One Thousand Games of Obsession

Seventeen years, one man and his chase for perfection

Manel Estiarte has a pet term: “the law of 32 minutes.”

It’s a rainy Sunday evening in Manchester. The temperature has slipped below double digits, signposting winter’s arrival. In the city’s east, Manchester City are playing Liverpool in the Premier League. Their head coach, Pep Guardiola, wearing his trademark all-black trainers, is furiously gesticulating at Rayan Cherki, who has surrendered possession twice in five minutes. “Rayaaan! Short pass inside! Open the body!” Football managers like barking instructions from the touchline; Guardiola speaks in shapes and patterns.

This is his 1000th game in top-flight football management. Manchester City probe at Liverpool all evening, twisting and stretching their defence, pulling them into a mesh of open threads until the referee calls for mercy. The final scoreline reads 3-0 to City, but it could’ve easily been five or six.

After the game, Guardiola shares a quick, perfunctory handshake with his counterpart, Arne Slot, and walks over to his boys. His celebration is typically muted, almost matter of fact. For Guardiola, it was simply another match ticked over, a set of questions answered, a new one to prepare for.

“You invite him for a meal in a restaurant, hoping that he’ll forget about football,” Estiarte tells the author Martí Perarnau in the book, Pep Confidential¹, “but 32 minutes later you can see his mind is already wandering.”

Estiarte and Guardiola’s friendship goes back to the mid-1990s. At the time, Guardiola was the vice-captain at FC Barcelona and one of the most sought-after defensive midfielders in the world, Estiarte a multiple Olympic medallist in water polo. Many years later, Guardiola wrote the foreword to Estiarte’s autobiography Todos Mis Hermanos and called him a guardian angel. Estiarte has been the only constant in Guardiola’s coaching staff across sixteen seasons and three clubs, a satellite to his perpetually-running laboratory.

In Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning², Guillem Balague recalls Guardiola’s habits as Barcelona manager. “Despite having twenty-four assistants, he worked longer hours than most of them and although the club offered him a unit of experts who could analyse games, he could never bring himself to surrender control of that part of the job,” Balague says. He also catches Guardiola admitting, “for me, the most wonderful thing is planning what is going to happen in each game.”

Phillip Lahm, ex-Germany and Bayern Munich captain and one of the greatest to have ever played football, once likened Guardiola to a chess grandmaster. “Some coaches seek to reduce the complexity of football. Guardiola, though, wants to master it.”

Since the summer of 2016, Guardiola has been the head coach at Manchester City, although it’s probably more fitting to call him ‘Chief Architect’ instead of the thin ‘coach’ or ‘manager’. He’s the oracle at that club, controlling everything from recruitment and staff to nutrition and training.

All or Nothing: Manchester City, the documentary following the 2017-18 Premier League season, lays naked Guardiola’s unbearable obsession for perfection. Professional footballers already at the edge of the sport’s boundaries get pushed further still; sports scientists with fat CVs face interrogations about recurring muscle injuries. And yet, there is a near cult-like devotion to his ways. Perhaps everyone realises that rare is the mind that can engage you in a conversation about the acidity of a coffee bean, and then tie that information to player performance.

That’s just Pep Guardiola. And to understand him today, it’s worth understanding how he was created.

In the summer of 1988, Josep Guardiola - ‘Pep’ is a common Catalan nickname for Josep - was 17 years old, playing as a midfielder in Barcelona’s youth team. The coaches saw a first‑team future once his frame caught up with his natural understanding of the game.

One morning, Johan Cruyff, Barcelona’s new head coach and football’s philosopher-king, walked into training. He spotted the skinny lad in midfield and asked the youth team coach to “play him as the pivote - a difficult position to adapt to and one not used by many teams in Spain at that time.”³ Within minutes, Cruyff’s intuition proved correct. Guardiola was a natural.

In a possession-oriented side - a non-negotiable for every Cruyffian setup - the pivot is the composer and conductor. He sets the tempo, directs the play, decides when to hit and when to hold back. Every move flows through him. In defensive situations, the pivot is responsible for intercepting opposition moves before they blossom. The best make it look effortless, but it’s probably the most demanding role on the pitch. You can’t tune out for a second.

Guardiola was born for this. In two years, Cruyff pulled him into the first team. In two more, still just 21 years old, Guardiola was starting as Barcelona’s pivot in a Champions League final at Wembley. The captain’s armband didn’t take long to come either.

He was so good, in 2001, Sir Alex Ferguson wanted him at Manchester United, to improve a team that had just won a hat-trick of Premier League titles. In the foreword to Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning, Ferguson writes, “Sometimes, you look back at a really top player and you say to yourself: ‘I wonder what it would have been like if he’d have come to United?’ That is the case with Pep Guardiola.”

There was something unique about the way he read and understood the game. His intelligence extended beyond his own choices, into a more collective territory - how the team should move, what pass to play when. It was as if Cruyff had hand-crafted him to carry the torch of Dutch-Latin expressionist football into the future.

“Without him [Cruyff], I wouldn’t be here,” Guardiola once said in an interview. It can come across as grandiose, crediting a once-in-a-lifetime career to a guide. But he isn’t exaggerating. Cruyff is the prism through which Guardiola is best seen. His current club, Manchester City, have a feature page on their website called ‘The Cruyff Way’, despite never crossing paths with the man.

***

In 2008, Pep Guardiola became the head coach of Barcelona. He was 37 years old, coaching Barcelona B - the club’s youth team. That summer, Barcelona had dilly-dallied before finalising a new coach. One popular choice was the ex-Chelsea man and multiple title-winner Jose Mourinho. Some others, who had seen Guardiola’s Barca B, wanted the local boy to be given the first team reigns.

Cruyff got the veto - he always did at Barcelona - and couldn’t stomach the idea of his club embracing Mourinho’s attritional style of football. To him, it was borderline repulsive, antithetical to everything Barcelona should stand for. So, twenty years after he had first looked at Guardiola and trusted his intuition, he gambled again.

A warm, romantic story had commenced its final act. Like Guillem Balague writes, “never before had a ball boy from the Camp Nou progressed through the youth ranks, captained the first team and then returned to the club as coach.”

Camp Nou, from the other side of the white chalk. Photo credits: Tsutomu Takasu | Wikimedia Commons

Because of Barcelona’s stature, and because of what came after, there’s a myth that Guardiola inherited a pot of gold, a debut gig with a support cast brimming with talent, primed for success. Not all of it. Some senior players had befriended decadence a bit too much. One, already notorious for his love of the high life, had come to pre-season with a flabby waist and bloated cheeks. A short conversation later, Ronaldinho, one of the greatest footballers of his generation, was out of Barcelona. Deco was next, following him through the exit door a few days later. These were the kind of names young coaches would kill to start their careers with.

Granted a free hand, Guardiola set upon building his chapel from the ground up. He laid down the foundational rules: one, the team had to be collaborative and committed, no mavericks anymore; and two, most of the raw materials would be sourced locally.

Guardiola had spent a lot of time with the Barcelona youth teams, seen gangly kids blossom into teenagers imbibed in the Barca Way. He had played with a some of the earlier graduates too. Bringing them all together and playing a certain kind of football was the only way he could get the club back to its Cruyffian roots.

Johan Cruyff coached like a cartographer. The ball was to be cherished, like a loved one, but never let to stagnate. Receive, pass, move into open spaces. It didn’t matter if you were a defender or centre-forward, the rules of creativity and protection applied to everyone. His teams stretched opponents, carving gaps into their defence with near surgical precision. And when the ball was lost, the closest players swarmed the opponents. Every second without the ball was a second wasted.

Those lessons formed the blueprint upon which Guardiola sketched his creations, though with modernist flourishes. It was football carrying all the Dutch and Spanish colours and shapes, but executed at a velocity fit for YouTube. Short, sharp one-touch passes, neat triangles, numerical overloads, and then a razor-like pass to slice through the opponents. This genre earned the rhythmic, onomatopoeic label: Tiki Taka.

It was mesmerising to watch some of the most naturally gifted footballers on the planet - Xavi, Iniesta, Busquets, Villa, Eto’o, Henry, Messi - paint neat moving patterns on the pitch. All of them, without exception, credited Guardiola with unlocking something they didn’t know they were capable of.

Barcelona won 194 out of the 255 games under Guardiola. In those four years, they won 14 out of 20 possible titles. That team is now a reference point in football history, one of its highest peaks. Cruyff influenced a university of 21st century coaches, but Guardiola elevated those principles to a level never seen before.

For the first time in nearly three decades, a team had so publicly discarded the idea of physicality and given themselves to artistry. Even in defence, their structural control was unique for its time. Guardiola’s Barcelona had a five-second rule: they had five seconds to win the ball back after losing possession. In those five seconds, every outfield player had to participate in suffocating the opponent. And if they couldn’t, they retreated into a compact ten-man block. The distance between the front man in the block and their last defender didn’t exceed 25 metres. Try building a move with ten players chasing you down in a 25x50 pocket of space.

In 2009 and 2011, Barcelona met Manchester United in two Champions League finals - one in Rome and the next in London. Manchester United, at the time, were serial league winners in England. They’d also won the Champions League in 2008. In those two finals, some of the names they sent out were: Rooney, Ronaldo, Giggs, Scholes, Ferdinand, Vidic, Tevez, Berbatov. Generational footballers, all.

Across 180 minutes, the contest lasted for the first ten. In Rome, United enjoyed a good opening burst. Then, Guardiola slid Messi to the middle and shifted Samuel Eto’o to the right. For the next eighty minutes of that night, and all ninety in London, Sir Alex Ferguson could only watch with a clenched fist and reddening face as Guardiola’s team turned his players into props for their exhibition.

By then, the world had also begun tilting. Spain won consecutive Euros and a World Cup playing a near-copy of Barcelona’s style. Manchester United had become more deliberate in possession. Bayern Munich wanted to do what Guardiola was doing. The 4-3-3 - his pet formation at Barcelona - had become ubiquitous in Europe.

When Guardiola finally left Barcelona in 2012, he was courted by every major football club you could think of, including those who had previously thumbed a nose at his style for being “too cute”.

At Bayern Munich, where Guardiola next went, the mandate was different from Barcelona in 2008: just win us the best things. Here, he didn’t need to rebuild, just reinvigorate.

His Bayern, like his Barca, were breathtaking, almost ferocious. Everyone found a new level to their game. This one time, Robert Lewandowski scored five goals in nine minutes. Pep made Phillip Lahm play in defence, midfield, wing, wherever he wanted control. Lahm, in turn, executed everything to a degree of mastery that made you wonder if he was lab-generated. Something about great minds finding other great minds through sheer intuition.

At times, Guardiola’s Bayern won the league with five weeks in the season still to go, which was an improvement on their usual number of three. There were games against title-rivals where he deployed all kinds of strange formations, some without specialist forwards, others without specialist centre-backs. And he’d win every damn time.

But - and this is key - he couldn’t win the Champions League in three attempts. Bayern were winning the Bundesliga every season anyway; Pep was brought in to turn them into regular European winners. His looked like a failure because his predecessor, Juup Heynckes, had won it the season before he joined.

In one semi-final, Guardiola’s Bayern squared up against Barcelona. It wasn’t quite his Barcelona anymore, but one built with his parts. Guardiola had to set up a defence that could neutralise Messi, Suarez, and Neymar - three of the best attacking talents in the world at the time. Instead of choosing extra defensive cover, he went man-to-man. And he then watched his defenders get publicly rinsed by MSN. Messi sent Jerome Boateng scurrying back, then, with one shift of the hips, flat on his ass.

That evening crystallised a stereotype that was already forming into a joke: Guardiola overthinks. Usually, a deep-thinker would be cherished in his profession, but this was aimed as a pejorative. According to many, including some who’d been in his orbit, his tendency to rabbithole for every minuscule detail was stifling his players, and by extension, his teams.

Guardiola left Bayern and joined Manchester City in the summer of 2016. For the first few years, the patterns were immediately recognisable. A beautiful, intricate style of football, intense defensive work, and a team that went from good to great to near-unplayable. Titles rolled in every year, records were broken multiple times over. In the most competitive league in the world, Pep’s Manchester City were running riot.

Between 2020 and 2024, he won four league titles in a row - no English team had done that before. City became the first Premier League team to reach 100 points in a season.

But, like at Bayern, he couldn’t crack the Champions League. Here too, he was on the doorstep but couldn’t finish the job. City reached the Champions League final in 2021. That night, against Chelsea, Guardiola sent out a lineup without a central defensive midfielder. Do you want to guess which open space Chelsea used to score their only, and winning, goal?

But, unlike Bayern, City’s football leadership and structure had been moulded for Guardiola. Half their directors had been poached from Barcelona. So they gave him time, money, and an arm around his shoulders when the skies turned cloudy.

It took him time, but Guardiola got there. In his seventh season at Manchester City, armed with a part-human part-comic book superhero Erling Haaland, Pep Guardiola saw his team win the Champions League. That season, City also won the treble of league, domestic cup, and European title - becoming only the second English team, after Manchester United, to achieve it.

Finally. Picture credit: Manchester City

And yet, seventeen years of spellbinding football later, there is still a slight hesitation, a “but” lurking at the end of sentences, while placing Guardiola amongst the all-time greats. Maybe it comes down to the crests he has worn.

Let’s start with Manchester City. City are one of the richest clubs in the world, funded by the United Arab Emirates’s state-run sports arm. UAE’s vice president, Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is one of their owners.

A letterhead like that can make you feel like you hover beyond others. In February 2023, Man City were charged by the Premier League with 115 breaches of the league’s financial rules. That number has since been upgraded to 134. The court hearings began only as late as September 2024, and predictably yielded diddly squat. Eventually, the Premier League and Manchester City settled to not waste each others’ time anymore.

The case essentially alleges City of financial doping. State sponsorships were passed off as income for the club, thus allowing the team to splurge unchecked in the transfer market. One glaring admission of guilt was the armada of top-bill lawyers City turned up to court with. They spent more than 30 million pounds in legal fees alone.

And when you consider what’s happened more recently, financial doping is still a relatively harmless transgression. The UAE government has been accused of supplying arms to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) - a Sudanese paramilitary group carrying out the killing and ethnic cleansing of non-Arab communities in the Darfur region. The government has flatly denied any such involvement, despite what the UN calls, “smoking gun evidence”. City have obviously neither been asked nor commented on matters beyond their training ground.

It’s convenient, this coating of defiance that keeps a club’s ownership at arm’s length when discussing genocide but involves them for season previews and post-title bus parades. But that’s Manchester City, that’s Newcastle United when they were owned by Saudi Arabia’s sports arm, that’s Paris Saint-Germain with Qatar, and many other clubs with dodgy American owners. It’s the accepted order in 21st century football.

That’s why reconciling a team’s actions with someone’s personal politics becomes a complex territory. Any sweeping conclusion sounds reductive, judgemental. Take Guardiola himself, for instance. In a recent video, he urged the people of Barcelona to come together for a special football match to be played next week in the city to honor Palestinian athletes killed in Gaza. “It is more than just a game,” he said. “It is a cry of solidarity in tribute to the more than 400 Palestinian athletes who were assassinated in Gaza. Let’s fill the stadium.” He also continues to lend his voice towards Catalan identity and fair elections in Spain.

Manchester City don’t, by any consideration, represent football’s ideal tenets, but much of it is beyond a coach or a player’s control. There is, however, something else Guardiola can be asked about: their financial indulgence. And that’s a more direct criticism, something that has tailed him all his career.

Guardiola’s list of employers, as coach, read: Barcelona, Bayern Munich, and Manchester City. These names represent a lineage of excellence and success, sure. But they also embody football’s deep financial imbalance. They earn and spend a scale of money their peers can’t comprehend. Like Barney Ronay says here, “Guardiola has only ever worked from the inside of this imbalance of power.”

In the summer that he joined Manchester City, he greenlit a transfer spend of more than 200 million Euros. One of the newcomers was the Chilean goalkeeper Claudio Bravo. Over the season, Pep grew unhappy with Bravo, so the following summer, City spent 40 million euros to get the Brazilian ‘keeper Ederson. A similar process was used for full-backs - one set bought, then ditched for a new one. Between two summer transfer windows, City spent 533 million euros. The average for the rest of the Premier League was less than one-third of that.

It was much the same at Bayern. Bayern Munich have a habit of ransacking the rest of the Bundesliga with their spending power. Most years, they stroll to the league championship without much hassle or competition. On the odd occasion when a lively unit breaks their rhythm, the next summer brings inevitable pillage. During Guardiola’s time, Bayern picked apart their biggest rival, Borussia Dortmund - first taking Mario Gotze, then their most prized asset: Robert Lewandowski.

So, yes, Guardiola’s teams spend. There is an unmistakable whiff of luxury to his teams, even accounting for his genius. Unlike, say, a Ferguson, who won a European title with little-known Aberdeen, or Jose Mourinho, who won the Champions League with Porto, he has only ever operated with the highest grade of players on the highest salaries.

It brings up a question - is he truly a great chef or can he cook up a lovely, pass-out-and-dream meal only if the rarest gourmet ingredients are kept on his kitchen countertop? What’s his legacy going to be?

The answer isn’t all that complex.

In a recent episode of the Mind The Game podcast, Steph Curry spoke about the rise of the Golden State Warriors - the San Francisco-based NBA team - from talented competitors to four NBA titles between 2015 and 2022. Curry was their centrepiece.

During the 2014 pre-season camp, new coach Steve Kerr got the GSW team in front of a screen. He wanted them to subtly change their attacking play, to add more rhythm and fluidity, a bit of unpredictability. Kerr played them clips of Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona.

“They really liked it,” Kerr said in 2023. “Years later, when I had forgotten all about it, we made a great play with a lot of passes to get a layup and Klay Thompson, from the other side of the court, looked at me and yelled, ‘tiki-taka!’”

If your work transcends your sport and finds admiration in an analysis room thousands of miles away, years after you introduced it to the world, you’ve created something timeless.

A couple of afternoons before his 1000th game, Guardiola sat down in a dimly-lit room as a SkySports presenter played a line of phone-shot video messages from Premier League managers to have crossed the 1000-game landmark. Amongst them were Arsene Wenger and Rafael Benitez. Sir Alex Ferguson sent in a written note.

The warmest video came from Jurgen Klopp - Guardiola’s greatest rival, in some ways his ideological opposite, and perhaps the only manager with a positive head-to-head record. “I’ve said it a million times, that it was a pleasure and an honour to face you that often,” Klopp said. “You were and you are, an inspiration. The way you understand football is second to none.”

When you look beyond Klopp and Ferguson, to the next generation of coaches, the scale of Guardiola’s influence truly comes home. The current league toppers in England, Germany, and Spain are all coached by Guardiola disciples - Mikel Arteta, Vincent Kompany, and Xabi Alonso. The internet is filled with their interviews crediting Guardiola for igniting the coaching spark and helping develop their eye for details. And yet, they aren’t homogenous. Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal looks very different from, say, Vincent Kompany’s Bayern Munich. They’ve gone about building their styles like Guardiola himself once did.

Even now, as the Premier League goes through a two-week break, Guardiola is probably picking at the defensive shape of Manchester City’s next opponents. Watch him then, in his 1001st game, prowling the touchline, one hand scratching his head, another pointed to a specific patch of grass, as he asks a midfielder to move four and three-quarters yards to the right.

1. Great book, read.

2. Guillem Balague and Spanish football = goodread.

3. From Phil Ball’s book, Morbo.