The Pepacy: Is Pep the Magic Dragon the greatest manager of our times?

At one point in the second half of the Champions League final in Istanbul late last Saturday, Pep Guardiola was caught on camera looking not just distraught on the sidelines, but demented, like a bride’s father whose caterers had still not arrived at the wedding venue – and the mobile phone had not yet been invented. This, when Manchester City, the side that he has managed since 2016, was a goal up in the 68th minute courtesy the unexpected scorer in a side that scores for a living, defensive midfielder, Rodrigo Cascante. That particular moment, of order-still-in-chaos, not only encapsulates Josep Guardiola Salas’ relationship with football, but also his relationship with the world at large that still functions essentially on an effort-result basis.

Since he honed his cojones in Barcelona — the Catalan club the Catalonian once played in through the 1990s as a midfielder in Johan Cruyff’s ‘Dream Team’, and joined as manager in 2008 — undertaking a startling project that saw its apogee in Barca clinching the European title with style, devastation and ease against Manchester United in 2011, Pep became the ‘mad scientist’ of world football. His radioactive material are his players — Leo Messi being the uranium-235 among them — his beakers and bunsen burners, the field and the ball where the Spaniard constantly triangulates spaces from the sidelines, on the practice field and in strategy meetings.

On May 2, 2009, he took out the ‘false 9’ from his tub of formaldehyde before our eyes, playing Messi as a ‘false’ centre forward ziplining up and down deep on the field in a typewriter run-and-back, ping, run-and-back, with Samuel E’to and Thierry Henry on the outside. The result was not just a 6-2 victory against Real Madrid at the Bernabeu that day,, but also a legacy weapon that is still lethal in the right ‘legs’ to this day

What makes Guardiola not just the best football manager in the world, but also one of the greatest managers of any controlled random environment, is his obsession to clamp the situation down to full control – or, as much as randomised events like football can allow. His control freakery was once evident in Barcelona’s on-field strategy itself, the much-touted ‘tiki-taka’ style of play.

Tiki-taka was the equivalent of being risk-averse, betting on safe, attractive stocks via short passing and constant moving with the ball, essentially to maintain possession. Guardiola was retrofitting Cruyff’s ‘total football’, where every player is in Brownian motion irrespective of his field position in a constant mode of controlled disarray. Tiki-taka yielded great results for Barcelona, getting the club 14 record trophies under Guardiola’s skinny jeans-clad managerial gaze.

But where Pep’s greatness is on full-display is his ability, genius really, to adapt, and how. Once the tiki-taka algorithm was cracked – first, most n o t a b l y, b y J o s e Mourinho’s Inter Milan in the 2010 Champions League semifinal where Barcelona players were left asphyxiated for short-passing space, and later by the likes of Bayern Munich under Louis Van Gaal who broke Pep’s weaponry by blitzkrieging counterattacks – Guardiola sought new methods. But they remained methods to control the 90 minutes of time and football field space.In 2013, when Pep left ‘home’ in Barcelona, it was Bayern that took him aboard for his new project. This was a tough call. Not because the German side was lacking in talent or trophies, but exactly because it was always going to be tough for Pep to make his mark in a club that was already a giant in European and world football. It was like being the new CEO of Reliance or Apple. How does one better what was already achieved?In hindsight, Munich’s two consecutive Bundesliga titles under his three-year watch, despite not advancing past the semi-final in the 2015-16 Champions League was a period of experimentation, fomenting what would be the core of what makes Pep talk: securing team unity in the gestalt sense – the whole adding up to more than the sum of its parts; ensuring a severe ‘Protestant’ work ethic; and ensuring there is a loyalty to the unit that goes well beyond the pitch.

But in legacy terms, it was his move to Manchester City in 2016 that gave Pep the canvas to showcase his art. Suddenly, it was not just about winning titles and trophies for giant legacy clubs, gargantuan brands. This was about moving from the expected successes – titles are not demanded, but expected from the likes of Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Read Madrid – to making Manchester City a club ‘of that league’. He needed to make the players wear the ‘heavy shirt’ that would make the side enter legendhood through an expected invincibility.

If Guardiola’s furious baton produced the right music for a club — no matter how deep-pocketed, how much brimming with individual sparks – to forge ahead of almost all-season leader Arsenal this Premier League season like a Kenyan long-distance runner, Manchester City looked ready to lift the Champions League trophy much before Saturday’s final against Inter Milan. What Guardiao has managed with players of the calibre of Ilkay Gündogan, Kevin de Bruyne, Erling Halaand, Bernardo Silva and Phil Foden is to recreate a system of default victory.

It’s ironic that in Saturday’s final, City found themselves lucky to beat Inter, literally by goalkeeper Ederson’s leg stopping a Romelu Lukaku shot on goal. But what Istanbul has achieved is Pep turning a commodity – a supremely valued commodity, to be sure – into a brand.

It is not the petrodollars, and the accompanying ability to get whichever ‘asset’ of choice to play in the light blue jersey, that has made an extremely talented side into a great one. It is Pep Guardiola, who has managed to do it. By his manic obsession to control the chaos in that rectangular space between two goal posts and much beyond.