What Pep Guardiola has achieved at Manchester City is nothing to sneeze at. It's an obsession from a coach that turned a team that won 4 Premier League titles out of the last 5 attempts, 6 if we count Pep's debut season.

The reason behind the success can be attributed to Pep, but there's an undeniable role of money. Just like Klopp's success has a chunk of it attributed to the data team that brought him and most of the players in as Klopp has made it clear many times that he isn't in charge of players signing.

However, money shouldn't be Pep's only legacy as there were teams in the Premier League that had a bigger spending difference than Manchester City had under Guardiola. Yet, the other clubs don't get half as discredited as Pep does.

Manchester City won 11 titles in the last six years, still, according to all stats, Manchester City is still underachieving and nowhere close to where a team of that caliber should be.

That is credited to players' performance as Pep can't score on their behalf. However, it is a result of an environment that existed thanks to Pep.

Obsession With No Boundaries

As I mentioned in a previous post, Pep has the backing of the club owner and directors, he is the boss, simply put. What he says goes. And while at Barcelona he had Messi, Xavi, Puyol, Dani Alves, and even Pique, Iniesta, and Valdes telling him when he might have gone too far. The same goes for Robben, Ribery, Lahm, and others at Bayern Munich. At Manchester City, he had none of that.

Yes, Yaya Toure, David Silva, Aguero, and even Kompany had problems with Pep, but with management backing him, those players always lost and bent to Pep's will. Pep has no star that is bigger than him.

This amount of control and submission turned a great bunch of young players and Kevin De Bruyne into, a machine yes, but also a team that lacks character.

A Schizophrenic Team

Creativity is the opposite of order, freedom is the opposite of control. And no strong character can be created by following instructions to a T.

That wasn't a problem for Manchester City as Pep knew enough ways to get his team the win more than anyone else. The players go in knowing what they need to do, which is terrifying the opponent and score in the first 15 minutes then just munch at the team as the opposite team fears losing by 6 or 7 goals.

But, during the few times where a team stands up to Manchester City and failed to score first. We see the complete opposite, just chaos ensuing. Pep minimized the human influence on the game as much as possible, and that by definition makes him the greatest manager. However, that is a double-edged sword.

In the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 seasons he actually did achieve the closest thing to perfection domestically. But, even during those seasons, he failed miserably in the UEFA Champions League for the same reason.

I would describe Manchester City as a schizophrenic team. A team that eats and annihilates the opponents once it scores the first goal and a team that is midtable at best that wastes easy chances and concedes goals easily.

Pep X The Champions League.

That's where Pep's flaws get exposed the most. Yes, Pep isn't required to personally teach Lionel Messi, Thomas Muller, and Sergio Aguero to score a decisive penalty in 2012, 2016, and 2019.

At the same time, do we know of another manager who was knocked out of the Champions League due to their best attacker missing a penalty? Do we know of another club that had such misfortune? Three times where a penalty could have saved everything, it failed.

Even in his match against Lyon, despite the wrong formation which happens to every coach at some point, City could have won that match if he hasn't had his star players miss the easiest scoring opportunities. The same against Tottenham.

Manchester City: The Spoiled Team

That's Manchester City now. They need a crazy number of scoring opportunities to score a single goal. A spoiled team that requires everything to go perfectly to win. Guardiola is great because he manages to do that most of the time, let's say 90% of the time.

Pep achieved that 90% by creating a machine of a team. However, he also caused that 10% by having that machine lack character. That's not perfection.

Pep's Pit

Perfection isn't players that are exact replicas of the manager's vision and a reflection of the manager where the players move like chess pieces the way he wants.

That's Guardiola's pit that he's been stuck in for years and can't seem to know how to get out of.

Instead of giving up on the fact that there are things that happen which are outside anyone's control that cause a loss or that it is not exactly a disaster that a coach has two Champions League titles in a 14 years-career and lost the rest because of uncontrollable circumstances most of the times, or even his own fault in other times.

Instead of just doing that, Pep insists that there is a way to achieve his goal which sent him into a looping circle of action and causality where he would create that 90% and lose because of that 10% which sends him into aiming to improve that 90% which causes to lost because of that 10% again, and so on.

More deals, more control, and if you add to that Pep's usual problems in the Champion League and the odd, sometimes needless changes ahead of big games in the Champions League, you'd finally understand why Guardiola won't win the Champions League with that mentality.

In Conclusion

All Guardiola is doing is creating a tougher job for himself as he and his team accumulate more bad memories and those bad memories would again cause the looping circle I mentioned earlier as they get weaker and more fragile as things get tough.

That's because when your experience in the Champions League is your inability to come back in a game against even teams like Lyon and Monaco, teams you should defeat in one leg, then no Guardiola or myself should remind you that this is the exact opposite of the goal Guardiola was set out to achieve.

Maybe Haaland can be the answer if he stands up to Pep or if Pep decides to let go of that control. Pep needs that 10% which comes only from the players.