He was preparing for the Bournemouth match when he learned the news had leaked. The news had broken on Monday night and on Tuesday morning he went into the training ground and told the players himself because he felt he owed them that. Ten years. He had wanted to keep the decision private a little longer. He did not get to.
Sunday at Villa Park is the last one.
THE END
There is a year left on his contract and he is not using it. Nobody saw it coming this week even though in another sense everyone has known for a while. There’d been enough whispers over enough months that the actual announcement landed with a tired inevitability rather than genuine surprise. Of course. Of course this is how it ends. Not with a league title, potentially, because Arsenal are five points clear. Not with a farewell at the Etihad with the crowd on their feet. Just a Tuesday morning announcement and a road trip to Birmingham.
Enzo Maresca is the name being reported as the replacement. He worked as Guardiola’s assistant in 2022/23, the treble season, then left to manage Leicester, then got the Chelsea job, won the Conference League and the Club World Cup, was sacked in January, and now potentially comes back to the club he left three years ago to follow the man who taught him. Chelsea want compensation. City are prepared to pay it. The game doesn’t do subtlety.
WHAT THE TEN YEARS ACTUALLY WERE
591 games. 423 wins. Twenty trophies. Six Premier League titles. When Guardiola arrived in July 2016, City’s trophy cabinet held four top-flight titles total. He added six more in ten years. Read that again.
The 2017/18 campaign, 100 points, exists in its own universe. 106 goals. 18 wins in a row. A points total that has never been touched since and probably will not be for a long time. When City were putting that run together in the winter of that season there was a genuine sense among people who watch football seriously that they were watching something that was not supposed to be possible within the rules of the competition.
The Champions League was the hole in the record for a long time. Real Madrid figured something out about how Guardiola’s teams played in the second leg of European knockout games and used it repeatedly, and there were a few years where it felt like the trophy was going to be the permanent asterisk on everything else. Then 2023 and Rodri’s goal in Istanbul and City had the one trophy that the whole decade had been building toward. The treble. First English treble since Ferguson’s United in 1999. On the pitch afterwards Guardiola looked like he could not quite believe it was real, which after the Madrid exits was understandable.
THE PLAYERS
Foden was 16 when Guardiola arrived. For three, maybe four years after, everyone in Manchester asked the same question: was Guardiola actually going to play him, or was Foden going to rot on the bench watching City buy yet another midfielder for his spot? Turns out the answer was a Ballon d’Or. Rodri got one the year before. Two Ballons d’Or from the same squad in consecutive years, both of them products of the same decade at the same club under the same manager.
De Bruyne is the one that stays with you. The angle of the pass that nobody else in English football was even considering, let alone attempting. The ability to receive the ball under pressure in midfield and immediately make something happen that the defender had not predicted and could not stop. Bernardo Silva somewhere along the line became completely unrecognisable from the slight Portuguese winger who arrived from Monaco. Haaland walked in and scored 52 goals in a season and the team made it look like a logical outcome of how they were playing rather than something extraordinary happening.
THE PARTS THAT DON’T FIT NEATLY
2024/25. Seven straight losses. There’s no good way to describe how bizarre it was watching that unfold after eight years of near-invincibility. Not one or two bad results. Seven. Back to back to back. City’s manager has never had a run like that anywhere in his career and at the time there was no obvious reason to believe it was going to stop.
Then there are the 115 charges. Financial rule breaches, the case ongoing, no resolution in sight. This is the bit that gets complicated to write about because it sits in the same decade as the 100-point season and the treble and the Champions League and none of those results change if the charges are eventually upheld. What changes is the context around them. City know this. Guardiola knows this. The whole club has been operating under that cloud for years and will continue to for however long the process takes.
Real Madrid and the second leg. The Bernabeu in 2022 especially. That match felt like watching a theory prove itself, the thing people had whispered about Guardiola’s sides protecting leads against European royalty who’ve lived these moments a thousand times. Then Istanbul happened in 2023 and rewrote it all. Both things happened.
WHAT COMES NEXT
City have not had a managerial change in ten years. Their last three managers before Guardiola were Mancini, Pellegrini and a brief caretaker period under Brian Kidd. The club was unrecognisable then compared to what it became. Going back to that version of Manchester City is not possible. What is possible is staying close enough to what Guardiola built that the drop is manageable.
Maresca knowing the system from the inside is the argument for the appointment. He was in the building during the best season in the club’s history. He knows what Guardiola demanded and why. Whether that translates into a different manager getting similar results from a squad that has been shaped entirely around one very specific way of playing is a question that only the next few years can answer.
Haaland is 25. That helps.
WHAT IT ADDS UP TO
Twenty trophies in ten years. Six league titles. One Champions League that the whole project was really about from the start. The 100-point record. The treble. Foden and Rodri with Ballon d’Ors. The way possession football stopped being exotic in England and became the baseline expectation for any team with genuine ambition.
Only Ferguson’s 26 years at United offers a proper parallel in English football. What Guardiola achieved in a decade would take most managers twenty years. If they got there at all. That is not nothing. That is most of it.
Sunday. Villa Park. Then it is done.
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