since he arrived.
City will be confident their work over the years, in preparation for days like these, will stand them in good stead when it comes to picking the right manager.
At various points during Guardiola’s reign, when they have put plans in place in case he were to leave, the club had seemed to place a lot of importance on people who have already worked there. For example, Patrick Vieira, Mikel Arteta and, more recently, Maresca.
The latter was hugely popular with the Chelsea players and those familiar with his previous work at City speak highly of him, but appointing him could be a hard sell to much of the fanbase, judging by the lukewarm reactions to previous reports linking him with the job.
There are a few potential options out there who would have excited supporters more, including Xabi Alonso, who has joined Chelsea, Luis Enrique and most obviously Vincent Kompany, the former City captain who has got Bayern Munich playing brilliantly. That will be an early obstacle for Maresca to clear when he takes charge.
It may be that this summer proves a good time for Guardiola to go, in terms of the reaction of the players.
The current City squad is so fresh, having been largely rebuilt over the past two years, that they may not be prone to breathing a sigh of relief after years of living with his high-intensity approach, which was the case at Bayern when he left to come to Manchester 10 years ago. Many are so new to the club that working for another manager may not represent such a big change for them, either.
City managed to attract the likes of Sergio Aguero, Yaya Toure and David Silva well before Guardiola arrived, suggesting they will always be a big pull, but will there be quite the same attraction now that everybody has become so used to the idea of the Catalan being a major draw?
History tells us that certain managers at certain clubs are simply impossible to follow, and Guardiola’s impact at City surely puts him in that bracket.
