Manchester United did not want to appear stupid. The 20-time English champions did not want to look as if they were ignoring Pep Guardiola, a coach widely regarded as the world's finest.
Since the start of the year, United had seen a raft of opinion pieces claiming that the club was making an error by not attempting to sign Guardiola.
Different reasons were given by various voices, yet United's had been adamant that the Catalan was joining Manchester City for a year before Monday's announcement that he will replace Manuel Pellegrini.
At the start of December, when the mood was very different among United fans from now, after a dreadful run of results, poor football and Uefa Champions League elimination, United’s leading executive Ed Woodward was convinced that Guardiola would leave Bayern Munich at the end of this season and that he knew exactly where he was going.
It was not Old Trafford. United felt that the deal has been done long before and their club, like any other potential suitors, did not join a queue because there was not one.
It was also pointed out that City had refused to deny the story.
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Three weeks later, Guardiola announced he was leaving Munich after at the end of this season to pursue his ambition to manage in England’s Premier League.
City’s statement, issued after Manuel Pellegrini announced he was leaving at the end of his contract in June, claims that it commenced and finalised contractual negotiations with Guardiola “in recent weeks” and that “these negotiations were a recommencement of discussions that were curtailed in 2012.”
City fans will be pleased. They will have sympathy for Pellegrini, a far smarter man than he was ever allowed to come across in the media by his employers who wanted an opposite to the more controversial Roberto Mancini.
They will know they are getting the best and, at 45, a manager with time on his side and one with a proven record of winning trophies in Spain, Germany and in European competition, an area where City have consistently faltered and underachieved.
They also know too that it will annoy rival United fans who are unhappy with Louis van Gaal.
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When a story broke that United had met Guardiola in a Paris hotel two weeks ago, it gave United fans a brief hope of a brighter future.
Snatching the Catalan from under the noses of neighbours City was very appealing. United maintained that no meeting had ever taken place, however there are some figures at Old Trafford who still suspect United spoke to Guardiola.
If they did, they had their work cut out, for Guardiola’s relationship with City’s sporting director Txiki Begiristain is key.
They played together for Barca in the early 90s, winning Barca’s first European Cup at Wembley in May 1992. They also played for Spain together, the Basque and the Catalan outsiders in a squad still depleted by regional differences.
They also worked together when Begiristain was the Catalan’s sporting director at Barcelona for two years. They won everything in that short space of time before Begiristain left in 2010 and joined City in 2012.
Begiristain and Guardiola will work under another former Barca employee, Ferran Soriano. There are other Catalans within Manchester City’s staff who will try to help Guardiola and his family settle in England.
For all his undoubted qualities, Guardiola will have to adjust to English football, something his former manager Van Gaal has found difficult since arriving in England in 2014.
This time, he will not be in charge of one of the biggest two clubs in the country, nor one which has won the European Cup within two years of him taking over.
And, for the first time, he will be managing in a city where his club are not the biggest.
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