Was 2017 the year in which Pep Guardiola changed English football forever? The Catalan revolutionary has certainly used a year of reflection and renovation to terminate a recent Premier League trend.
If we accept that the title is Manchester City’s — and an unprecedented 13-point Christmas lead offers sparse credible alternative — then Guardiola has detailed a different way to win in England. Compare City’s possession-centric, high-risk, high-line approach with the systems that took the Premier League’s last two titles and the contrast is immense.
“The last two champions in the Premier League were super defensive teams,” noted Jose Mourinho in an early-season interview. “Super-defensive teams, with a killer counterattack. So be defensive and have a killer counterattack was the way to win the last two Premier Leagues.”
A precisely executed counter is a thrilling weapon and the Manchester United manager has no issues with the colleague who deploys it well. His point is that Leicester City and Chelsea excessively exceeded expectations by playing the percentages. The Italian duo of Claudio Ranieri and Antonio Conte produced two teams who defended deep then attacked at rapier pace to claim famous triumphs.
To put just a couple of numbers on it, Chelsea took the title with around 11 minutes less possession per game than City are averaging for the first half of this season. Leicester made their miracle on a whisker short of 20 minutes less.
Ranieri and Conte would use opponents’ possession to draw them into positions of vulnerability. A legitimate and intelligent tactic when well-executed, yet one Guardiola avoids. “I want the ball, that is my main principle,” he said recently. “And after that when you don’t have the ball to be well organized to recover as much as possible, knowing that the opponents want to punish you to use their magnificent counterattack.
Guardiola’s decision to double down on his core philosophy — recruiting players better suited to dominating the ball and increasing the intensity of measures to prevent those counters — had delivered a domineering year of League results. City have lost just twice in the Premier League — away to Everton in January, away to champions-elect Chelsea in April.
At the halfway point of the current season, Guardiola is a home draw with Everton short of a perfect return of 57 points. City have scored 60 goals while conceding 12, both division leading figures. His is the first top-flight team to return a 100 goals in a calendar year since Liverpool in 1982 (when there were four more games in the League season).
Guardiola’s preference for quick, nimble ball players, his insistence that the ball be passed precisely in all areas of the pitch, the way in which he tasks his team with creating shooting opportunities inside the penalty box, makes much of City’s football extremely easy on the eye. The praise has been such that a team that has still to touch silverware is being talked of as potential quadruple winners.
His men certainly deserve plaudits for the manner with which they’ve traversed some significant obstacles along the road. Before Guardiola settled on a 4-1-2-3 shape, points were dropped at home to Everton and could easily have been lost at Bournemouth — two of this season’s strugglers. A sequence of three matches in which Huddersfield Town, Southampton and West Ham United all concentrated on closing off passing lines into the area while denying Kevin De Bruyne the space he likes to have to pass from all ended in narrow 2-1 wins, City riding luck and some propitious officiating to extend a long run of consecutive wins.
If those fixtures offered clues as to how City could be halted, there seems little prospect of their football being surpassed by any coach who seeks to adopt Guardiola’s strategies. Put quite simply, no manager anywhere ever has worked at a club as supportive to his methods. Abu Dhabi hasn’t simply put more money into its Manchester City project than any other football club owner, it has allowed the project — from chief executive, through director of football, through player recruitment, through infrastructure – to be shaped with hiring Guardiola in mind.
To cite just a few examples, an academic study by the CIES Football Observatory have the City’s current squad as the most expensive in football by transfer-fee cost at €853 million ($1.01 billion). As in Guardiola’s first campaign, City outspent every domestic rival, adding to a pattern of transfer-market investment between 2010 and 2016 that led the global game (another CIES analysis putting the club’s total transfer-fee spend in that period at €1.02 billion, some 17.5 percent more than the second highest investor, Chelsea, and a remarkable 59 percent above Real Madrid’s).
City’s wage bill grew 23 percent to an annual £243.8 million in Guardiola’s first year at the club, a reflection of the division leading salary packages the club now offers key recruits. With two more transfer windows of deals structured to include immense performance-related elements to add in, 2017-18 salary costs will scale new heights.
Abu Dhabi’s largesse is further reflected in the make-up of a squad that Guardiola still considers only partially built. His defensive options include the second most expensive goalkeeper ever by transfer fee (Ederson bought for €40 million to replace last summer’s errant purchase of Claudio Bravo), the most expensive right back ever by transfer fee (Kyle Walker), and the most expensive left back ever by transfer fee (Benjamin Mendy).
In the middle of defense, Guardiola has the most expensive center back by transfer fee (John Stones), a €50 million purchase in Eliaquim Mangala, plus another of the most costly acquisition ever in that position, Nicolas Otamendi. Should City succeed in dispelling the belief of some at Liverpool that Virgil van Dijk’s transfer from Southampton is a “done deal”, that record will be reset once again.
None of this diminishes Guardiola’s success, it merely places it in context. Could future Premier League managers adopt his principles to surpass his achievements? That will certainly be a hard ask.
2017 must be viewed through the prism of Pep Guardiola’s Premier League revolution
2017 must be viewed through the prism of Pep Guardiola’s Premier League revolution
A journey to Cambridge reveals surprise cricket heritage
- It is a sign of changing times that the university’s cricket ground, a pitch famed for generating high-aggregate first-class match scores, has been left behind by shifts in the game’s geography, structure and power base
After attending eight T20 World Cup matches in Sri Lanka, I traveled to the UK to join a conference on cricket organized by the Cricket Research Network, or CRN.
It was held on Feb. 25 at one of the University of Cambridge colleges, Hughes Hall, sited next to Fenners, historically the university’s cricket ground. In 1846, Francis Fenner leased land from Gonville and Caius College. Two years later, he sub-let the newly constructed ground to the University Cricket Club, which, together with the Athletics Club, bought the freehold in 1894.
One of the conference presentations was on the topic of “town versus gown,” covering the history of cricket in Cambridge at both university and club level. I was aware that Fenners once had a reputation as a pitch that favored batting. When I mentioned this to the presenter, he asked if I knew that the highest aggregate number of runs scored in a first-class match, in which both sides only batted once, had occurred there. My interest was piqued. A quick search revealed that 1,324 runs were scored in a three-day match between May 17 and May 19, 1950, when the University of Cambridge hosted the West Indian touring team.
On winning the toss, the university chose to bat first, amassing 507 for the loss of only three wickets on the first day, declaring on the second day, having reached 594 for the loss of four wickets. By the end of day two, the West Indies had responded with 379 for two. They continued to bat throughout the third day, ending with 730 for three wickets, Frank Worrell scoring 160 and Everton Weekes, an unbeaten 304, at an average of four runs per over.
In today’s world of instant T20 cricket, in which the average number of runs scored per over is typically eight or more, the scoring frequency at Fenners would be regarded as pedestrian. However, in the context of the times, four runs per over was almost double that which was achieved in the four Test matches between England and the West Indies in 1950. The University of Cambridge team contained five players who would go on to represent England. One of them, Peter May, captained England on 41 occasions. Neither Weekes nor Worrell were impressed by the match, calling it “a farce of a game, just a bore, a little match practice,” adding that “unless you have to work for your runs, there is no fun making them.”
Away from the local Cambridge topic, the other themes at the conference were wide-ranging. The CRN is a group of researchers and writers working on cricket-related matters, having an aim to inform change in the game with critical and empirical research.
Five main themes were covered. The first was gender, the second was history, both weighted toward the women’s game, while the third looked forward to the 2026 Women’s T20 World Cup, which is to be held in England and Wales in June. Inclusion was the fourth theme, which included fandom and using AI to identify talent. This was followed by representations of cricket, including its defining stories. The final session dealt with governance and sustainability, covering illegal betting, climate justice and cricket in the public interest.
As regular readers will know, the last subject area has been addressed a number of times in this column, usually with a level of despair about the unsatisfactory standards and practices displayed by those who are vested with the responsibility for cricket’s governance. These have been in evidence before and during the current T20 World Cup, centring on Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. The day after my visit to Cambridge, Pakistan failed to qualify for the semifinals and rumors circulated that the Pakistan Cricket Board, or PCB, was proposing to fine all members of the squad the equivalent of $18,000. If true, this would be an egregious example of misguided management, effectively fining players for losing matches.
Allegedly, the fines were imposed after Pakistan’s defeat by India in a group-stage match, with a rider that the fines might be waived if semifinal qualification was achieved. Although the PCB’s action is unusual in professional cricket, it is not the first time that the PCB has imposed punitive measures. After a narrow defeat by India in the Asia Cup Final on Sept. 28, 2025, the board briefly blocked its players from playing in T20 franchise leagues. There have been past fines for indiscipline and insurrection. This latest action runs the risk of alienating players and further impacting their desire to perform well. How the players who performed well are going to respond is unknown. Remarkably, there have been later rumors that not all players will be fined or that different levels will apply.
It would seem grossly unfair to fine Sahibzada Farhan, who broke the record for the most runs scored at a T20 World Cup, as well as becoming the only player to score two hundreds in the same tournament. Farhan and Fakhar Zaman, who played in only two games, constructed the highest opening partnership in men’s T20 World Cup history. Two players were not selected at all. What have they done to deserve being fined? Media and social media reactions have focussed on the board, administrators, selectors, coaches, advisers, domestic structures and inadequate development pathways. There has been churn in all of these areas for years. The outcome is a failure to reach the semifinals in four successive ICC tournaments and a loss of patience among the country’s hierarchy.
There is a world of difference between the high pressure, politically charged international game of today and the metronomically compiled 1,324 runs on a placid Fenners pitch in Cambridge, 76 years ago. Yet cricket’s social tensions are a common theme throughout these years, albeit with variations. The West Indian team of 1950 was led by a white Barbadian, John Goddard, born into a family that controlled a leading trading company on the island. His leadership abilities were praised as the West Indies won its first Test match and series in England, but his star fell in the following series in Australia. Throughout the 1950s, white men continued to be chosen as captains. It was not until 1960 that a black man, Frank Worrell, was appointed to lead a series. This heralded an era in which the West Indies came to dominate international cricket for three decades, at times relishing their defeats of England.
One of the presentations at the CRN conference revealed the struggle and obstacles that women’s cricket faced in trying to establish itself in the West Indies. This was also a feature in other countries during the past 76 years, certainly as far as equality of opportunity and treatment was concerned. Research undertaken by members of the CRN has explored this, and the conference panel discussions at Cambridge focussed on the progress that has been made leading into the 2026 Women’s World Cup.
Inevitably, change is accompanied by casualties. One of these appears to be Fenners. In July 2024, Hughes Hall acquired two pieces of land at the edge of Fenner’s, leading to concerns about access to facilities. The number of matches being played there has fallen, along with the quality of pitches, now maintained on a shoestring budget. It is a sign of changing times in cricket that a ground and a pitch famed for generating high-aggregate first-class match scores has been left behind by shifts in the game’s geography, structure and power base.
