Pep Guardiola during the draw with Feyenoord - Pep Guardiola's bloodied face offers a fleeting window into a tortured soul
Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola has had little to cheer about in recent weeks
The image of Pep Guardiola’s scratched face, his nose cut and his scalp painfully reddened, is heart-rending. Here is a figure who likes to project a force field, an aura of invulnerability, but whose torment at the worst run of his managerial career is so acute that he is tearing at his own skin. “I want to harm myself,” he said, laughing nervously at the end of his press conference, shattered at seeing his Manchester City become the first team in Champions League history to hold a 3-0 lead after 75 minutes and fail to win. “Goodnight.” To which the only appropriate response is not mirth, or schadenfreude, or tribal taunting about the 100+ charges against his club, but empathy.
You can be sure that Guardiola does not want to face the world bleeding. Turning his anguish against himself is an extreme stress reaction, the type of behaviour suggesting that a cocktail of frustration and self-reproach has become so overwhelming that he feels he has no other outlet. It is a picture, frankly, that should stop any critics in their tracks. While the temptation might be to counter that he earns £20 million a year, or that he has won six titles in seven seasons, none of this matters much when he is clearly so traumatised by City’s tailspin that he hurts himself.
It ill behoves anyone to act as his therapist. People direct their emotions inwards for complex reasons – whether because of a pre-existing condition, a sense of desperation, or as a cry for help. All that can be said with certainty is that Guardiola, dealing for the first time with five straight defeats and now City’s chaotic late collapse against Feyenoord, is suffering for his art so intensely that it is affecting his psychological state. Journalist Sam Lee, who asked the question about his cuts, struck exactly the right tone on hearing his startling answer about self-harm: “It’ll be OK.”
Pep Guardiola has reacted to the cuts and scratches on his face following Man City's draw with Feyenoord 🤕 pic.twitter.com/gMN8ZvXFup
— Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) November 26, 2024
Guardiola likes to act in these settings as if he is the smartest person in the room, as if reporters can never hope to understand the rarefied air he breathes. “My life is better than yours,” he said last season. But his self-evident trauma in the wake of City’s capitulation serves as a leveller, a reminder that even a genius acclaimed as the Gaudi of his craft is not impervious to despair.
The morning after, his PR team released a statement on his behalf, where he claimed his comment was “in no way intended to make light of the very serious issue of self-harm”, urging anyone on this path to contact the Samaritans. Except Guardiola did not speak out of turn, or trivialise the issue in any way. On the contrary, he offered a fleeting window into his soul, into the reality that the most mythologised manager of his generation can still endure moments of wretchedness.
By temperament, Guardiola is constantly wired. We have seen glimpses in his bizarre antics on the pitch: whether in his agitated pep talk at Southampton to Nathan Redmond – “I cannot control myself,” he said later, “but hopefully I can improve” – or his berating of Ederson within seconds of City taking the lead against Real Madrid in a Champions League semi-final. In his eyes, every nuance of the game assumes a vividness that makes City’s present malaise almost impossible to bear. If he can castigate his goalkeeper simply for passing the ball out to the wrong centre-half, you can imagine how much it wounds him to watch his defenders jog back in a five-on-three and let Feyenoord equalise in the 89th minute.
Manchester City's Spanish manager Pep Guardiola reacts as he talks with Southampton's English midfielder Nathan Redmond following the English Premier League football match between Manchester City and Southampton at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester
Guardiola has been known to explode emotionally
If the players are hardly helping him to steer City out of this funk, then neither are some of the supposed fans. There were boos at the Etihad at the final whistle, with City throwing away their advantage just 72 hours after losing 4-0 at home to Tottenham. Where do you even start with such entitlement? Any true supporters should be overcome with gratitude that Guardiola has graced the club at all. In December 1998, a 2-1 defeat at York City left City 12th in the third tier. Since 2016, Guardiola, backed by Abu Dhabi’s billions, has guided them to a Treble and an unprecedented four straight Premier League crowns. It is his brilliance that has elevated them to the point where even a temporary blip can be interpreted as a major crisis.
Now comes Guardiola’s greatest challenge of all. He has extended his contract to 2027, a defiant expression of belief in the City project even as the club wait for the verdict on financial irregularities, all of which they deny. Even in the event that they lose and are plunged into their own nuclear winter, Guardiola insists he would be happy to stay and manage in League One. It is quite the declaration, given that his 16 years in charge of Barcelona, Bayern Munich and City have all been spent in a position of dominance.
Today, more than ever, he is showing his susceptibilities, incredulous that City have lost their fearsome reputation and grasping for solutions as to how they can recover it. Their rivals, of course, are relishing the unravelling, overjoyed that their armour has finally been pierced. Guardiola’s scratches, though, demand a different reception. He is too proud to solicit sympathy, but he still deserves basic human respect and a reassurance that this too shall pass.
Finally we see the human cost of being football’s ultimate perfectionist.
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