The 11-point lead at the top of the Premier League table does not tell the full story. You have to listen to Pep Guardiola’s players to see what he brings, manhandling and yelling at them until they see the light.
‘Guardiola’s switched my brain back on,’ Raheem Sterling observed recently, describing the critical change in body shape that his manager has taught him to adopt when receiving the ball.
Eric Abidal once described his initial annoyance at being shouted at like ‘a 15-year-old’ by Guardiola and being ordered ‘to stay back when my strength was getting forward’. He was a Barcelona Champions League-winning defender inside two years. ‘Tactically I have never come across anyone like him,’ he said.
Pep Guardiola has enjoyed success at every club he has managed but it has come at a price
Manchester City’s players are enjoying plenty of success under manager Guardiola
Kyle Walker is just one of the players that Guardiola spent a premium for in the summer
So speak those touched by a managerial master whose teams exhibit the football of the gods and don’t so much win as dominate – grinding everyone else into the dust. With that 16-match unbeaten stretch in the Premier League behind him, Guardiola has now secured the longest winning league runs in German, Spanish and English football history.
Yet it is equally irrefutable that he is the man who has been able to buy success; working at three clubs – Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City – which have been in the world’s five richest by income and spending during his time with them.
He’s not so far from becoming a transfer market £1bn man, laying out £896.6m since starting out at Barcelona in 2008. Jose Mourinho – whose £1.1bn expenditure exceeds that of any other manager – and Carlo Ancelotti, who’s shelled out £970m, are the only two who have spent more.
Guardiola’s total spend as manager of Barcelona during his four seasons at the Nou Camp
The Spanish boss spent £62.5million on striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic from Inter Milan
But the Catalan has laid out £99.6m a year on average, compared with Mourinho’s £65m and Ancelotti’s £44m.
For a truer, more accurate sense of the value the 46-year-old adds as a manager, we need to take away the money. But since he’s not going to manage Burnley or Bournemouth any time soon, the best means of assessing the value Guardiola adds is to see how things change at a club when he arrives and leaves and establish if he takes them to places they’ve never known before.
The evidence isn’t overwhelming. At Barcelona, there was an immediate uplift in the win percentage, despite the club spending roughly the same amount on players as before. But Barcelona had won both La Liga and Champions League titles in the two years before Guardiola took over.
He has had the experience of working with the best players in the world like Lionel Messi
He delivered a further three domestic titles and two Champions Leagues in four years there and, in the five years since he left, they’ve clinched another three La Ligas and one Champions League. We can’t say categorically that no other manager could have had the same effect, with the gift of Lionel Messi at his disposal.
Bayern Munich had won the Bundesliga title in the year before Guardiola arrived and clinched it again in each of his three years with them. But despite spending £183.5m there, they underperformed in Europe. Bayern, reigning Champions League winners when he was recruited, could get no further than the semi-finals during his tenure, with a 5-0 aggregate hammering by Real Madrid along the way.
After a first season without trophies, Guardiola is certainly creating an extraordinary City, with a £406.1m outlay which already exceeds his four-year Barcelona spend by £100m. But to be transformative – to do what no one else has done – he must take them to a Champions League final and win the league by the kind of advantage they now hold.
Guardiola’s total spend as manager of Bayern Munich during his three seasons there
The most he spent on an individual at Bayern Munich was the £34m that paid for Arturo Vidal
Many will say these numbers provide a very narrow interpretation of the unquantifiable aspects of what Guardiola brings. The beautiful fluency of his teams. The transformation of players, including seemingly average ones like Nicolas Otamendi. A capacity to reinvent players and locate talents they never thought they had. It was Guardiola who converted Barca’s Javier Mascherano and Yaya Toure into centre backs and who is developing Fabian Delph as a promising full back.
Ironically, the fact that Guardiola is not always at his best in the transfer market supports the notion that it’s about more than the money with him. Martin Caceres, Dmytro Chygrynskiy and Zlatan Ibrahimovic (collective cost: £100m) were all duds for Barcelona while the less said about £14m Claudio Bravo at City the better. Money doesn’t always guarantee success, either. Paris Saint-Germain’s failure last season proved that, even though it is almost universally true in the modern era that the clubs who pay big wages prosper most.
Guardiola’s total spend as manager of Manchester City since his arrival there last summer
Guardiola forked out £52m on full back Walker who joined in the summer from Tottenham
But the managers who really prove they are geniuses will transform not just one club but two – and not just with cash.
They include Brian Clough at Derby County before Nottingham Forest and Sir Alex Ferguson at Aberdeen and Manchester United. Ferguson’s achievements eclipsed Clough’s because he sustained success for so long.
A study by the top expert in this field, Prof Stefan Szymanski, established that Ferguson delivered success for many years while barely outspending his rivals.
Guardiola has City on course for the Premier League title after an incredible start to the season
And there is an intriguing way of testing whether City’s manager has what Ferguson possessed for all that time.
Five years ago, after Fabio Capello had left England, an intermediary contacted then FA chairman David Bernstein to convey Guardiola’s interest in the vacant position, during his sabbatical after leaving Barcelona.
He was never interviewed because it was decided that England’s next manager must be English and Roy Hodgson was recruited instead. Perhaps, some day that chance will arise again. Then we’ll really see what this man is made of.