The flawed genius of Pep Guardiola
Before Pep Guardiola took charge of Barcelona in 2008, nobody believed it was possible to play elite European football in the way you might play a five-a-side: holding possession, dragging the opposition around the pitch, trying to work openings. Thirteen years on, his approach is so accepted as a standard way of playing that there has been a counter-revolution. And now, in the season just finished, a synthesis seems to have emerged, led by Guardiola himself.
After the years when the game, at the highest level, was about retaining possession, Jurgen Klopp and the German school came to the fore by regaining it. But this season, Guardiola’s Manchester City won the league and Thomas Tuchel’s Chelsea won the Champions League with a form of football that balanced pressing and possession, that operated a high line without being overly vulnerable to balls played into the space behind it.
There is, of course, one enormous caveat, which is that 2020-21 was not in any sense a normal season. A lack of pre-season and the compressed nature of the calendar had a major effect on how football
The revelation of the line-up in Porto was one of those jaw-drop moments: he’d done it again
was played. First there was the wildness and the chaos of those early weeks of the Premier League season, as City conceded five, Manchester United conceded six and Liverpool conceded seven. Then there was the retrenchment, so that in the end the average goals-per-game for the season was 2.69, fractionally down on the previous season.
And at the heart of that were City, rising from eighth in mid-December to have made the title inevitable by the end of March. In Ruben Dias they had, as Alex Ferguson once said of Nemanja Vidic, a defender who could defend: a player capable of rotating possession who also excelled in the more traditional virtues of heading and marking. The benefits were seen especially in that Champions League semi-final against
Paris Saint-Germain as bodies were hurled into the way of shots. Guardiola had gone from being a coach who insisted he didn’t coach tackles to having a team that actively celebrated Oleksandr Zinchenko blocking a shot from Neymar.
But just as everybody prepared to celebrate a great Guardiola side, his third Champions league success after a ten-year gap, and one that, being so hard won, might have meant even more than those glorious triumphs achieved with Barcelona in 2009 and 2011, he fell victim to the flaw that has undone him so often in the past.
The revelation of the line-up in Porto was one of those jaw-drop moments: he’d done it again.
Since 2015, when Guardiola sent his Bayern out with a back three to push high against Barcelona, he has made a habit of bizarre line-ups. It’s as though Barcelona’s (incredibly unfortunate) defeat to Chelsea in 2012 and Bayern’s to Real Madrid in 2014 made him fear being caught in the counter-attack so much that
he felt he had to take specific measures to avoid it. But those steps, paradoxically, were precisely what brought about his doom.
It happened in his use of llkay Gundogan wide against Liverpool in 2018. It happened in his deployment of a back three against Lyon last year. And it happened again in Porto, in the most direct of ways, as Mason Mount’s pass to Kai Havertz for the goal went precisely through the space in front of the back four where Fernandinho or Rodri may have been expected to have been covering. Gundogan, the notional holding player, was still only just crossing the halfway line.
And what made the line-up all the more remarkable was how Guardiola had seemed to have worked out how to balance a hard press with cover for the high line. His City through the late winter did not press quite so aggressively as they had. They retained possession better. They managed usually to keep five men behind the ball. And then, having achieved that great breakthrough, he threw it away in the biggest game of all, against a coach who, of all those of the now dominant German school, has been the most influenced by him.
Tuchel’s Chelsea conceded only two goals in seven Champions League knockout games, an extraordinary transformation from the Chelsea who had been notorious for conceding on the counter under Frank Lampard. They too temper their pressing by holding possession, and achieve a basic solidity by protecting their back three with two holders – one of them the phenomenon that is N’Golo Kante. That might be too predictable for the long term, but in his first half season at the club it worked.
And that is the enigma of
Pep Guardiola. He has shaped modern football more profoundly than anybody, and yet misfortune and a couple of key defeats have bred an insecurity that leads him to undermine himself in key games. All geniuses need their flaws, and that is his.