Manchester City finished second in the Premier League and was knocked out of the Champions League in the round of 16, meaning Guardiola’s era had come to an end. There is no doubt that Pep Guardiola will be remembered as one of the best managers in the Premier League. Guardiola dominated English football with six Premier League titles between the seasons 2017/18 and 2023/24, where City won four consecutive titles.
Guardiola was ranked by World In Sport as the second-best manager in Premier League history for his outstanding achievements. During his 330 games at City, his win percentage was the highest of all managers, 72 %, and a total of 18 trophies won.
Alex Ferguson is considered the best manager because of his 13 Premier League titles and 38 trophies in total, but during many more seasons, 810 matches in total, compared to Pep Guardiola’s, whose accomplishments have been significant in many more ways than just trophies.
Manchester City has probably played the most beautiful football in the Premier League for several seasons. At the same time, Guardiola’s experimental approach to football innovation and his intention to constantly implement new ideas have brought critical voices not only to the city of Manchester but also sparked a grand debate about whether his style of football is utopian or dystopian.
From Cruyff to Mazzone and the influence of Italian Football
Pep Guardiola was raised in the world-famous Catalan academy La Masia, where he rose through the ranks and made his debut for the Barcelona first team in 1990. He was influenced by Holland’s Johan Cruyff, who brought his artistry when he became manager at Barcelona, and spotted a young Guardiola, making him an important player in the first eleven. Cruyff implemented the Dutch style of play, totaalvoetbal (Total Football), which meant that all 11 players should be able to play each other’s roles. From his successful managerial career in Ajax, Cruyff also brought football culture to Barcelona:
“Winning is just one day, a reputation can last a lifetime,” said Cruyff. “Winning is an important thing, but to have your own style, to have people copy you, to admire you, that is the greatest gift.”
Pep Guardiola has compared Johan Cruyff to a father figure and said that his vision of football was largely shaped by the Dutch legend. In 11 years as a first-team player with Barcelona, Guardiola played almost 400 games and won 15 trophies. He learned from Cruyff that he should always want to keep learning, and maybe that was why Guardiola experienced Italian football while playing for Roma and Brescia at the end of his career.
Carlo Mazzone was one of the most influential Italian football managers, managing more Serie A matches than any other in Italian history and becoming a mentor to Guardiola. While he was influenced by the defensive-oriented Catenaccio style of play, Mazzone wanted to organise attacks from the build-up and control and dominate the game through possession, which would influence Pep Guardiola and his football philosophy.
Brescia’s Two Playmakers: Pirlo and Baggio
Carlo Mazzone was the legendary manager at Brescia who, in 2001, challenged Pep Guardiola’s idealistic Johan Cruyff philosophy with pragmatic, defensively oriented Italian football. This influenced him to include a new approach where defensive principles such as zonal marking, defensive tactical formations, and how to break down heavily structured low-defensive blocks were implemented into his football philosophy.
Guardiola embraced pragmatism to find solutions to challenges and became more tactically flexible. One of the most important tactical lessons was the importance of more specialised individual roles rather than shared responsibility in possession. Instead of the Total Football philosophy, where all players should be able to play each other’s role, Mazzone preferred specialisation.
Carlo Mazzone changed Andrea Pirlo from a trequartista, an offensive playmaking role, to a deep-lying midfield playmaker, called regista. Pirlo was considered to lack pace and strength and was therefore positioned deep in the midfield, where he had more time and space to control the rhythm and tempo in the build-up.
This differed from the traditional central midfield roles of, for example, the leading Italian managers Arrigo Sacchi and Fabio Capello, who preferred defensively strong players in the central midfield. Mazzone chose to use Andrea Pirlo’s talent and maximise his strengths, elevating his creativity and technical brilliance. Instead of forcing him to improve his pace, strength, or defensive abilities, Mazzone played defensive complementary players around him, especially Pierpaolo Bisoli.
Pep Guardiola replaced Pirlo as regista at Brescia and became the new deep-lying playmaker, orchestrating possession alongside one of Italy’s best players of all time, Roberto Baggio. Mazzone built Brescia around Baggio and formed his tactics to elevate the creativity of an ageing superstar. Baggio was given the freedom to play as a trequartista without any defensive responsibilities – contrary to many managers in his career who wanted Baggio to adapt to the Catenaccio system.
Il Divin Codino — the Divine Ponytail — was older when playing for Brescia, but with experience he could play smarter, and with his genius he could unlock any low defensive block in Serie A. Baggio became the model for the next generation of Italian superstars like Francesco Totti and Alessandro Del Piero. Eventually, the Brescia experience made Guardiola implement the playmaker roles, trequartista and regista, when he became manager in Catalonia, and elevated Xavi and Messi as well as the whole of Barcelona.
Guardiola’s Tiki-Taka and the Transformation of Possession
The New Barcelona was formed when Pep Guardiola became the manager in 2008. The succession meant that Frank Rijkaard, a legendary Dutch player with playmaking responsibilities at AC Milan during the 1990s, was replaced by another Catalan playmaker who brought new ideas. Pep Guardiola reshaped the team’s core principles, focusing on players who could adapt to the new system. All eleven players had to get involved in high pressing and in possession, which was controlled by the regista and trequartista.
Superstars were replaced with Catalan players who were raised in La Masia and truly understood the culture based on the slogan ”mes que un club”, more than a club, meaning Barcelona is more than a team of great stars. Even though the Cameroonian Samuel Eto’o was one of the best attackers in the world, he was replaced by the highly adaptable Spanish representative David Villa, who, instead of a centre-forward, became a left winger.
The fading Brazilian superstar Ronaldinho gave room for the next superstar, Lionel Messi, and instead of the French Ludovic Guly, Pedro Rodriguez became a hard-working winger. Yaya Toure from the Ivory Coast gave room for a promising academy player, Sergio Busquets, who became a key player in central midfield, and the creative offensive midfielder Andres Iniesta replaced the Portuguese superstar Deco. The Brazilian Sylvinho was replaced by Jordi Alba, who became a reliable fullback, while Gerard Piqué became a key player in the defence, replacing the Mexican Rafael Marqués.
Guardiola not only replaced the majority of the starting players, but he also transformed how possession should be controlled. Xavi, who primarily played as a number six, became the regista, and Messi, who was naturally a right inverted winger, transformed into a trequartista. Guardiola’s system in possession, Tiki-Taka, was based on the concept of the ”third player”, focusing on finding triangles to free the third player who could be positioned directly towards the opponent’s goal, ready to attack. The possession was characterised by one or two touches, fluid movements, and an interchange of positions, with the flow of play easily breaking the opponent’s pressing lines.
Eventually, the concept evolved into the ”fourth player,” who immediately received the ball in the penalty area from the third player, who became the assist maker for most of the goals. In Guardiola’s system, Busquets became the defensive anchor as number six. Like Andrea Pirlo in Brescia, Xavi could focus on his strengths and had the freedom to progress, initiating the build-up and becoming the third or even the fourth player under Guardiola, during which he scored more goals.
Eventually, the whole system changed in favour of Messi, who became the ultimate superstar and dominated world football. Guardiola followed in Mazzarone’s footsteps and built the whole team around Messi, much as Brescia was built around Baggio. Messi was supposed to unlock any defensive block, no matter how compact it was. The tactical lessons from Brescia were once again revitalised in a new context, where teams all over the world played Catenaccio football to try to stop Barcelona.
This was a turning point where Guardiola’s principles were changed, especially when Messi did not have to engage in high-pressure. Subsequently, the entire defensive play changed, and the pressing to win the ball became“always keep the ball”. Since the majority of the teams facing Barcelona played with a low defensive block throughout the game, there was no need to press, as Barcelona was allowed to keep the ball at will. Guardiola did not intend to ever give away the ball and let the opponents try to score. As long as Guardiola had Xavi and Messi, he could rely on their responsibility for the creativity in possession. But at Manchester City, he had no La Masia players, and he could never fully replicate his Barcelona regista and trequartista roles in other clubs. Therefore, Guardiola decided to build a new attacking system.
Manchester City’s Systematic Attacking Football
Pep Guardiola eventually left Barcelona, and when he joined Bayern Munich, he faced several tactical problems that constantly challenged him to experiment with different tactics and be innovative enough to make his possession-oriented system solve them. When opponents got better at defending in a low block, Guardiola accelerated the innovation of possession play, focused more on developing new principles, and thus transformed Tiki-Taka into systematic attacking football.
Even though Guardiola revolutionised English football with tactical innovations, such as the goalkeeper actively being part of the build-up, sometimes as a playmaker, and John Stones as an inverted centre-back, as well as inverted fullbacks who were supposed to overload the central midfield, in the end, the system was based on collective responsibility for creativity.
At Manchester City, the responsibility for creativity shifted from the individual to the collective level. Instead of relying on individual players like Messi and Xavi, all City players were expected to engage fully under Guardiola’s new system, called Juego de Posición, meaning Positional Play. Guardiola always wanted to control the ball, but emphasised controlling space through positional play. His system allows the players to act in accordance with certain rules, such as occupying only specific attacking zones on the pitch, with the aim of creating passing options and structured overloads to break pressing lines.
“The objective is to move the opponent, not the ball.”
The goal of possession is to have enough patience to force the defensive lines to move in different directions and shift in formation, creating pockets of space that the concept of “free man” can eventually exploit to attack around the penalty area. But critics argue that Guardiola’s system favours control over space and possession, at the expense of creativity and individual flair. As analysed in World In Sport, Guardiola tends to prefer ”system players”, who are criticised for playing too robotically, prioritising short, horizontal passes rather than showing attacking flair, dribbling 1v1, and shooting. Thus, according to the critics, the system has made the attacking play slower and more predictable, resulting in a lack of creativity and vertical play.
Great examples of this are Phil Foden and Savinho, who more or less lost their creative playing style at Manchester City. Jack Grealish at Aston Villa is another example, where he scored many more goals and was a creative midfielder who played with flair. In contrast, at Manchester City, he scored fewer goals and focused on systematic attacking football, where Haaland was expected to score goals inside the box.
Guardiola has therefore tried to play more directly with Halland and Doku as attacking players who have been allowed to dribble more freely 1v1 and score goals. Without a trequartista like Baggio or Messi, Manchester City is still heavily dependent on Haaland, who scored 27 goals in the 2025/26 season. Doku was the second-best goal scorer with only 5 goals. Compared to previous seasons, when City scored around 100 goals in total, it’s obvious that Guardiola’s system has consistently constrained attacks and reduced the number of goals.
In World In Sport, Manchester City’s possession was analysed, and it was noted that Guardiola lacked a central midfielder who could switch between direct and lateral play and control the game, as Xavi and Pirlo did. Neither Rodri nor John Stones has the capacity to play as a regista, and without David Silva or Bernardo Silva, who mostly stood for the playmaking and creativity, City has no natural regista.
Guardiola is retiring, and the systematic attacking football will be debated forever. For millions of fans around the world, Guardiola will be remembered as a utopian philosopher, similar to the legendary architect Antoni Gaudí, who built the cathedral La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. After all, Guardiola is part of the Catalan family and has built a legacy in Barcelona. That will forever be remembered as one of the most beautiful chapters in the history of football.
