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On this week’s episode of the Rest is Football podcast, the Manchester City midfielder Rodri was asked if he ever fancies emulating Pep Guardiola and becoming a coach. “No,” comes the firm response. “I see Pep, and I don’t know if I want that for the next period of my life. I see Txiki’s face and I like it more. More clean and relaxed.”
Of course Rodri has made no secret in the past of his admiration for City’s director of football, Txiki Begiristain, and his desire to go down that career path after he retires. All the same, there is a faintly damning quality to his words. Imagine being so hard-working, so ruthlessly dedicated to your job, that even Rodri starts to think: whoa fella, bit much.
And of course we have to assume that this interview was recorded before the 3-3 draw against Feyenoord in midweek, when Guardiola came out for his media duties with red marks on his scalp and a small cut bleeding from his nose, looking like a guy who had just fought a stapler and lost. He made a joke about self-harm for which he later apologised. None of this, right now, is really screaming “dream job”.
Meanwhile City have become increasingly shambolic in defence and increasingly bereft in midfield, Erling Haaland has seemingly forgotten how to score a Premier League goal, and there is the small but real possibility that in January they could be found guilty of serial rule breaches, stripped of their league titles, relegated to amateur football and indelibly associated with one of the most infamous episodes of cheating ever seen in modern football. Anyway, welcome to Anfield!
Even if City’s predicament feels reassuringly short-term – still second in the table, with the opportunity to move within five points of Arne Slot’s Liverpool team on Sunday afternoon, injured players still to return – then the circumstances that created it are anything but. In a way the freshest iteration of English football’s newest blue-chip rivalry is a chance to examine why these two clubs seem to have ended up on violently different trajectories.
After all, it was Liverpool who were supposed to be in their rebuilding phase, City the model of stability and calm, Liverpool the club prone to lavish fluctuations in form and intensity, City the cold winning machine harvesting points without ever really seeming to get out of fourth gear. But in hindsight the cracks in the City edifice have been forming for a while: a product not just of their legal troubles but of mistakes in recruitment and retention, a culture that somehow ossified, congealed, got just a little too comfortable, a little too pleased with itself.
Take their struggles in midfield: a problem brought into sharp focus by Rodri’s injury but one they have also tried to address in previous transfer windows. Kalvin Phillips, Matheus Nunes, Mateo Kovacic arrived in the 2022 and 2023 summers for a combined outlay of more than £100m. This summer Ilkay Gündogan was re-signed, a free transfer but with wages likely to be in the region of the £320,000 a week he was earning at Barcelona.
None of them has ever looked a durable option for a club aspiring to be the best in the world. Nunes is not good enough; Kovacic not fit enough; Phillips neither good enough nor fit enough; Gündogan a shuffling 34-year-old with all of the cleverness but none of the sharpness he possessed in his prime.
You can go through some of City’s other recent transfer business picking out similar anomalies. The spectacularly misguided call to let Cole Palmer go to Chelsea after giving him three Premier League starts in three seasons. Allowing Julián Alvarez to leave in the summer with no obvious replacement, and thus placing pretty much the entire striking burden on Haaland.
Of course injuries have been an issue this season. But past City sides were always able to weather the loss of one player because the system was king. Who plays up front in a Haaland-oriented team if Haaland gets injured or suspended? Phil Foden? James McAtee? Bernardo Silva on Oscar Bobb’s shoulders?
Liverpool, by contrast, have built resilience in almost every position. Obviously players such as Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk are largely irreplaceable. But their absence would not in itself force a change of style or approach. Conor Bradley has established himself as a fine deputy to Trent Alexander-Arnold. Alexis Mac Allister is in a rich run of form but nobody would panic if Curtis Jones stepped in for him.
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How have Liverpool reached this point? Largely by taking decisions that caused them a good deal of short-term pain. Carefully dismantling their famous front three when it probably had a couple of years left in it. Signing pretty much an entire midfield – Mac Allister, Wataru Endo, Dominik Szoboszlai and Ryan Gravenberch – in the space of eight weeks in the summer of 2023. Trusting academy players such as Jones and Bradley, giving them proper minutes in proper games.
There were times under Jürgen Klopp – specifically the 2020-21 and 2022-23 seasons – when the whole structure looked on the brink of collapse. There were calamities, slumps in form, rumblings of discontent among the fanbase. But somehow there was always a through-thread of identity, a recognisable sense of mission, principles to live by. Klopp was the spiritual leader of the club but never interested in controlling it at a micro level: always open to new ideas, always self-aware enough to know what he could do himself and what was best delegated to the experts.
City, by contrast, is a club that revolves almost entirely around Guardiola’s vision: the strategy to attract him in the first place, an infrastructure built to his exact specifications. A style of football that is more authentically “Guardiola” than it has ever been authentically “City”. The players he wants, and none of the players he does not. A small squad, because that’s what he likes. There are, of course, worse strategies than betting the house on the most brilliant and gifted coach of his generation. City’s trophy haul is testament to that.
But it does mean that over time, the collective begins to take on the character of the individual. As Guardiola has aged and changed, so have City: more pragmatic, more stubborn, more bombastic and obsessive, preoccupied above all with defending a legacy rather than building a new one. In a way City have become as much a temple to celebrity as the decadent star vehicles they used to beat, fatally dependent on the enduring individual genius of Haaland and Rodri and Guardiola himself.
One way or another, a reckoning is coming. It may come in the summer, it may come from the lawyers in January, it may even come at Anfield on Sunday, where another capitulation or embarrassment would surely accelerate the sense of chaos and disintegration. Guardiola has just signed for another two years, but in a weird way the clock is already ticking. The mistakes of the past brought City to their undistinguished present. What others might they already be making?
