An architect who redefined football - why Guardiola stands apart
An architect who redefined football - why Guardiola stands apart
Guillem Balague - BBC Sport ColumnistSun, May 24, 2026 at 5:57 AM UTC
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Guillem Balague column byline
Manchester City won 17 major trophies in 10 seasons under Pep Guardiola.
Stop and let that number land.
Guardiola has won 41 trophies in total across his 17-year managerial career. The legendary Sir Alex Ferguson got to 49 - but in 39 years.
And Guardiola has won the league 12 times in those 17 years.
Compare that to Carlo Ancelotti, who, with more years in the profession, has 'just' six league titles - although two more Champions Leagues than Guardiola.
The numbers give you a glimpse of who should be considered the greatest. And yet winning - at the highest level, for long enough - is only the entry fee.
Ferguson won a lot. So did Bob Paisley, Bill Shankly, Jose Mourinho and Ancelotti. Zinedine Zidane too in a short period. Mircea Lucescu, Valeriy Lobanovskyi, Ottmar Hitzfeld, Jock Stein, Arsene Wenger, Jurgen Klopp - they all won plenty of titles.
The question is not whether Guardiola belongs in that company. Obviously he does. The question is whether he stands apart from it - and why.
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A managerial career that started with a sentence
To understand Guardiola's true weight in football history, consider this. His fingerprints are on everything.
It really started with a sentence. When Joan Laporta was weighing up whether to give Guardiola the Barcelona job, the president looked at him and said: "No tens els collons." ("You don't have the balls.")
His only managerial honour at the time was the Spanish third division. Laporta gave him the job. Football changed. Guardiola changed it.
By the way, can Pep do it on bad pitches, with small crowds, with a small team? He did it in the third division with Barcelona B, with kids. Another tick.
The school he came from had two Dutch headmasters: Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff. Later on came Louis van Gaal.
At Barcelona, Guardiola turned their ideas into the most complete club side the world had seen. At Bayern Munich he pushed deeper into positional play, leaving ideas German football is still working through today.
Then came the hardest test he could find: England. The home of football. The place where received wisdom said his style - all the ball, all that control and all that demand for space and movement - would not survive. The queue of people predicting failure was long.
They were wrong, but here is what makes his time as a club manager unique. Guardiola has changed how football is played across three phases of the game.
If you follow the most common framework for analysing football with the ball - building from the back, transition through the middle, play around the box, and the finishing of the action - he has systematically revolutionised the first three.
The fourth phase, the finishing itself, is one football culture is not yet ready to absorb in the way he envisions. But no manager in history has done what he has done with the first three. Now others can come and continue the work.
And at City specifically, he has built not one great team but three.
The first: a beautiful side that won league titles playing football that made neutrals stop and watch.
The second: a battle-hardened version with four centre-backs in the back four and a centre-forward - Erling Haaland - who broke every record in sight.
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The third: this current iteration, still evolving, still capable of winning domestic trophies. Going back to win with each new generation of players is one of the most significant marks of a truly great manager.
'He leaves behind a sport that thinks differently'
There is also this. His most trusted lieutenants didn't just leave his staff to take other jobs. They came back. And others that know him or got to know him studied closely his collection of solutions.
Mikel Arteta. Vincent Kompany. Enzo Maresca. Roberto de Zerbi. Luis Enrique. And more.
Some of them sat in his meetings, absorbed his methods, and then returned to compete against him. There is no historical parallel for this.
Ferguson had rivals. Paisley had rivals. But Guardiola has had to fight for titles against managers he himself educated. And still he adapted, still he evolved - and yes, still he won. Is that a different category of greatness?
It would be dishonest not to mention the Champions League. Just one European Cup in 10 years at City - albeit their first - shows the competition's difficulty, but also suggests there are heights the club must still reach to win it more regularly.
That caveat belongs in the argument. Guardiola himself would insist on it.
But now consider the following. Changing the game is one thing. Changing how people understand the game is something else entirely.
Football is a conservative sport. It resists change instinctively. Supporters who have followed the game for decades will tell you, with genuine frustration, that Guardiola's football is not the football they recognise.
They are right - and that is precisely the point. One person, stubborn and intellectually relentless, moved the sport.
Cruyff did it. Arrigo Sacchi nudged it. Guardiola has done it at scale, across three countries, across three decades, and his influence is still spreading through the coaching trees of England, Spain, Germany and beyond.
The list of managers who shifted the intellectual framework of football - who made coaches, players, fans and analysts see the sport differently - is very short. Guardiola belongs on that list.
The case rests on four pillars, and each alone would be enough for a place in history. Together, they make the argument almost unanswerable.
1. He won, at a historic rate, in three different countries
2. He changed how football is played
3. He changed how football is thought about
4. He did it with a style that will be studied and debated long after the medals - including 20 trophies in 10 remarkable years at City - are forgotten.
The greatest? The honest answer is: you make the case and let it land.
But here is the last thing to know about Pep Guardiola. He is not done. Even now, as this chapter at Manchester City closes, he wanted a hand in choosing his successor - the manager who will continue his legacy, the same way he continued Cruyff's.
Not just a winner, more like an architect. Someone who carries the idea forward. That is how you know you are dealing with someone who was not just building a football team.
The question of whether he is the greatest is, ultimately, less interesting than what he leaves behind.
And what he leaves behind is a sport that thinks differently because of him.
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Source: “AOL Sports”
