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.