Untold stories from a decade with Pep

Spaniard was a great innovator and the ultimate trophy hunter

24 May 2026 - Sunday Independent (Ireland)

James Ducker

February 15, 2022. José Alvalade Stadium, Lisbon Manchester City have just become the first team in Champions League history to lead an away knockout tie by at least four goals at half-time. Sporting have been taken apart in the first leg of their last-16 tie and many of the Portuguese club’s fans who have not headed for the exits are applauding City’s players off the pitch. Bernardo Silva has scored twice, Riyad Mahrez and Phil Foden one apiece. It has been a masterclass in attacking football. City have run riot. But those players, all smiles as they file into the dressing room expecting a pat on the back, are in for a nasty shock.

“Most managers would come in, tell everyone, ‘Well done’ and start thinking about substitutions to save energy. Not Pep Guardiola,” Ilkay Gundogan, City’s former treble-winning captain, said.

“He walked in and was fuming. He was picking apart some technical errors, misplaced passes in our own half and a lack of respect for the ball. He told us that if we played like that in the next round, we’d be out. He’s much tougher on you when you are winning. He’s terrified of complacency. He knows that the moment you think you are perfect is the moment you start losing. That Sporting game was a perfect example.”

The stories of Guardiola’s obsessive, uncompromising side are legion. This is a man who once tore a strip off unsuspecting first-team support staff because they were not celebrating goals raucously enough for his liking in a pre-season friendly City were winning at a canter.

“He started showing us footage of us sitting there, going, ‘What’s this? Why’s no one celebrating?’” one staffer reflected. “After that we wondered if we should start celebrating the goals in training as well.”

Picture Guardiola and it is sometimes hard to look beyond the purist in relentless pursuit of perfection. The meticulous workaholic who can squirrel himself away for hours in his office, alone with his thoughts. Sergio Aguero would chuckle on the occasions he walked past to find Guardiola pacing up and down in his socks, muttering to himself, only an incense candle and some classical music for company.

He is a man of almost manic intensity and eccentricity. Who can forget those images of him with self-induced cuts and scratches all over his face after attacking himself during the stress and tension of a frenetic 3-3 Champions League draw with Feyenoord? Or in a near-possessed state, up in the face of Southampton’s Nathan Redmond at the end of a last-gasp victory?

The great innovator meets the ultimate trophy hunter who, amid a deluge of silverware, victories and goals, has reinvented English football as we know it, his influence felt throughout the Premier League, down the leagues and on to grassroots pitches across the country.

But as City fans prepare to bid farewell to the greatest manager of his generation against Aston Villa at the Etihad Stadium — a coach who has turned their wildest dreams into reality — it is the warm, funny, generous, inspiring and human side of Guardiola that many who have worked with him will miss the most.

Underpinning all that success has been his charismatic leadership and captivating personality, a manager who pulls people together behind a common cause and, in the words of one, “made us feel like equals”.

“He’s like the Pied Piper — he leads and everyone just follows in behind,” a long-standing colleague said.

City’s critics paint the club as a cold, corporate construct and point to that catalogue of still unanswered alleged financial breaches (the club deny any wrongdoing) and assign a large asterisk to the trophy pile until told otherwise.

But Guardiola is the one who gives the club its warmth and charm. He has in effect become City, and one of the big reasons his impending exit will leave a void that is impossible to quantify.

‘Hello, this is Pep’

One former member of staff still laughs at the recollection of an amusing conversation between Guardiola and the staff member’s wife, who is not a football fan, at the end of his first title-winning season in 2018, when they finished with 100 points.

City had won the title with a month to go after Manchester United lost 1-0 at home against West Brom and had just one game a week left to play.

“Even though Pep wanted all these records we’d still go out. He’d be like, ‘Right, Sunday, we’ve got a game but then Monday, Tuesday we’ll go out’,” said the staffer. “It was every week. So by the time we got to the actual parade the day after the final game my missus was like: ‘You can’t go out again, it’s getting beyond a joke! You’re out all the time.’ And I’m like: ‘But Pep’s asking me to’.

“Anyway, we’re in the canteen having a few beers before we got on the parade bus and Pep says, ‘Are you out tonight?’ And I say: ‘I can’t. I think I’ll be left homeless if I go.’ So Pep goes: ‘Well, stay at my apartment if you want.’

‘I can’t Pep, it’s my missus.’

‘You want me to ring her? Come on, ring your missus.’

“Everyone was around us at the time. My missus answered. ‘Hello, this is Pep.’ She says: ‘Who?’ ‘It’s Pep Guardiola.’ She’s gone: ‘All right, yeah, go on?’ ‘Listen, I know we’ve been out a lot recently but we’ve just won the Premier League. I’ll have him home by two in the morning.’ My missus just replies, ‘One’ and hits the red button. Everyone’s there howling.”

Pep’s personal connection

Guardiola’s work ethic is legendary. Some close to him wonder whether, for all his talents and success, it is born in part from an insecurity that if he does not run himself into the ground something could be left to chance. But he also understands the importance of having fun, of levity, of personal connection.

Take that Christmas Day training session when he egged on the former kit man Brandon Ashton to dress up as Santa Claus and start running around the pitch. City’s players all creased up laughing as Guardiola stopped the session and encouraged Ashton to sing ‘Jingle Bells’. “He’s just brilliant at taking the stress out of a situation,” one source said.

Guardiola had certainly learnt and sought to make changes from his experiences at Barcelona and Bayern Munich, where at times he was guilty of a lack of empathy. If he was to impose his playing philosophy successfully on the Premier League, he knew he would need total buy-in from players and staff. And that would require a more approachable, less standoffish Pep.

The tone was set 10 days before he first stepped through the doors at City on July 1, 2016 when he asked for a list with the name and picture of every staff member at the club’s training ground.

“People had been on eggshells for the week before, wondering what he was going to be like,” one insider remembers. “But he turns up on his first day, greets Stacey on reception by name and everyone else that follows. That was a game-changer.”

The contrast with his predecessor, the distant, detached Manuel Pellegrini, could not have been starker. When Clive Wilton, head of facilities, was diagnosed with cancer, Guardiola had him talk to the entire squad in the dressing room, with the manager in tears, documenting the sacrifices he had made during Covid to ensure everything ran smoothly.

He drew inspiration from ordinary people doing extraordinary things. One such address about a father and his sick son brought Aguero to tears. On a training camp abroad, he bumped into a man working 16-hour days to support his family overseas that he had not seen for months and recounted it to his players to remind them how lucky they were to do what they do every day. Staff would be touched by his compassion. Guardiola told one to take all the time he needed after his son was born three months prematurely.

Speak to those closest to Guardiola and they feel his legacy goes beyond the extraordinary trophy haul and is better judged by how his playing style, ideas and innovations have permeated all levels of the game in England. “You watch non-League Gateshead playing out from the back and that’s where you see the extent of his impact,” one ally said.

Many of the managers now making waves — Mikel Arteta, Vincent Kompany, Xabi Alonso, Cesc Fabregas — have all been schooled by Guardiola in one form or another. But just as he has reshaped the way football is played in England, so England has had a huge influence on him.

He could not wait to play at Goodison Park for the first time after a staff member ranked it in his top three English grounds. City would lose 4-0 on his first visit there, a game he still rates among his most painful as manager of the club, but a couple of days later sought out his colleague. “You were so right about Goodison,” he said.

For all his complaints about referees and congested schedules, staff talk about how English football has “got into his blood” and his fascination with the size of the crowds teams way down the pyramid draw.

Some think they will find him pitching up at EFL games in future, like he did recently when he took up a long-standing offer from Stockport County owner Mark Stott to watch the League One side in action against Port Vale at Edgeley Park on the same night his old club Bayern were playing a Champions League classic against Paris Saint-Germain. He has been known to get giddy over the most colourful stories about Neil Warnock and Steve Bruce or Sam Allardyce’s days at Bolton Wanderers and loves hearing about how Premier League predecessors would cope with dressing-room problems.

He would exchange messages with Alex Ferguson. “You’d hear him say, ‘Yeah, Sir Alex mentioned this about that referee’ and think, ‘Oh, well that’s more than just a ‘how’s the family?’ kind of conversation,’” one source said.

He has made a lasting friendship with Michael Flynn after playing his Newport County side in the FA Cup in 2019 and still texts Flynn’s son to wish him happy birthday. Stockport manager Dave Challinor initially thought it was a windup when he got a call from Guardiola asking for advice about Leyton Orient after City were drawn against the League One club in the FA Cup last season. Guardiola and Tony Pulis, the former Stoke City and West Brom manager, became particularly fond of each other.

“The first time we met was during my time at West Brom and he came in after the game for a glass of wine,” Pulis explains. “He was absolutely amazed at the hospitality and had never experienced it before. He sat down for something to eat and was talking football to all my staff.

“When we went to the Etihad he pulled me before the game and said he’d got a drink for us and some food. He said: ‘We never usually do this but I’m doing it for you’. We went in there and I remember him asking me if I’d ever been to Barcelona.

“I said I hadn’t so he sent me an email address and said if I was ever over there he’d sort everything out for me. I’ve still never taken him up on the kind offer. I’ve always had massive respect for him. He’s always been very good with senior managers, whether they’ve worked in the Premier League or not.”

One anecdote: In January last year, Karl Robinson took his Salford City side to the Etihad in the FA Cup. Guardiola had told Robinson to come and see him afterwards “and make sure you bring Ryan Giggs”.

It was not a good day for Salford. They were trounced 8-0 but when Robinson and his director of football, Giggs, rocked up at Guardiola’s office they found the City manager worshipping in the former Manchester United player’s direction.

“We’re not worthy,” Guardiola said to Giggs while animatedly kowtowing. Giggs was initially unsure whether Guardiola was being serious. “What a brilliant player you were,” Guardiola said, before dropping a bombshell. “Did you know Barcelona wanted to sign you when I was still playing for them? We were desperate to sign you but Ferguson wouldn’t allow it!” Giggs started laughing. “F**king Fergie!”

Guardiola wears his heart on his sleeve but sometimes his emotions have got the better of him. His manic haranguing of Redmond remains one of the most vivid illustrations.

Guardiola could not understand why Redmond had not attacked City in the same way he had done the previous season and was forcibly letting him know, perhaps not fully appreciating that the player was being asked to perform a more defensive role under a different manager.

Nine years on, the former England winger, whose admiration for Guardiola shines through, reflects on it all with a certain fondness. “Do I look at it like a badge of honour? Yes and no,” Redmond says. “It felt like he really respected me as a threat and was obviously wondering why I wasn’t giving him the same problems as the year before. We’ve seen it with other players. It’s just his love for football and his brain works super differently.”

Guardiola would subsequently ring Redmond to apologise but the player never took offence.

“I was already interested in how he operates as a person and a manager but it just put more of an emphasis on how this guy really cares about football on all levels. Since I’ve been living in Manchester, if we see each other in the street it’s always, ‘How are you? How’s the family?’”

Guardiola’s deep affection for English football runs hand in hand with the city of Manchester, even if it was not an instant love affair.

He and his close friend Txiki Begiristain, City’s long-standing director of football until last year, would joke that Manchester was like the not so-pretty girl at school whom you were not too keen on initially but eventually fall in love with.

He immersed himself in city life, initially living at No 1 Deansgate before relocating to a sprawling £2.7m apartment at CitySuites. Salvi’s Mozzarella Bar in the Corn Exchange which would become a favourite hang-out alongside Tapeo & Wine, the restaurant co-owned by former United midfielder Juan Mata, before it closed, by which point Guardiola had already become one of the backers of the Catalan restaurant Tast on King Street.

He grew to love the music of Oasis and now counts Noel Gallagher as a good friend, as he does the legendary former City player Mike Summerbee. It was Summerbee who first accompanied Guardiola to the bespoke tailors Williams & Gill on Chapel Street to purchase a £75 flat cap, an emblem of industrial working Manchester that would become one of the manager’s fashion staples.

Lose a game in Barcelona and coaches and players would go into hiding. Guardiola could not believe how different the reaction to defeat would be in Manchester. “City fans would go, ‘Unlucky today Pep, we’ll win the next one,’” one staffer recalled. “He was like: ‘What the f **k’s going on here?’ Little things like that deepen the attachment.”

It would be fair to say not all staff were comfortable with Guardiola wandering around the city on his own, fearful an aggrieved United fan might one day do something daft. Colleagues would urge him not to walk down the Manchester Ship Canal alone, but Guardiola would wave away such concerns. Ditto riding his bike around the city centre. Truth be told, there was less to worry about than Guardiola parking his car at the training ground.

Guardiola is a very good manager, just not a particularly good driver, or so the stories go. He had a Bentley when he first arrived at City but that did not last long after a reputed altercation with a bollard. Nor did a black Mercedes or a Ford Capri. Eventually he migrated to a Nissan Leaf.

“We’d come in, walk past it, see the scrapes and go: ‘Jesus Christ, he’s done it again!’” one amused staffer recalls. Another said: “It became an ongoing joke that the pillars at the training ground tended to move quite often. It wasn’t him driving badly, it was the pillars moving around! Pep would see the funny side.”

Guardiola’s love for Manchester

Was Guardiola’s fierce bond with Manchester and City cemented on that horrific night in May 2017 when a suicide bomber detonated an explosive device attached to his body at an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena?

Guardiola was at home in his apartment waiting for his wife Cristina and daughters Maria and Valentina to return from the concert when the explosion at 10.31pm shook his entire building. City’s manager hurtled down almost a dozen flights of stairs and into the night air when Cristina called to reassure him they were safe. They had left just minutes before the detonation of the bomb that killed 22 and injured more than 1,000.

Guardiola would later attend the vigil at St Ann’s Square when the assembled crowd broke out in a spontaneous rendition of Oasis’s Don’t Look Back in Anger after a minute’s silence in honour of the victims.

Towards the end of last season, Guardiola invited Warnock to watch training, a privilege seldom afforded outside eyes. But Warnock is one of those veteran English managers for whom Guardiola holds a deep respect and affection.

Having been blown away by the sheer intensity and ferocity of training, Warnock was asked to address the City squad. “So they come in,” said Warnock. “Kevin De Bruyne’s there, Erling Haaland. ‘Well lads, think yourself fortunate you haven’t got me as your manager because you’d be lumping it from here to there and lucky if it ever touched the ground.’ You can imagine the reaction. I told a few more jokes. We had a tremendous laugh. Afterwards, Pep says to me: ‘I see how you got all those promotions.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘The humour, that connection, that human element. It’s so important.’ He started pointing at all the computers, TVs, iPads and what-not. ‘You see this, it’s all so data-driven now. Everything is so methodical. Stats.’”

Such characterisations jar with tales about Guardiola’s meticulous attention to detail and how the outside world perceives a coach who has revolutionised the modern game.

This is the manager who insisted on the Etihad turf being cut to 19mm, as it was at Camp Nou and Allianz Arena, but compromised on 23mm after reluctantly accepting the grass doesn’t get as much sun in Manchester.

The guy who plastered the first-team building with posters of all the records he wanted to break the day after winning his first title and told anyone who did not share those ambitions to enjoy their holidays and not bother coming back.

The man who, while staff partied hard on the plane back from London after winning the Carabao Cup against Arsenal at Wembley in February 2018, was busy forensically watching the game back in preparation for a league match against the same opponents four days later.

‘You learn to love the intensity’

Where once Guardiola would scoff at metrics like expected goals, he has come to embrace them and there are more than twice the number of analysts at City than five years ago. Whereas previously he might watch 10 games of an opponent before facing them, with experience he has learnt to be much more focused and specific about what he consumes. But he will always trust his own instincts and eyes, even if he places great faith in the assistants around him, from Arteta and Domenec Torrent in those early days to the eagle-eyed Juanma Lillo and his likely successor, Enzo Maresca, and, most recently, Pep Lijnders.

Staff laugh in awe at the number of times Guardiola has introduced an idea in training on a Tuesday, perfected it quickly, and then seen it reproduced and culminate in a goal on a Saturday. One former employee, previously a lower-league professional, remembers playing a round of golf with Guardiola and relaying to the manager as they walked past some giant sand dunes how he used to have to run up and down them relentlessly in pre-season.

“Pep turned to me shaking his head and just said: ‘No, no, no — we never train without the ball’. And, you know what, for all the years with him I can’t remember the players once training without the ball.”

There were other non-negotiables. Guardiola has always been a stickler for having players’ weight regularly monitored and has made it clear he is not responsible for how players return for pre-season. “They’re top professional footballers, it’s not my job to keep them fit in the summer,” he said. Samir Nasri was one of two players who reported back overweight for his first pre-season and, by the end of that summer, had been dispatched on loan to Sevilla, despite Guardiola confiding to staff: “We’re losing the best player in training, quality-wise.”

He was even more ruthless with Joe Hart, having resolved that England’s No 1 would not be his goalkeeper before even stepping foot in the building. The irony was Victor Valdes at Barcelona had not been the best with his feet either, but Guardiola placed his faith in him and there are several who feel the manager would have grown to love Hart. It is telling that Hart, despite that rejection, remains effusive in his praise of Guardiola.

As tough as he can be, Guardiola will always hold his hands up when he gets it wrong, or goes too far. Take a story involving Phil Foden in 2020 when he was still only 20. Late on in a Champions League tie against Porto, Foden was scolded by Guardiola on the touchline for not taking a free-kick in the precise way he wanted. “F**king hell, Phil,” screamed the City manager. “You haven’t f **king done what I said.”

Foden was livid. At the final whistle, the City forward marched off the pitch and was fully changed before some of his teammates even returned to the dressing room. By the time Guardiola got back, Foden was waiting by the door and unloaded on his manager. “Don’t ever f**king do that to me again,” Foden barked. “You wouldn’t do that to f **king David Silva.”

Guardiola apologised and the next day went even further, calling a meeting to apologise to Foden in front of the rest of the group and then paying a self-imposed fine into the players’ kitty, a gesture that was well received.

Something special

Looking back across his 592 games as City manager, a frankly ludicrous 70.3 win percentage and those 20 trophies (he counts those three Community Shields), it is easy to forget now just how riddled with doubts and anxiety he was during his first season in charge.

As daft as it may seem given what insiders call the “unbreakable bond” that would be forged between him, Begiristain, chief executive Ferran Soriano and chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak, Guardiola feared he could be sacked after a 3-3 draw at Celtic gave way to a bleak October in 2016.

In hindsight, it felt more like a manager — who had previously only known success — wrestling with bad results for the first time, but he could be a nervous wreck during those challenging months.

The relationship between Guardiola and the hierarchy has been something special and has served only to strengthen the manager’s authority.

It was in the summer after his first title that Guardiola told the author Marti Perarnau, who has long chronicled his managerial career, that “nobody can create two masterpieces”. Eight years on, it seems fair to say he was wrong about that.