Pep Guardiola changed Manchester City and what England thought football could be

Arsenal were crowned Premier League champions on Tuesday, but in reality, it was surrendered long before then; the Gunners proving to be by far the best team in England this season. While that realisation will sting Manchester City, more mournful than any lost title will be the contemplation of life without Pep Guardiola. Guardiola announced on Friday he will end his 10 years in charge against Aston Villa at the Etihad on Sunday. It will sign off the most successful period in the club's history. The effects will be keenly felt in Manchester but will reverberate throughout England. For all the arguments about Abu Dhabi’s money, the charges, the spending and whether Manchester City “ruined football”, one truth has become impossible to deny: English football changed forever the moment Guardiola arrived in 2016 . Before Guardiola, the Premier League was still a league addicted to chaos. Goalkeepers launched long balls forward because taking risks near your own box was madness. Midfielders ran endlessly. Wingers sprinted up and down the touchline. Centre-backs headed things. The league was fast, emotional, dramatic and wonderfully imperfect. Then Guardiola arrived, preaching positional play and an obsession with geometry. A glut of trophies at both Barcelona and Bayern Munich already offered proof that he was on to something, that there might just be something to this devotion to football as intricate science rather than a game of chaos and instinct. But it's easy to forget that, at first, English football laughed at Guardiola. People mocked City for passing sideways. They laughed at Claudio Bravo for trying to play out from the back (granted, there were a few comical moments). They said Guardiola’s football was too delicate for England, too soft for rainy nights in Stoke or Burnley or Goodison Park under the lights. A decade later, almost every team in the country is trying to play like him. That is Guardiola’s true legacy. Not the trophies, though there are plenty of them. Not the records either, although City have set almost every meaningful domestic benchmark under him, including most points and goals scored in a single season. It is that he permanently altered what English football believes good football looks like. You can see Guardiola’s fingerprints everywhere now. Centre-backs split wide during build-up. Goalkeepers spraying the ball around like midfielders. Full-backs underlapping and drifting into central areas. Teams press high in synchronicity. Possession is no longer just decorative, it's control. Ten years ago, those concepts sounded foreign in England. Now they are the norm. Clubs adapted or they got left behind. It is the reason Arsenal under Mikel Arteta, who worshipped at the altar of Pep, are so damn good . The student has become the master. Even England’s national team benefited. The technical level of English players improved because academies changed how they coached and what they valued. Suddenly, young midfielders were taught how to receive the ball under pressure, defenders learned distribution, and intelligence became as important as physicality. A player like Phil Foden could only exist in modern English football because Guardiola helped create an environment where players like him are trusted rather than dismissed as too small or too lightweight. Of course, Guardiola did not invent possession football. Nor did he single-handedly modernise English football. Arsene Wenger and others had already nudged the game toward technical refinement long before Guardiola landed in Manchester. Guardiola just accelerated the evolution. His influence stretched beyond tactics. He raised standards to absurd levels. Of 13 Premier League titles under Alex Ferguson, only once did they cross 90 points. City hit that mark four times, including in 2017/18 when they became the first top-flight team to reach 100 points. Liverpool finished second that season with 97 points, enough to win all but two of the Premier League's 34 campaigns. Managers were no longer judged simply on winning, but on how they won. But that relentless desire for perfection, to raise standards, to rewrite the record books, has broken people, Guardiola included. City recorded only 71 points last season; the maximum they can end this one is 81. He took a sabbatical after three years at Barcelona, where the emotional and mental toll of maintaining excellence at such an impossible level eventually consumed even a man who appeared born to win. That he has maintained such high standards over a decade at City will go down as one of his greatest achievements. Studious and sophisticated, one area of Guardiola's reign often overlooked is the emotion that radiated throughout his best City teams. David Silva, Kevin de Bruyne, Sergio Aguero, Erling Haaland and Rodri – beautiful football still needs beautiful footballers. Guardiola, more than anybody, understood how to liberate them. When English football looks back at this era decades from now, the trophies will matter. The treble will matter. Four straight Premier League titles, six in all, will matter. But the biggest change Guardiola delivered was cultural. He didn’t just build a dominant team, a behemoth club, he changed what an entire country thought football could be. On Sunday, amid the tears and farewell, English football will remember one of the greats.

Pep Guardiola changed Manchester City and what England thought football could be

Pep's time at Man City - in pictures