MORAL GUARDIOLA - Pep can be both right to speak out as well as a hypocrite fluffing for despots

He shouldn’t just stick to football – it strays into propaganda and death

7 Feb 2026 - THE GUARDIAN / Sport

Barney Ronay

You may find yourself living in a glass and steel yak-fur-lined penthouse. You may find yourself with six Premier League titles and a sport refashioned in your image. You may find yourself in front of a large advert board covered in words such as Experience Abu Dhabi, haunted by images of suffering, a scythe clanking gently at your shoulder. And you may say, well, how did I get here?

There are only ever two types of Pep Guardiola article. First, articles announcing that Guardiola’s influence has reached some new level of annihilating dominance, that what we have here is our own cashmere-draped, cranium-whirring Ideal Tactics Man, that Pep-ism is bigger than smartphones, bigger than internet porn, bigger than a mother’s love, that playing out from the back is now visible from space.

And second, articles that warn Pep Guardiola is not just finished but fatally exposed, emasculated, weak-chinned, pigeon-chested, cheese cubes tumbling from the pockets of his moth-riddled cardigan. Righteousness has come for him. Faces are being clawed. Keith Andrews can throw a kettle over a pub. They’re selling Pep wigs in Woolworths. The decade of bandy-legged futurism is over.

For years teams of sports scientists have chased the impossible dream of a third Guardiola article, some kind of alternate Pep space where he is neither a god-level maker of worlds or an all-out huckster, cheat and fraud.

There was a hint of something different earlier this season. Guardiola seemed carefree. He said tactics were “bullshit”. He went off happily over Christmas to tour the high-concept industrial food ateliers of Barcelona. At other times he has seemed cinematically listless and sated, like a footballing version of that 13-year-old kid who completed Tetris and was caught on film celebrating what quickly became a moment of terrifying emptiness, a game that ends by simply ticking over to all the nines like the millennium clock.

Pep has also done this. He has completed football Tetris. He has tessellated human blocks, made cubes and triangles and oblongs into a perfect sporting maths. Victory happened. Like Tetris Kid he must process the void, interface with humans, stop looking at the sky waiting for blocks to fall.

And now, finally, we have this: the political campaigning of Pep Guardiola. From a standing start, Pep has gone full anti-autocrat. Voice of the underclass. Hammer of dictators. Chief employee of the UAE soft power outreach arm. It is a remarkable plot twist.

In Barcelona last week Guardiola spoke with clarity and moral purpose about the bloodshed and oppression in Palestine. On Tuesday there was an unexpectedly gripping press conference where he shifted seamlessly from duels, half-spaces and transitions to talking about all suffering everywhere, saving the kids, saving your kids, saving the kids of kids, like listening to a charity cover of Earth Song over the top of a hyperintense Youtube tactics video.

There are two obvious things worth saying about this. First, Guardiola is right. Good on him. It doesn’t matter who you are or what else is in your wing mirror. Using a public platform to highlight horrific militarised bloodshed can only ever be a good thing. More of this.

Guardiola even mentioned Sudan, perhaps in part to pre-empt accusations of blindness to his complicity in the whole area of autocratic states inflicting suffering beneath a comfort blanket of sport. And this is of course the second thing here.

Guardiola is right. He shouldn’t stick to football, not when football strays relentlessly into power, propaganda and death. But he is also, and there is no other way of putting this, a profound and performative hypocrite.

It’s fine to say this, while also supporting his right to speak and applauding what he says. It’s not even a contentious statement, just an obvious A-B piece of logic. But it is also important because of the sheer scale of his hypocrisy, a hypocrisy that also tells us something universal. Even here Guardiola is ahead of the tide line. Maybe he’s the greatest hypocrite. Or at least the perfect hypocrite for our times.

This isn’t an addendum or a tag-on. Arguably it is the most interesting part of the Pep-as-activist dynamic. There was a depressing headline on an article on this topic in the Athletic this week, suggesting Pep deserves praise (correctly) but also rolling its eyes at “the inevitable whataboutery” that will follow.

It is a glib and dehumanising word in this context. Almost 500 patients and doctors massacred in a hospital in Darfur. Piles of bodies so large they are visible on satellite imagery. These are not whatabouts. They’re actual people. Their deaths have been enabled and funded, it is claimed, by Pep Guardiola’s employers, who deny any involvement.

And yes it’s just a headline. And yes it is also necessary for subscription publishers to couch their statements in a way that is most agreeable to a tribal readership, a flaw in the model where the challenge is to publish truth people don’t want to hear.

But the entire moral framework collapses when we interpret one of the great horrors of the age through the vocabulary of football banter. This is not an argument about refereeing decisions. This is death and suffering directly linked to the institution telling you about death and suffering. Mainly though, it isn’t a tangent because Pep is a main character. It is commendable that he mentions Sudan, but also wildly on point given his status as a hugely successful fluffer for a regime that is, as we speak, enabling bloodshed.

In the end Guardiola on Sudan should probably just stand as one for historians of the post-apocalyptic future; evidence of the struggle for soft power, the co-opting of spectacle, and the inescapable nature of the machine.*