It started with a goal after just four minutes. Sergio Aguero was the scorer in a 2-1 Premier League win over Sunderland at the Etihad Stadium. It was a penalty as it happens. All a bit pragmatic and functional for Pep Guardiola on the day, in August 2016, that he took his bow in English football.

In the print edition of the Mail on Sunday, the headline referred to City’s new manager – pencil thin and dressed in a white shirt and black tie – as the ‘messiah’ but noted that his players were struggling to get to grips with the ‘new Pep culture’. They would struggle for a while, as it happens. Guardiola’s first season in England was to finish without a trophy.

Subsequently, the pain has belonged to everybody else. Guardiola was initially set to stay for three years but, as Daily Mail Sport exclusively revealed yesterday, he is taking his leave a decade later – and the numbers tell part of the story.

Ten years, almost 600 games, more than 1400 goals and 20 major trophies. Guardiola’s impact on City and indeed English football has been profound. Storied coaches such as Jurgen Klopp, Arsene Wenger, Jose Mourinho, Louis van Gaal, Mauricio Pochettino and Antonio Conte have all – to some degree or other – bent to the force of his mercurial whim.

What did we expect when he arrived, at 45 years old, from Bayern Munich? A few years of stardust? Maybe.

He had done three seasons in Bavaria and before that his gilded tenure at Barcelona had lasted only a year longer. Burned out by the pressures of that one, he had taken a year out to recover in the relative anonymity of New York.

At City, it has been different. In Manchester Guardiola has shaped a whole football club in his very image. The football they play, the philosophies they preach. Even the clothes they wear.

More widely, he has fundamentally altered the way many people – inside and outside the game – view the way football is played in this country. Guardiola has directly influenced the cultures, tactics and even the language and terminology of English football.

Over the next five days, Daily Mail Sport’s Manchester City expert Jack Gaughan will take subscribers into the heart of Guardiola’s City empire and deep into the very fabric of his life. This is chapter one of the untold story of Guardiola and his decade of Manchester City glory – starting with the enigmatic personality at the heart of it all...

With a crash, the door slams shut. Hinges wobble but remain intact. A band of backroom staff are locked out, waiting in the corridor. Pep Guardiola is on the other side, spewing. His voice carries. This is Guardiola raw and uncut.

Manchester City are in Newcastle. It’s gone 10pm on January 29, 2019, and Guardiola feels the defence of his first Premier League title won eight months earlier is already on the rocks. A 2-1 defeat is their fourth in the last nine league games and the City manager feels intervention of the crudest form is needed.

This is the essence of Guardiola. There is not one consistent face or mood, just an unshakable set of guiding principles that mould his feelings, opinions and behaviours at any given moment. He can switch from light to shade and from fire to ice and part of the genius is an instinctive ability to frame a moment exactly the right way. Here beneath the Milburn Stand at St James' Park, he has pressed the nuclear button almost entirely without thinking.

An incandescent anger rages around that poky dressing room as Guardiola accuses his team of all the things he hates most in football.

Too passive, not enough fight, not sticking together, no desire. He fumes that the team eased off following Aguero’s opener in the first minute. But this release of fury – spread over a 30-minute spell that nobody present has ever forgotten – has been coming for a while.

Guardiola was already seething after lacklustre wins over Wolves and Huddersfield and all the while Liverpool – City’s great modern rivals – have been purring.

Jurgen Klopp’s team have won all but one of their last 12 games – a dramatic new year defeat at the Etihad Stadium – while City’s outlook has suddenly gone rather foggy on the Tyne.

Liverpool can go seven points clear with victory over Leicester in 24 hours and all of that, the losses and the missed opportunities and the feeling that one of the all-time wins over their great foe may pale into insignificance, hangs heavy over Guardiola as a storm cloud breaks over his players.

This – he gambles – is the wake-up call his team needs. If it doesn’t work, he figures, then too bad. If he does nothing, Liverpool will soon be off over the hill anyway. Timing, on and off the pitch, is everything.

Some coaches are still in the hallway. Guardiola wants to deal with the players himself, to have their eyes solely focused on him, and the scene plays to the messaging of his very first, trophyless season when the Catalan had set about building an ethos that one success is not nearly good enough. You have to want more, to go longer and further, to demand excellence.

A single crown, even a record-breaking campaign of 100 points that marked Guardiola’s first Premier League triumph, must be backed up and if players do not comprehend that then they are not long for the world according to Guardiola.

This intensity – this sheer emotional energy – cuts to the bones of Guardiola. This is the image in which he wishes the modern City – his City – to be built.

He knows it comes with risk. In Barcelona, as he was drawn ever deeper into a war with Real Madrid coach Mourinho, it almost overwhelmed him. He took that year off in America for a reason.

But Guardiola knows no other way and here in Manchester – free at last of the toxic politics of Spanish football – it is used as fuel. Some around the club don’t cope. It’s always the way. To Guardiola, they are collateral damage. Unfortunate but natural. Part of the process.

In his own mind, there is only ever a forward gear and the previous summer, featuring a 2018 tour of America, Guardiola had returned from holiday with more energy than friends had ever witnessed before. He was aware that only Sir Alex Ferguson and indeed Mourinho, at Chelsea, could lay claim to having retained titles in the Premier League era.

Back in Newcastle, as staff nervously listen to what unfolds on the other side of that door, one says forlornly: ‘It is over.’ And by ‘it’, they mean the title race.

Guardiola’s admonishment goes on for so long that he fails to say farewell to Newcastle manager Rafael Benitez. The plan had been to head into Benitez’s office for a glass of red alongside City coach Rodolfo Borrell but his opposite number has already left by the time City’s dressing room opens and steam billows out.

Despite the toll taken by such a torturous night, Guardiola still heads to Manchester’s Palace theatre the following evening as Liverpool kick off against Leicester at Anfield. It’s a family occasion, watching Jersey Boys. Guardiola has always eschewed the anonymous footballing enclaves of Alderley Edge, Prestbury and Hale. He has spent a decade living in the city centre, a man of Manchester.

In his seat at the Palace, his phone will buzz once Harry Maguire’s equaliser confirms a Leicester draw and a gap at the top is only stretched to five points. Anger briefly gives way to relief but among the City squad the message has been digested, retained and understood.

Players say Guardiola’s temper can last weeks, that the ferocity is second to none. He can go ‘crazy’ for hours, even days, after defeats. But what he says to them, how he interacts – or sometimes doesn’t – so often yields extended runs of results. In short, it works. Football talks often about the genius of Guardiola’s tactics but this is about the power of his personality.

So many people over the years have privately confessed that the force behind their work at City has been driven by a simple fear of letting Guardiola down. The players feel that in 2019, when they host Arsenal five days after Newcastle and emerge victorious, an Aguero hat-trick earning a 3-1 win.

And there it is. That is the starting pistol for a second half of a season that sees City win all of their remaining 14 league matches, conceding four goals and scoring 32, to pip Liverpool by a single point in one of the most high-octane, high quality, captivating title tussles ever witnessed in English football.

Guardiola still puts that title down as one of his greatest achievements, one partially created by half an hour of fire and fury inside four walls of breeze blocks up in the freezing North East.

At dinner tables across the world – in America, Asia, the Middle East, Europe – City’s lord of the manor will sit and tell his staff that if there is no enjoyment to be felt in the process of building a triumphant team, then there is no point in doing any of it.

Football is fundamentally a means to an end business. The results are what matter. But if anybody comes close to debunking that truth then it’s Guardiola, a lover of the journey.

Those who really know him say that Guardiola is rarely caught off-guard. If an idea is being knocked around in his company, he switches to a mode of engagement that millions see on their television screens every week. He is at his most passionate when imagining fresh plans and arguing their merits with coaches who bring them to the table.

‘You realise the environment is demanding just by seeing him work,’ one source tells Daily Mail Sport.

‘He’ll grab you and explain but it’s more that he’s created this environment that playing here is a challenge.

‘The message is clear: “Look, this is the level."’

Not every day is like that one at Newcastle. Very few days are, in fact. More important to his day-to-day methods is an aura built over time. Guardiola is not a tall man but his gaze alone can crumble grown adults.

Those who have worked for him talk of the invisible pressure. The creep of constant expectation. He never chases staff for results or answers on tasks. Instead, a silent expectation lingers and here, in some ways, stands the modern-day Sir Alex Ferguson, the man who had been so desperate to lure Guardiola as his own replacement at Manchester United. 

The fear – if indeed there is one – is of letting him down and from that point of view, every day, each training session, is a battle to be won.

‘He’s mind blowing,’ says ex-City coach Brian Barry-Murphy, now a promotion-winning manager at Cardiff City.

'However good you think he is, he is better. He's got this unbelievable ability to make you want to please him. I see it with my children. You know when you're looking for attention from your mother or father? It's like that.' 

‘Every day you go in and strive to give him what he wants. He’s got this amazing personal touch which makes you feel incredible so you want to feel like you’re contributing to what he’s doing.

‘He might ask you to do the simplest thing and if you do it well and he goes “perfect” you go away feeling your life is complete.

‘But then there were a couple of days I remember where I was doing practice with them and my service (passes into players) just wasn’t right.

‘When it’s not perfect, he gives you the look. He doesn’t say anything. Just the look. And it lives with you until you can put it right.’

This is what it has been like working at City under Guardiola, a manager whose personality and sense of expectation and sheer perfection permeate every single department of the football club.

The curious thing is that it was never really meant to be this way. After the toxicity of Roberto Mancini’s final 18 months in the early part of the last decade, City executives decided a manager would never again be allowed to become the most powerful man in the building. It was too risky.

When it turned ugly – as it did with Mancini – then the dangers of the whole palace falling to pieces were just too great. But then you either hire Guardiola on his terms or you don’t hire him at all. So City put their new structure – their new philosophy – on hold for the greatest coach in the modern game and may well argue that six Premier League titles and a Treble – among other things – stand as reasonable justification.

It has been OK to smile at times. Watching City’s players and staff – including the venerable former assistant Brian Kidd – disembark the bus on matchday for eight years wearing cutting edge fashions from the Dsquared2 label – Guardiola is named as a friend of the company on their Facebook page – was to understand just how deeply the manager’s tentacles had reached.

Guardiola is obsessive and can be introspective. In November 2021, for example, there was confusion when he exasperatedly told players: 'I can’t do this any more' after they had beaten Club Bruges 4-1 in Europe. Murmurings about his future surfaced among the players, but then they do most seasons.

There can be casualties, too. For example, a row bubbling away with the Etihad’s ground-staff came to a head in 2021. In a stinging rebuke of groundsman Lee Jackson’s team, he complained the state of their pitch was nowhere near the Emirates, Old Trafford and elsewhere.

That the grass at the training ground over the road at the City Football Academy – looked after by a different team – was consistently in far better shape than the Etihad ate away at Guardiola.

There were meetings and more meetings. Staff joked that perhaps the sun set differently on the north side of Ashton New Road. But Guardiola was not laughing. Jackson eventually left the club in 2024, bringing an end to 33 years of service, and went to Sheffield Wednesday.

Over at the training ground, with its pristine grass, there are two things to note. Guardiola’s eventual acceptance of new ideas and the need to keep things tight and in-house at all times. When it comes to keeping the methods behind his genius safe, Guardiola would give the secret service a run for their money.

When he arrived, City did not train set-pieces. Guardiola’s assistant Mikel Arteta lobbied for Nicolas Jover’s appointment from Brentford, a specialist in the field, but Guardiola never took to the Frenchman and lost no sleep when Jover joined Arteta at Arsenal. Interestingly, their set-piece output dramatically improved when Carlos Vicens took over.

Funnily, the role of a set-piece coach under Guardiola is more about their defensive shape at attacking plays than scoring. Petrified of counters, Guardiola was seething when City allowed United to transition from a corner to score on the break in January 2026. The current incumbent James French did well to steer clear of the manager in the aftermath.

So there was no corner practice in 2016, all those years ago, and Guardiola is known to have snorted in derision at the rise of the expected goals (xG) statistic. But now he employs 11 analysts, up from four just five years ago. Once disciple Carles Planchart left, Pep Lijnders took on a heavy amount of analysis work alongside Harry Dunn in a reshuffle.

It proves Guardiola can change, even if some technology is stubbornly considered superfluous. An enormous and overbearing TV wall looming over a training pitch is there to dissect training drills and act as an aid for players who are visual learners. But Guardiola rarely utilises it, sources saying you can count on one hand the times it has been engaged in a serious capacity. It is sometimes turned on to act as a VAR tool during the end-of-session games, when kit men double up as underqualified and controversial linesmen.

Guardiola simply relies on principles that have guided him for years. Hardly anybody outside of the immediate circle is afforded the privilege of watching training, for example.

Even former players have to book time to watch and that is only granted on special occasions. Footage of sessions is kept private.

‘Nobody’s allowed to watch the first-team train,’ one former academy coach from the younger age groups says.

‘It’s the first place I’d ever worked where that’s happened. Unbelievable. They’re very paranoid of giving things away. I met Pep once. You can’t get near the players to ask them to go into see the young lads for 20 minutes.’

City and their executives have worn all this graciously over the years. Some of it has rubbed but the view at the club has always been that whatever you choose to give to Guardiola, you are likely to get back in duplicate.

For example, a couple of years ago during a lean time on and off the field, City midfielder Phil Foden answered a knock on his front door to find Guardiola standing there unannounced. The men hugged and went inside where just about everything apart from football was discussed for an hour.

This instinctive but deep emotional intelligence extends to club staff, too. Guardiola sends notes of support to the City women’s team staff while inside his office hangs a list of birthdays of all first-team employees. The rule is that they bring the cake for the celebration but a fuss is then made. Birthday well wishes are beamed on screens around the training ground and a bottle of champagne may be presented.

At least two wider City staff members have been given extended compassionate leave for family reasons, at Guardiola’s request, while he took it upon himself to persuade club bosses that all staff should be paid in full during the Covid pandemic, as many Premier League rivals leant into the Government’s furlough scheme. On another occasion Guardiola went to war with chief operating officer Omar Berrada – now chief executive at United – over employee bonuses.

Guardiola walked into one tense meeting and told Berrada that he was paying employees £10,000 each from his own bonus as a Premier League title win pot. In no uncertain terms, Berrada was urged by his manager to sort out the rest – and quickly. Staff who sat in on that exchange gawped in amazement. Berrada, in his defence, had rightly been worried about the tax implications of gifts.

‘The truth is that he will do anything for anybody on the (team) plane,’ says one source. ‘There are those who leave the club and make sure they say they owe him everything.’

After 10 years in the Premier League, Guardiola’s footprint is deeply felt and not just in terms of results. His obsession with the game does not have a ceiling and he can overstep occasionally. His habit of grabbing opposition players for animated conversations after games is not universally admired among counterparts and rivals.

Equally, he is popular. More so than someone like Liverpool’s Klopp or indeed Mourinho, football’s ultimate alpha males. Managers at all levels of the game have known their phone to ring a couple of days after a game. On the other end of the line an animated City manager wanting to discuss a tactic or a formation they had employed against his team.

‘You can’t help but talk to him,’ reveals one Championship manager.

‘On the one hand it’s b****y cheeky. Why would we discuss our secrets?

‘But on the other hand, it’s Pep! So you are flattered that he cares or that he has been impressed.

‘And then you ask him questions and he answers honestly. So maybe you both learn.’

That particular manager once went for a job interview at a London club to discover that Guardiola had already put a word in for him. Oddly, he didn’t get it. But the image of a manager who is at least occasionally able to see life beyond the prism of his obsession with his own club endures.

‘There is a reverence towards him and he has that deity status in English football,’ another source says.

‘Nobody has deliberately tried to p*** him off. Everyone wants his approval.’

To illustrate that, Klopp did not need asking twice to take part in an emotional montage put together by Sky Sports marking Guardiola’s 1000th game earlier this season.

City’s manager went dewy-eyed while watching the likes of Wenger, Sam Allardyce, his mate Tony Pulis and even greater mate Neil Warnock send video well wishes. So keen to be involved, 78-year-old Roy Hodgson learnt how to record on his phone specifically for the occasion.

There was, perhaps inevitably, only one glaring omission from the list. Off camera, Guardiola turned to the Sky crew and quipped: ‘You didn’t ask Jose, then?’ They had. Jose said no. Old habits and all that.

Back on camera, Guardiola enthused at messages from ‘the old English’ managers, the elder statesmen he reveres.

Looking back on his start to life in England, one source says: 'I remember we played Everton and Pep was like a baby. It was, “Ooh it’s Sam Allardyce”. The second year with Warnock at Cardiff was exactly the same. He genuinely knew all about these guys. He is fascinated by what they have done and how they have done it.’

Warnock – recently afforded that rarer privilege of observing City training sessions – actually geed Guardiola up in 2024, privately imploring him to refresh the squad and go again amid the worst run of the coach’s career. As we know, he did – pivoting from a plan to leave – and built a team capable of challenging for the title again in the 2025-26 season.

There is a genuine love for England, with some believing the national team job is now his ultimate destiny. 

This may be one of the things that separates Guardiola from merely being remembered as a top coach. There have been less dignified moments – he tussled physically with Wigan manager Paul Cook after an FA Cup defeat in Lancashire while there is no love lost between him and Brighton’s Fabian Hurzeler – but on the whole his relationships forged within the management community have held water. It has been a similar story with the media, with whom he can be unpredictable.

‘He puts the fear of God into me,’ one TV interviewer says.

Another offers: ‘His eyes burn through you. He can obviously be very sarcastic but I never feel it’s malicious. Other managers can be spiteful.’

Guardiola has been known to approach reporters at train stations to say hello and can hold court with other personalities at social events – usually involving a golf course – in a way that the public might not imagine. On other occasions he has misjudged the mood, such as the night when he turned up at Football Writers’ Gala dinner dressed in his jeans. He blamed that faux pas on City staff and doesn’t care for such events anyway.

At least those men and women on the front line, microphone in hand, unsure of what may tumble out of their subject’s mouth, view Guardiola as authentic. We can’t say that for all of them.

‘A bundle of paranoid football genius,’ is how one puts it.

Guardiola has been known to wag fingers at broadcasters for questions they have posed once interviews are finished – even returning to wag a little bit more between other radio or TV duties.

While one high-profile boss used to watch early kick-offs with Sky Sports crews on Sundays, Guardiola doesn’t stick around before or after games. This area is seen as strictly business – and not a business he enjoys. This also creeps into player interviews, with City staff not wanting stars to conduct those directly after full time, moments seen as a crucial juncture for messaging inside the dressing room.

TV floor managers have been known to physically block Guardiola’s confidant and head of player support, Manel Estiarte, as he gesticulates at flash interviews overrunning. One player recently looked on aghast at a commotion behind the camera, knocking him off his stride while offering answers.

Estiarte – once the Lionel Messi of water polo, an Olympic Games gold medallist with Spain in 1996 – is seen as a divisive but fundamentally crucial figure both inside and outside the club. He and Guardiola met in 1991. He has been with the manager since the call-up to manage Barcelona and is utterly integral to how Guardiola operates, to the great man’s never-ending need for control and to be relatively isolated and secretive but at the same time all-knowing. 

Estiarte – always seen on the pitch at full-time and a brooding presence within earshot of all media interviews – is his friend’s eyes and ears, his emotional minder. Guardiola knows he would not be the same coach without him and perhaps City realised this too, committing to paying his wages back in 2016 while Bayern Munich beforehand had not. 

Unless you are in Guardiola’s immediate coaching circle at the Etihad, Estiarte is the way to get to him. Only certain people have the manager’s number.

The day after Guardiola’s first title win was secured in 2018, for example, he disappeared on to the golf course with Ryder Cup star Tommy Fleetwood. With the media – including City’s in-house channels – clamouring for access and quotes, he couldn’t be raised but it later transpired that it was not Guardiola’s phone that had been called by communications staff, but that of Estiarte.

The 64-year-old recognises that he is the bad cop of this operation. He understands the role is to shield Guardiola so he routinely pushes back at requests, often delivering a blunt ‘no’. Some people feel he drip feeds negativity to the main man in order to fuel him.

Players had initially been wary of Estiarte, seen as Pep’s guy, and some club staff still are. But the dressing room soon noticed he was working to their benefit. To those within his circle of trust, Estiarte is a dream. He looks after his own and is a rock for plenty.

‘Manel doesn’t get the credit he deserves, Pep is very lucky to have him,’ is the view of one staff member.

Sometimes, meanwhile, the face Guardiola decides to show to the world is entirely of his own making. After winning the league in 2023 and in the wake of the 115 Premier League charges lodged against the club, Guardiola kept Sky waiting for so long for words that they had to reschedule their programming to eventually accommodate him.

As City staff constantly went over to cajole him over to Sky’s set, he kept saying he was busy celebrating with family and friends. Only when touchline reporter Geoff Shreeves physically marched him across – long after the show was supposed to be off air – did Guardiola finally fulfil his obligation. Little victories such as this continue to amuse him greatly.

Closer to home and closer to the things that really matter, Guardiola has drawn certain lines so deep in the sand they will still be there when he goes. For example, leaking of information – especially team news – is not tolerated.

One staff member, still there, survived by the skin of their teeth after being suspected of the cardinal sin but another was unceremoniously frogmarched out of the building without notice. In the 2025-26 season, City undertook an internal investigation about the whole issue.

But this is why he loves the staff he still has around him, the ones who survive and make the grade. It’s why he makes sure their birthdays are marked, gives them extended time off, sympathises with family plights, sticks the boot into the hierarchy over bonuses. The loyalty and the blind devotion is what it’s about.

It’s what Guardiola demands from all of them and he knows it is not easy. This is why the parties after title victories, domestic trebles or the actual Treble, when a lubricated Guardiola is dancing up on stage in front of hundreds of employees, are important. They bring them together and he insists on the fun. City built the first padel court in Manchester on the premises at their manager’s say-so. There is a golf simulator, even if the manager had that one built largely for his own ends.

In 2018, in the weeks after clinching a first Premier League title and while chasing the magic 100 points, Guardiola even sanctioned weekly parties.

‘When it came to the actual title parade, my partner said I couldn’t go out again because it was getting beyond a joke,’ one staffer says.

‘I was doing the parade and going straight home. Pep turns to me at the parade and asks if I’m going out with them for the last party. I just said I can’t.

‘So he said to ring my partner. “Hiya, it’s Pep.” She goes, “Pep who?”. She didn’t have a clue!

‘He explained it was Pep Guardiola: “Listen, I know you don’t want him to go out tonight but this is the last one, I’ll have him home by two.”

‘My partner went: “One.”

‘I can’t remember what time I got home!’

Barcelona will always be this passionate Catalan’s home. In those early days – with City staff given two or three days off when possible – he would travel home to recharge in the quaint Bar Canete just off La Rambla, which features in the Michelin guide. He’d see his father Valenti, a bricklayer of 50 years and his mother, Dolors Sala, who passed in April 2020.

After 10 years in England, however, something fundamental of Manchester is burned into his soul. It’s not fake. It’s not some lip service paid in lieu of a generous employer. It’s real and something that has been shaped by experience and by events.

Guardiola, for example, was at home the night a terrorist's bomb exploded at an Ariana Grande concert at the nearby Manchester Arena. His wife and daughters were there so he did what any parent would do. He ran there to find them. They survived while 22 others perished. Later the spontaneous group rendition of the Oasis classic Don’t Look Back in Anger at a vigil he attended in St Ann’s Square had a profound effect on him.

Months later, at a benefit gig for those affected back at the Manchester Arena, Guardiola was introduced to the Stockport band Blossoms backstage. Although arguably the most consistently stellar local band since Oasis, they are huge City fans and were too awestruck to speak. Guardiola took some ribbing from comedian Peter Kay with good humour that evening.

An eye witness said: ‘Pep was incredible that night. He was totally invested. You could tell how much the whole thing meant to him.’

Ex-City manager Brian Horton was equally speechless at a Vincent Kompany testimonial dinner at the Hilton on Deansgate in 2019 when Guardiola approached him.

‘I feel this body come round and he has basically came over to say happy birthday to me,’ Horton recalls.

‘How good is that? I got a photo. I was starstruck. Like a baby, like a little boy.’

All of these things and many more have helped shape Guardiola’s life at City. For a while he part-owned a restaurant on fashionable King Street. He has played golf on Manchester’s best courses.

For a decade he has been present and invested, in more ways than one, and aside from the glory, the obsession with the Champions League and the records, Guardiola’s overt standing for basic human rights and charitable causes has become a pillar of his decade-long reign.

Each year, the Christie – Manchester’s renowned cancer hospital – hold a donor dinner for around a dozen high-net-worth individuals. Organised by Jon Bell, the son of late City legend Colin, Guardiola always attends when asked, enthusiastically regaling tales and answering questions. Recently, a £1million donation landed on the Christie’s desk the morning after the function.

Loads of theories are thrown around as to why he has stayed so long. His friends, director of football Txiki Begiristain – now gone – and chief executive Ferran Soriano brought him to the club. His relationship with chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak is strong. There is autonomy. There is money. And there is the insatiable lust for winning and for reinventing and for making one final point to those inside and out who may have expressed a sliver of doubt.

And there is also some stubbornness. The more people have questioned his desire to stick around in the wake of UEFA financial charges – most of which didn’t stick – and the Premier League ones that linger to this day, the more he has appeared inclined to do exactly the opposite.

‘Julius Caesar said in this world there are no enemies or friends, there are just interests,’ he said in contempt of rivals working to expedite possible punishment.

Chillingly, he added during an unforgettable press conference performance after the Premier League charges landed: ‘I am not moving from this seat, I can assure you. More than ever, I want to stay.’

To watch and listen to Guardiola that day was an education. It was street fighting stuff from a man utterly in step with his club’s belief that the established football hierarchy are out to derail City’s march to dominance. Unrehearsed but passionate, structured and persuasive. No wonder players want to embrace sacrifice for him.

More broadly, Guardiola is a manager who tends to hear what the world is saying about him, his club and his team. Indeed the idea that Guardiola owns a burner X account has been doing the rounds for years.

He’s never confirmed as such but has been seen sitting in restaurants around the trendy Ancoats square scrolling the app. And his obsession with what the general public say about team selections points in particular to the work of a doom scroller.

At various junctures over his time here, he has referenced outcry at team selection decisions, the sort of which can only be garnered through X.

‘Did you read social media when I picked the team at Newcastle in the FA Cup?’ Guardiola asked in March 2026.

‘How did Pep pick that team? He lacks respect for the competition. How can the people say that? Why doesn’t he play Rodri? Why doesn’t he play Bernardo? Why doesn’t he play this player or that player? Why has he left Erling at home?’

When pressed on why he bothers to scour social media, Guardiola rather fancifully suggested that the club’s press officer compiles a list of his harshest critics by way of a briefing note.

‘I don’t have Instagram, I don’t have TikTok,’ he said. He neglected to mention X and he certainly reads the Daily Mail website. He has said so.

Negativity and criticism does linger with him. Some suspect the hand of Estiarte but the truth is that he doesn’t need any encouragement for it to fester.

Almost two months on from a galling Champions League defeat at Bodo/Glimt and Guardiola was still bringing up media coverage. He watches everything, he notices everything, he reads more than he would have us believe. He knows everyone and everything. Just like Ferguson, he misses no tricks.

He knows the identities of the United supporters among the press pack and, on becoming more carefree in later years, has relished gently saying so.

He has bought into the City practice of paying attention to who covers what and this was never more obvious than in the sweltering summer heat of Hong Kong in 2019, when a reporter broke away from United’s own pre-season activity to join the champions’ tour.

‘Thank you for joining us,’ said Guardiola as the reporter planted his Dictaphone on Guardiola’s desk.

‘Have United gone home?'

He smiled but was making a point.

The Champions League monkey weighed heavy on his back for a while but once the 2023 Treble wrenched it off, media interactions became looser. 

Guardiola can be electric company but whereas he would feel his bon mots had been nailed in press conferences, they actually could come across as so edgy, so sharp that they would have somebody’s eye out.

A reporter who is renowned for asking questions surrounding injuries – which a somewhat exasperated Guardiola quickly cottoned on to in the very first season – fondly tells the story that at the Ataturk Stadium in Istanbul, an hour after City had completed their historic Treble, a joyous and jovial Guardiola confidently bowled over to him and said, without missing a beat: ‘No injuries, everybody is fit.’

He walked off smirking to himself.