Pep Guardiola's Premier League Arrival Will Cause Change Far Beyond His New Club
Speculation had followed him for years, but now it was ramping up even further. "I have said time and time again that we will say something after our final game in Hannover," said Pep Guardiola in December, as the world demanded answers on his future.
The world had waited a long time, but it wouldn't have to wait much longer. Only 18 days later, Guardiola, still midway through a season and already at the game's pinnacle with a colossus in Bayern Munich, uttered the words so many had wanted to hear: "I want to coach in the Premier League."
On their own, those seven words were extremely significant; in context, they were immeasurably so.
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This was Guardiola's "LeBron" moment, they said, his rendition of The Decision. Technically it wasn't quite that—there were no one-hour television slots here, nor statements like "I'm going to take my talents to the Etihad"—but in essence it was the same thing. This was the world's most in-demand figure in his field picking his next job like you and I pick groceries.
Because he can.
In the history of football management, the clamour for Guardiola might be unprecedented. In the age of the Super Club, the Catalan has become the game's Super Manager, his reputation so far beyond his peers' he now, as a coach, has reached a different plane of existence: Clubs don't get to pick him, he picks them; clubs don't name their price, he names his. No other man in his field can do the same, and soon, tantalisingly, he'll be on his way to the Premier League.
Change will be coming with him, too.
For more than half a decade now, Premier League clubs have watched Guardiola's sides take all before them while concurrently watching their own supremacy fade.
It's almost two years now since England last had a representative in the Champions League semi-finals; almost four since it had one in the final; almost eight since the Premier League reached its on-field zenith when Manchester United and Chelsea met in the 2008 finale.
In that time, the Premier League has progressively lost some its lustre despite its own billing. Year after year, an exodus of top-end talent to La Liga's giants has eaten away at the division's quality, the world's finest players nowhere to be seen in the world's self-proclaimed finest league.
Revered managers have been just as scarce. In the aforementioned period, the bulk of Jose Mourinho's time was spent away from England. Ditto for Carlo Ancelotti. Ditto for Jurgen Klopp, despite his recent arrival. Elsewhere, Diego Simeone has eluded the Premier League to date, and so too, of course, has Guardiola. Among the game's pre-eminent thinkers, only the long-term icons in Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger have really called the Premier League home.
Inescapably, then, the Premier League has been left with a superstar vacuum.
And it's this that Guardiola will change.
When the Catalan puts pen to paper with one of England's elite ahead of next season—and it will almost certainly be at one of the two Manchester clubs—the Premier League will be welcoming its biggest signing of any description in years. In a way the competition hasn't since the departure of Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United to Real Madrid in 2009, the league will possess a man who's undoubtedly at the peak of his profession. A leader. A face. A reference point.
Guardiola won't kick a ball next season but might be the league's biggest drawcard anyway.
In an immediate sense, the change brought by Guardiola's arrival will be most visible at his new club as precedent has shown.
When the former midfielder took over from Frank Rijkaard at Barcelona in 2008, he didn't inherit the world's greatest side as his cynics like to believe; he created it.
In a post-European Cup hangover, Barcelona wore the scars of decadence and dysfunction when Guardiola took the job, the club having watched its standards and professionalism fall to pieces as a rather unspectacular Real Madrid won back-to-back league titles—the second of which was won in a canter, 18 points clear of Barcelona.
At the time, the world wasn't aware that Lionel Messi was the world's greatest player in waiting. Nor had it anticipated that Xavi and Andres Iniesta would form the world's greatest midfield. Nor had it heard of a guy called Sergio Busquets.
After one season, it had and it was. After one season led by Guardiola's obsessiveness and furious, unparalleled attention to detail, Barcelona were 20 points better off in the league and finished it as treble winners; after two seasons, they were 32 points better off. Thirty-two.
What's more, they weren't just improved; they were utterly relentless. Durable. Disciplined. Tactically superior beyond anything previously seen—all after being the antithesis of those things prior to this arrival.
When Guardiola went to Bayern, his impact was similar. Though he inherited a treble-winning outfit, the Catalan—on a week-to-week basis—made the Bavarians better again.
Under his management, they cliched the Bundesliga title in record time and set new league benchmarks for consecutive wins, longest-ever unbeaten streak, longest unbeaten start to a season, most consecutive away wins, longest run of two-goal performances in winning matches and most away goals in a season.
This is what he does. And this is what he's capable of doing at a new club in England.
At Manchester City, Guardiola would be capable of steering the club away from its existence in which points aren't yet reflective of talent. At the Etihad, a soft underbelly continues to hold back Manuel Pellegrini's team, as does an often-observed sense of tactical simplicity that's been emblematic of the league as a whole.
Across town at Manchester United, Guardiola's presence would almost certainly be just as transformative. Engulfed by monotony, United need releasing and unshackling, invention allowed to exist alongside instruction—just the way Guardiola allows it to.
"He used to say to us," said Thierry Henry in December to Sky Sports' Monday Night Football programme when breaking down his former manager's philosophy, "'my job is to take you up to the last third, your job is to finish it.'"
As such, it's not unreasonable to think that whoever lands Guardiola for next season will become a different beast.
And yet, gradually, thanks to Guardiola's arrival, so might the Premier League as a whole.
In recent seasons, and particularly in the current one, the football of England's top division has grown increasingly entertaining but also increasingly unsophisticated. Carrying chaos and freneticism, the Premier League has become the Wild West of the European game, home to, as neatly put by the Guardian's Barney Ronay, "muscular island nation football."
Right now, the league is led by a prone-to-being-flaky Arsenal, who finished Wednesday night's stylistically symbolic clash with Liverpool effectively playing a 6-0-4; next is nuts-and-bolts Leicester City; behind them, it's the paradoxical City; another spot further back, it's the still-building Tottenham Hotspur; West Ham United are after them.
This is a league there for taking but one in which everyone is deeply flawed, each club increasingly becoming a product of its immediate environment. A product of the Wild West.
And this is where Guardiola comes in.
In the Catalan, one of the Premier League's elite will soon have a boss unprepared to accept such a status quo.
Under his watch, City or United—or Arsenal or Chelsea, if you want to entertain the idea of the outsiders in this race—won't allow chaos to upset effectiveness. His team's preparation and planning will prevent that. His side will operate with control, with precision and with tactical flexibility. There will be flair, an abundance of it perhaps, but it won't come at the cost of balance and principles. It never has.
What Guardiola will bring to the Premier League is a level of sophistication, innovation and versatility that's been absent for some time—the sort his current adversaries haven't been able to live with.
"You prepare to press and stop their passing and they play it long," said Borussia Dortmund manager Thomas Tuchel not long after his side's 5-1 thrashing at the hands of Guardiola's Bayern earlier this season, per Graham Hunter of the Daily Mail. "You adapt to that mid-game and they simply start passing through you again—they just have so many recourses and their players are so adept at switching from one tactic to another that it's very hard to play against. We didn't have the answers."
Thus, Guardiola will likely set a new standard in the Premier League. A new method. A new way of thinking. In response, his rivals will be forced to react and adapt, both on the field and off it.
Off it, the losers in this race for his signature will likely enter the transfer market with added urgency.
City or United will undoubtedly throw millions around; Chelsea will definitely try; Arsenal, Tottenham and Liverpool will surely recognise they're not built to compete if Guardiola is given one of the country's best squads as well as the funds to reshape it as he pleases.
After all, his presence alone could help his new club lure players that might have previously been out of reach, one coach perhaps able to influence an entire transfer window on his own.
On the pitch, meanwhile, the changes could be just a significant.
Like all sports, football has a follow-the-leader nature. If Guardiola comes to the Premier League and successfully implements his world-renowned approach, ruthlessly exposing the deficiencies of others, the attitudes and approaches of rivals will adapt as the league's rugged, chaotic and island-mentality-driven status quo is challenged and toppled.
Opposing teams will be forced to get smarter. They'll need to embrace added sophistication. They'll need to take elements from Guardiola's example or risk being left behind domestically as well as on the continent, because precedent suggests there's a very real chance they will be.
"For me, he is already one of the greatest coaches of all time," wrote Henry of Guardiola in the Sun. "His teams don't just win the league, they totally dominate it."
Guardiola—the cult figure, the Super Manager, the man who'll soon become a superstar in a Premier League short of them—might actually be set to drive the standard of the division north. Set to give the league a new benchmark. A new emphasis.
A new complexion.
It might not be just his new club that Guardiola changes. It might be everything.
