It took Pep Guardiola an unusually long time to get over Manchester City’s collapse at Liverpool in the Champions League. According to those at the very top level of the club, it dominated his thoughts – “[it] really killed him” – right through the Premier League title win, as well as the summer, and to now, the eve of a new European campaign.
Part of that was of course just down to Guardiola and his intense personality, as he was desperate to understand how everything that had been so right had gone so wrong, and part of it was down to what the Champions League alone means.
A very large part of it, though, was because Guardiola would have seen winning that great competition as well as the league with City last season as “his greatest ever achievement”. That is some view when the Catalan has probably been responsible for Europe’s greatest ever side in Barcelona 2008-11, but that alone illustrates the point.
Guardiola feels that City’s lack of European Cup legacy is that profound a burden, that much of a hurdle, that it really will take so much to imbue them with the imposing belief required to go and win the competition.
That is a little rich when City themselves are so wealthy, and the Catalan is probably the greatest manager in the game right now.
The reality is that the club have everything in place to produce the best team on the continent, and everything about how they regularly play and win indicates they probably reached that level last season.
Whether they can prove it with club football’s most prestigious prize is arguably this season’s most compelling storyline, along with the fate of the other favourites, the defending champions Real Madrid, after the sale of Cristiano Ronaldo.
That was naturally brought up in the pre-match press conference, taken by Mikel Arteta, ahead of the season-opener against Lyon. Guardiola has a touchline ban after his dismissal against Liverpool last season, in another element that displays his deep frustration regarding that tie. Arteta arguably handled it with even greater diplomacy than Guardiola would have.
I am surprised when you have a team that has won it three times on the row,” Arteta said, referring to Madrid, “but that means we are doing things really well.”
Exceptionally well, probably better than anyone in Europe. It’s just that the Champions League isn’t a competition that definitively decides that status, and it’s not like Guardiola hasn’t been in this situation before.
You could even argue he had the best team in Europe in 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018 but didn’t win it.
The primary reasons he didn’t are relatively consistent, and they are not that his teams lacked continental pedigree, given five of those side were either that Barcelona side or Bayern Munich.
When you consider it, and consider how supreme he is as a manager, it is actually remarkable Guardiola will now go at least eight years since his second and last Champions League title in 2011. That victory for the ages at Wembley seemed a genuine “end of history” moment for modern football, signalling how Guardiola and Lionel Messi would go on to dominate club football for the next decade. That has someway happened, given they have racked up eight domestic titles between them out of a possible 13, but it has not happened in the Champions League.
