ExpandPep Guardiola with the Premier League trophy at the Etihad Stadium, Manchester, on May 19th, 2024. Photograph: Visionhaus/Getty Images
Pep Guardiola with the Premier League trophy at the Etihad Stadium, Manchester, on May 19th, 2024. Photograph: Visionhaus/Getty Images
There’s a Pep Guardiola speech that bubbles up every once in a while on the internet, like the gristly foam on the surface of a boiling ham. Taken from one of the Amazon glaze job documentaries, it’s always a good reminder that you’re spending more time than you should in the For You wastelands of X. Sort of like Robin Williams’ gag about cocaine being God’s way of telling you you make too much money, just with added Bernardo Silva.
It’s from the end of the 2017/18 season, Guardiola’s second at Manchester City, their first league title won under him. Except they didn’t just win it; they swallowed it in one gulp. They put up 100 points; they set or equalled records for consecutive wins (18), consecutive away wins (11), and consecutive wins in all competitions (20). They scored 106 goals, 22 more than the next-highest. They finished with a goal difference of +79, a full 33 better than the next best.
It was a Pantera season, a vulgar display of power. And in keeping with the general tone of muscular, macho bravado, Guardiola’s speech to his players, captured by the Amazon cameras, leans into the language of obliteration. The supposed intent of it is to deflect praise from himself on to them, but there’s a serious bang of the humblebrag off it too.
"I destroyed football like you destroyed the Premier League"
Pep Guardiola's speech to his @ManCity players after their first Premier League triumph 🏆 pic.twitter.com/3rFW4wXWd5
— Prime Video Sport UK (@primevideosport) January 12, 2022
“Can you imagine a ball boy?” Pep begins. “In his own country, a small country. Going to the academy when he’s 13 years old. And after playing in the first team, his own team, in his heart, who stayed there a lot of years and after became the manager – 37 years old and in four years he destroyed football.
READ MORE
“It’s me. I had the privilege to live that. I destroyed football like you destroyed the Premier League. Like you destroyed the Premier League this season.”
Sheesh! Talk about saying the quiet part out loud. Just to put a bit of context around the season Guardiola is eulogising here, City went into it off the back of a summer window in which they bought Ederson, Kyle Walker, Bernard Mendy and Bernardo Silva. They added Aymeric Laporte in January. This was on top of the previous season where they bought John Stones, Leroy Sané, Ilkay Gündoğan and Gabriel Jesus. Of those nine players, six went on to feature in at least one PFA Team of the Year over the next decade.
The money did what it was supposed to. It built Guardiola’s best-ever team. Photograph: Gareth Copley/Getty Images
The money did what it was supposed to. It built Guardiola’s best-ever team. Photograph: Gareth Copley/Getty Images
They didn’t come cheap either. Ederson cost a world record fee for a goalkeeper. Stones was the world’s most expensive defender until they bought Walker, who held the tag for four months until being passed by Laporte. Silva played 460 games for City, Ederson played 372, Walker 317. Stones, Gündoğan and Jesus all played at least 200 matches; Laporte played 180. The money did what it was supposed to. It built Guardiola’s best-ever team.
[ Manchester City or Scam FC – the €1bn scandal ]
We know now that it was all a con job. The Premier League confirmed on Tuesday that City had been found guilty of inflating their sponsorship totals for a decade leading up to that season, that they filed inaccurate accounts to hide the true state of their finances and that they arranged sham contracts with commercial partners. This was worth almost £900 million to them over the period that was investigated. City have stated their innocence and are appealing.
In the forest of numbers, it’s useful to try and find a clearing where we can give ourselves room for a better look. Helpfully, the report breaks down City’s connivance on a season-by-season basis. And so we are able to see that in 2017/18, the club recorded £145.73m (€166.34 million) in commercial revenue, with only £11 million (€12.56 million) paid by actual sponsors. That means City’s owners put up £134.73 million (€158.38 million) in disguised funding for that season, against the rules.
[ Manchester City guilty of Premier League charges after £900m of ‘sham’ contracts ]
Cut to Guardiola standing in front of a white screen in a Holiday Inn meeting room in 2018, all grave tones and manly gesticulation, giving his players their due for destroying the Premier League. “This belongs to you,” he says. “The football, guys, belongs to you. It doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to you.”
Pep Guardiola presumably didn’t mean to be quite so on the nose with all his talk about destroying football and so on, but look where it has all led. Photograph: Molly Darlington/Getty Images
Pep Guardiola presumably didn’t mean to be quite so on the nose with all his talk about destroying football and so on, but look where it has all led. Photograph: Molly Darlington/Getty Images
It belongs to them all now. Guardiola presumably didn’t mean to be quite so on the nose with all his talk about destroying football and so on, but look where it has all led to. Nobody has been able to give a proper sense of where this is going to end up for City, but regardless of what form their punishment ultimately takes, football has been destroyed here.
Not just Premier League football, either. English football as a whole is going to have to wrestle with what to do with them over the rest of the decade. The past 15 years of European football is a tainted, asterisked thing too. There’s no satisfying way to sanction them, no undoing what they’ve done. You can’t take the eggs back out of the cake once it’s baked.
The comet’s tail is going to be longer than we can even imagine here. City’s rapacious, lawless tentacles have been attached to every corner of the elite game throughout the Abu Dhabi adventure and so their name is blackened permanently for future generations. They were one of the greatest club teams the game has ever known, playing football that reinvented an entire sport.
But who even cares about that now?