Despite permanently transforming English football, Pep Guardiola has under-performed with Man City in Europe
Visuals of football players in sky blue shirts with shining grins glorifying a gorgeous shiny silver trophy around an incredibly huge stadium on the continent in front of admirers, throwing their coach into the air midst the party poppers, fireworks, and champagne should have been the defining images of these year. Pep Guardiola should have been the spearhead of the world’s most brilliant team, the Harlem Globetrotters, marching them to triumph by maiming the ancient battalions who had held the European Cup for far too long.
Unfortunately, six years later, Manchester City‘s only evidence of playing in Europe is a vector illustration loop of long lens photographs of Guardiola kneeling, head-in-hands, mouth open, begging to the skies without receiving any answers. Guardiola and City had methodically implemented his game-plan at the Estadio Santiago Bernabeu on Wednesday evening, earning themselves a crack at overcoming Liverpool in a Parisian final that this epoch of football had been ramping up to for years. Manchester City had been kicked over for the second time in six minutes, scheming to waste all their hard work and effectiveness against an undeniably inferior football club in six minutes of self-inflicted turmoil.
Guardiola and City might be excused if this was a one-off for the visitors, an explainable breakdown in the face of magical power against a squad simply too brilliant to keep back. But that is not the situation, because this is a trend that runs through their common history as well as Guardiola’s personal Champions League failure over the last decade. Guardiola has led Bayern Munich in three seasons and Manchester City in six since winning the second of his two European Cups with Barcelona in 2011. After building totally superb teams worthy of shredding the opponent week after week over the course of whole league campaigns, a single final is nothing short of abysmal.
When City plays in the final stages of European competition, the precision and discipline that they have been able to accomplish so regularly under Guardiola in England just vanishes. The players are the same, and the sticks don’t shift, but the mentality and context of playing in the Champions League, with the show, the music, and the whistling, appears to fracture the force-field City has so meticulously and masterfully created around them.
