Back-to-back titles is the main aim ahead of Champions League success
Pep Guardiola has declared that he’d take Premier League title success over Champions League glory again next season.
And he’s promising to shed his nice guy image to achieve it.
The Manchester City manager is aware that the last nine titlewinning managers have relinquished their crown 12 months later and he’s determined not to be No. 10.
If that means City again finish without landing Europe’s premier prize next summer, then that’s a price he’s willing to pay.
“The Premier League is again the priority next season, absolutely,” says Guardiola.
“I will sign up right now, if we can do what we did this season again next. Right now!
“The Premier League is the most-important title. It’s the title you win by working every day.
“When I came here the chairman and sporting director never said: ‘ You have to win the Champions League’ or ‘ You have to win the Premier League’.
“They said to do what I believed I had to do, and try to be constant for as long as possible.
“Believe me, I dream to play in the final of the Champions League. I know how beautiful it feels to finish the season with that trophy.
“But I realised this season how
difficult it would be to win the Champions League.
“Maybe I am wrong, but I think that before you win that competition you have to win more Premier Leagues to get respect in Europe that you are a top club.
“Of course, we are always going to try. But I don’t know if, as a club, we have the power on and off the pitch yet to achieve and to get there.
“So I would prefer, like this season, to be solid in the Premier League. I prefer to have a team that every day is a machine.”
Guardiola appreciates that in recent years every title- winning side has dipped in form the following season.
“It’s always complicated the year after winning the title,” says Guardiola. “We have to know what can happen.
“The first game this season Chelsea lost to Burnley at home. Nobody expected that.
“I also saw at Barcelona and Bayern Munich, that it is more difficult to retain a title because the players believe what they have done in the past is only down to them.
“They don’t realise that what they have done is finished. They have to play for the future.
“They think that, because they’ve done it once, they will do it again.
“That makes them lose energy. When they used to run five metres now they run three metres and that makes the difference.
“That’s why next season will be more difficult for us. It is also why next season I will be much harder.
“At Barcelona and Munich, I made the players press more, I made them work more and I had to find other ways to control them.
“I made sure that they were on time for training and that they had to work harder without the ball, than with the ball.
“Our relationship next season will not be as friendly as it is.”
City will be chasing scoring and points records over the next few weeks. But, however big the margins are at the end, Guardiola doesn’t believe that this team can be classed as the best the Premier League has seen.
“I will never say we are in the best team to win it, because I have respect for what Arsene Wenger and Alex Ferguson did in different periods of their career and for Chelsea in 2005 and 2006,” he says.
“In one season, we were better than 19 other teams. That is excellent. But it is only one season.
“To be part of something special in the Premier League, you have to win more. You have to win titles back-to-back.
“I lived that in Barcelona and I know that when a team wins eight or nine times in a decade, that is fantastic.
“But we cannot think now about how we won this title. I have to prepare for next season. It starts this weekend to see if we can handle this situation when we play Swansea.”