With Manchester City facing elimination from the Champions League, Pep Guardiola now looks as vulnerable and troubled as any other manager who has suffered a seventh defeat in 10 games. Both these statements would have seemed virtually unthinkable only a month ago, but the stark truth is now slapping Guardiola hard in the face after Tuesday’s 2-0 Champions League loss against Juventus.
Second-half goals from Dusan Vlahovic and Weston McKennie sent Juventus chirpily on course for a playoff spot, leaving City ingloriously stranded in 22nd position, only a point clear of 25th place Paris Saint-Germain who are currently below the cut-off point that will see teams drop out of the competition altogether.
City face PSG in Paris in their next game and if they lose that, elimination from the Champions League will loom large and painfully real, a prospect that would be a humiliation for a club of City’s stature and ambition. After all, they were Champions League winners in 2023. The biggest problem might just turn out to be Guardiola himself, as in whether we’re witnessing the beginning of the end of his incredible eight-year reign in charge.
Is Guardiola’s position as City manager under threat after his team’s unprecedented slump? It is highly unlikely that the club’s hierarchy, who were in Turin, led by chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak, would resort to knee-jerk reactions as to even consider dismissing the most successful manager in City’s history, the same individual who has delivered 18 trophies since 2016. However, the faith and support of his bosses is not the issue.
What has been most perturbing is the unfamiliar sight of Guardiola cutting an unusually restrained figure on the touchline during this game in Turin – apart from when he would stand with his hands in his pockets when he wasn’t slumped in his seat – barely delivering instructions to his players. The real question is how long he will be able to sustain himself in a role when nothing seems to be working at all.
Guardiola has never of having been just another manager, one of those guys who stereotypically has good days and bad days who ultimately runs out of solutions when the problems begin to stack up. Yes, he has invariably had bad results in charge of Barcelona, Bayern Munich and City, but never once had he ever been put through the kind of crises that all other managers endure. Until now, that is.
Undeniably, his gilded career – a tale of almost unbroken success since he won the Treble with Barcelona in his first season in 2008-09 – has placed the 53-year-old above the trials and tribulations of his contemporaries, but now he is compelled to deal with them himself. And it seems apparent that Guardiola is at a loss for solutions for the first time in his career.
In Turin, all he could do was watch as his flailing team struggled to overcome a Juventus side that had gone into this game with just one win from their last six games and he did virtually nothing about it. He watched Kevin De Bruyne (33) and Ilkay Gundogan (34) run out of steam in midfield and left to toil until the 87th minute when he finally made his first change by introducing Matheus Nunes in favor of Jack Grealish.
City’s goal machine Erling Haaland once again failed to contribute anything in a game when he doesn’t score – managing just 18 touches all night. Yet again it was Guardiola himself who was unable to make the crucial tweak in his selection or system to make the difference. When asked after the game whether he was now questioning himself, Guardiola conceded he was, but with an air of defiance rather than hinting at a lack of self-confidence.
“Of course I question myself and I have my thoughts,” Guardiola said. “I’m stable in good moments and bad moments. I try to find a way to do it.”
However when pushed on whether he was now experiencing the toughest challenge of his career, Guardiola insisted he was not.
“My biggest challenge is to get results to continue to work in the first seasons [at Barcelona],” Guardiola said. “It’s life, it happens. Sometimes you have a bad period, but I’m going to insist until we’re there.”
When Guardiola signed a two-year contract extension last month, he said that he had begun to view this season as his last at City.
“I was thinking a lot,” he said. “There were some moments, I have to be honest, I thought this should be the last one. But at the same time, when the situation comes and the problems we had in the last month, I felt now is not the time to leave, I would let the club down and I had the feeling I had to do it.
“Don’t ask me the reason why. Maybe the four defeats were the reason why and I felt I cannot leave.”
City have had no bounce on the back of Guardiola’s new deal and they are now, along with their Champions League struggles, eight points behind in the Premier League. And with City due to participate in the FIFA Club World Cup in the United States next summer, their season still has another seven months to run and Guardiola and his players already look to be out of energy and ideas.
They appear to have run out of legs, with none of the vibrancy and attacking verve of Guardiola’s earlier great teams, and the manager himself is literally scratching his head for answers.
What is left now is the scenario that City might be relegated from the Champions League and Guardiola’s new contract may end up being worth less than the paper it is written on.