- Pep Guardiola agreed to sign a new contract with Manchester City on Tuesday
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Some things never change. Perennial champions Manchester City lose football matches in the autumn. And Pep Guardiola agrees to extend contracts in November.
Tuesday night brought news that will have had executives in the richest boardrooms across the country reaching for extra jumpers, although even the additional layers won’t stop the shivers prompted by the realisation of yet more Guardiola, a seemingly endless Guardiola.
He was ready to swear off all this just a few months ago. Shattered at the end of climbing English football’s Everest, becoming the first manager to chalk up four consecutive titles. He was done, energy zapped.
Those who know things around City were talking about 2025 marking the end of a chapter, with both their stellar boss and sporting director Txiki Begiristain expected to call time on an era like no other. Staff were under the impression that this would be it, a last dance.
But then Guardiola had another hit and that was just too much to give up. Setting himself bigger targets, bringing in new faces, finding new ways of defeating those incessant low blocks. He just can’t leave it alone. This is a drug like no other.
At this rate, maybe he’ll never leave just keep going on and on, waving as the next pretenders come and go in attempts to snatch the crown. November again, a deal agreed in principle for another year and potentially 12 months on top of that.
It comes four years to the day since City were stumbling through a similar spell to the one they are enduring now: performances not at their finest, disappointing results.
There had been noise, then, that he was bidding farewell, albeit not as loudly as this time.
Guardiola sent a message by extending his contract that year – even if some staff were left surprised that he committed, unsure of how he would pick the team up – and the same is true now.
Those players will notice. The confusion and uncertainty is eradicated as soon as City flash the story up on their website.
It brings more calm to proceedings that have been anything but smooth over the last month. Do City’s displays improve immediately? Perhaps not – they didn’t in 2020 – but the decision to plant his flag again leaves the squad in no doubt of what is expected of them from now until the season’s end.
The potential for anything fizzling out dissipates.
‘He has elevated me to a level I didn’t know I could reach,’ Ballon d’Or winner Rodri said recently. ‘He gives you a toolbox and you have more tools than the rest.’
Guardiola’s relationship with chairman Khaldoon Al-Mubarak is key in these decisions – the pair have holidayed together with their families in the past – and the latter was always going to make a huge play to keep the club’s prized asset.
Because that is what he is: for all the brilliance of Erling Haaland, Kevin De Bruyne, Phil Foden. The City juggernaut is about the man who drives it. The man who has wandered through the club’s training ground the morning after Christmas parties complaining that nobody else is working.
He is a force of nature, someone who drags staff with him and someone who quickly identified with City as a club. As a man full of surprises, that is perhaps the biggest one since he arrived here, suited and wearing white trainers, in 2016.
That guy would not have pegged this job as a decade-long crusade. Not a chance.
He’s free in Manchester, free of the politics which blighted spells at Barcelona and to a lesser extent Bayern Munich. There is the odd difference of opinion in the transfer market but certainly at the training ground, and in preparation for fixtures, the Catalan is not left wanting.
A feeling of gratitude doubtless comes into play and the schedule of next summer’s Club World Cup must have weighed heavily on Guardiola as he worked out his next move. There will likely be less than a month between the end of that competition and the 2025-26 season beginning.
Aside from having the successor shadow him over in America, how would City have dealt with that? The ramifications of no pre-season with a new voice would definitely have had an impact in the interim period.
The post-Guardiola conundrum is set to be kicked down the road a little further and City could not be happier about that, giving new sporting director Hugo Viana more time to bed in before a new man projects some stability at a time when the champions are going toe-to-toe with the Premier League in two huge cases off the pitch.
They’ve done Guardiola a few favours over the years and this is just another one he is offering in return.
