Pep Guardiola’s team are applying a top-down version of how to win, imposed by the will of a sovereign state
Pep Guardiola looks on during heavy rain at Manchester City’s victory over Bayern Munich on Tuesday.Probably themselves too. This current season team has taken a while to adapt to the sharper, narrower, more linear rhythms of Haaland-ism. It was always going to take time. But something has happened on the current winning run. Guardiola teams always evolve. The mature form of his Bayern team was the acme of The Control Years, football as a kind of choke hold, as beautiful annihilation.
In an odd twist, playing a pure centre forward has made them seriously tough to beat, the current mini-run studded with clean sheets. Possession football was always, at bottom, about control, about disarming the opposition, about defence. This team that looks like it can win 1-0 or 7-0 or 4-2, can score and defend in different ways now. It is hard to think of an iteration that beats it.
At which stage, it is necessary to consider question two. What does it mean for football that City are this good, that we have a nation state team on the verge of basically completing club football? Before we get to value judgement on things like good, bad, healthy, beneficial, it is at least necessary to acknowledge that this model is something new.
But then this is not an organic kind of sporting success, a success or a style that expresses anything from the ground. It is instead a top-down version of how to win, imposed by the will of a sovereign state, driven by extreme administrative competence, freed from the usual human failings, greed, lust for glory, with a bolt on internal culture road-tested in Catalonia, in a new-build former municipal stadium, producing a deeply alluring kind of planned perfection.
As City creep closer to a kind of completion, the treble, the total realisation of the project, it would take a complete lack of intellectual curiosity, or a blindly polarised sense of tribalism – ladies and gentleman, we have the internet in the house – not to see that this is at the very least worthy of comment; or to ignore the profound sense of change here. New forms, new dynamics, an Abu Dhabi full house in the year of Qatar. Welcome to the sky blue future.
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