For varied and obvious and entirely understandable reasons, the Premier League manager discourse is currently dominated by a few names.
Your Slots, Your Artetas, Your Amorims. Your Santos. The Sean Dyches of this world.
But it occurs to us that there is currently very little being said about Pep Guardiola, and we find that quite interesting.
Because this is a pretty crucial juncture in the Premier League career of one of Our League’s greatest managers. And we think he might just be starting to enjoy himself again.
We’re pretty sure he didn’t really enjoy last season very much. You could see it on his face, sometimes viscerally and literally. A man used to competing for – and very often winning – the very biggest trophies was suddenly not in any way doing that, like at all.
Man City’s bids for a fifth straight Premier League crown and a second Champions League title were barely perceptible. The former disappeared in an astonishingly miserable run of form last autumn, one that also caused damage to the latter that proved unrecoverable.
We spent a lot of last season wondering whether he might in fact walk away from City altogether, whether he any longer had the energy or desire to keep pushing himself and his players to go again in pursuit of yet more tin.
Having watched his great rival Jurgen Klopp walk away from Liverpool due to possessing sufficient self-awareness and self-knowledge to know he just didn’t have another rebuild in him, would Guardiola be thinking in anything like the same way? We’re certain the thought at least crossed his mind, especially with Klopp clearly very much enjoying his less intensely and relentlessly stressful Red Bull role so much.
And despite his new contract, those thoughts resurfaced when City made a stuttering start this season, with consecutive and quite alarmingly tame early defeats to Spurs and Brighton hinting at another season in transition, a season building the foundations for something new rather than competing at the very top level.
Could Guardiola really be arsed with all that? Building a new team to one day go against Arne Slot seemingly finding the Premier League embarrassingly easy, or whatever phase Arteta Arsenal are now in? What about right now?
That’s all shifted a bit, though. City have been very good since the Brighton game and, with Liverpool/Slot losing the entire run of themselves over recent weeks, it is once again Guardiola and his side who have emerged from the chaos looking the likelier challengers for a currently dominant Arsenal.
And we know that going up against his old mate Mikel Arteta enlivens and energises Guardiola. It might just do so again. And we also don’t have to worry about just how much of an achievement Guardiola would consider it were City able to come out on top once again in that particular title battle.
The respect he has for Arteta and his team appeared to be bordering on deference given the way he tried and ultimately failed to sh*thouse his way to a 1-0 win at the Emirates in what must rank as one of the most out-of-character managerial efforts in the Premier League since Jose Mourinho, fuelled by thoughts of vengeance and last-laugh-having decided to send Spurs out to obliterate United at Old Trafford in one of those weird and echoey covid-era games that just don’t feel remotely real anymore.
There is a clear sense this season that Arteta at last has Arsenal approaching something like their final form. For City, that’s absolutely not the case. This is a new team playing a new way, looking to lean ever more heavily on the specific Erling Haaland traits that caught everyone’s attention at Borussia Dortmund.
And it’s starting to work remarkably well. We’re not about to get carried away, because Haaland’s Premier League career has always seemed to involve flying out of the blocks with a rush of early goals before a reversion to the (still very, very high) mean as the season plays out.
But there does seem to be something different this year in the manner of the goals Haaland is scoring. There are a lot more Dortmund Haaland goals and not as many City Haaland ones. It’s quite something to consider that for his first three years in England City might not actually have been playing to Haaland’s strengths. Not quite getting the most out of him.
This new slightly more direct Haaland-centric, post-De Bruyne City shows tantalising signs of capturing Guardiola’s imagination in a way nothing really did last season. They have created more Big Chances than anyone in the Premier League this season.
When you’ve achieved what Guardiola has achieved it must be unbelievably hard to keep coming back and putting yourself through it all again.
This season suddenly looks to be playing out in just the way to get his blood up. The combination of the revitalising change in his own team’s methods and the familiarity of their direct rival might just be ideal.