Pep Guardiola will always be looked at as one of the greatest managers of all time, and even if you can’t stand the guy, I think it’s impossible to take at least that from him. Because Guardiola not only won too much consistently throughout his career to be anything less than a great manager, but he really did change the game in terms of how teams approach possession, movement off the ball, and dominance. In a lot of ways, he set the stage for how clubs in Spain, Germany, and now England play, especially the biggest clubs in the world like Bayern Munich.
At the same time, Guardiola’s legacy always came with a bit of an asterisk. See, unlike the coaches he often gets compared to in debates about the greatest modern manager, namely Jose Mourinho and Jurgen Klopp, he never actually built a team from the ground up. Barcelona and Bayern Munich were already powerhouses before he arrived. And even Manchester City had already spent their way to being the best team in England before he showed up at the Etihad. Yes, he elevated Man City to greater heights, but he didn’t save a team Klopp did Liverpool or build them into a fairytale the way Mourinho did Porto (or you could argue Roma and Inter Milan) or Klopp did with Dortmund.
Maybe you could argue that what Guardiola did with Manchester City was similar to what Mourinho did with Chelsea, just substituting the UAE ownership and Roman Abramovich, but the scale at which Man City spent is different, as well as the fact that Man City had already won the Premier League with Roberto Mancini and Manuel Pellegrini before Guardiola’s first title win with the club in 2017.
Manchester City’s spending outweighed Guardiola’s success
Of course, nobody dominated at Manchester City the way that Guardiola did, but when you look at the scope of the charges against Man City and the fact that they were found guilty of 114 of 115 of them, it puts Guardiola’s achievements into perspective. In the Premier League’s official statement on the earth-shattering decision, they stated that Man City falsified 900 million pound increases in revenue in order to spend and even created “sham” deals to make this happen. It is hard to believe that Guardiola was entirely unaware of how he was benefiting from constant squad refreshes and unprecedented Premier League spending, particularly since the timing of his departure at the end of the 2025/26 season to take a sabbatical now looks quite curious.
Manchester City spent nearly two billion pounds in total on transfers under Guardiola from 2016 to 2026, which is a figure that is impossible to wrap your head around. And it is an insane competitive advantage not just in the Premier League and in world football. Yet in that decade, Guardiola only had one Champions League title to speak of, reaching only one other final, while Real Madrid, for example, won four Champions League titles with a fraction of the net spend. And Luis Enrique, in a similar situation with Qatari ownership at PSG, has already won more Champions Leagues in a few seasons in Paris than Pep did in a decade at Man City.
Guardiola’s dominance in the Premier League at Man City, again, is impressive with six league titles, and while the Premier League is more competitive than Serie A and the Bundesliga, both Bayern Munich and Juventus had more dominant periods in their leagues in the 2010s and early 2020s with less dominant net spending compared to their peers in the league like Borussia Dortmund and Inter Milan.
You can argue that the only giant Guardiola achieved expectations for was Barcelona, where he had arguably the greatest homegrown squad ever assembled with Lionel Messi, Xavi, and Andres Iniesta forming the nucleus of his team, in addition to many other stars like Carles Puyol, Dani Alves, Sergio Busquets, and David Villa who were among the best in the world. It is the only club where he won multiple Champions League titles. And even there, his accomplishments come with the asterisk of the Negreira case.
Pep Guardiola’s asterisk just got nearly as big as his name itself
Bayern Munich hired Guardiola to take them to the next level, and while he totally dominated the league – and didn’t break any rules either – he could never progress in the Champions League, famously getting embarrassed by his old team and old friend Messi in the semifinals of the 2014/15 campaign. Uli Hoeness and Die Roten fired Guardiola, expressly stating that they were disappointed in his inability to help them compete in the Champions League. His time at Bayern was viewed as a failure by diehard members of the club, with the club leadership expressly stating that anyone can win the title at Bayern (which is true, looking at their record run of wins in the 2010s and 2020s).
And likewise, at Manchester City, Guardiola dominated the league but only won the Champions League once in the 2022/23 season, taking advantage of Karim Benzema’s injury plagued follow up to the Ballon d’Or fairytale of 2021/22 to knock Madrid out as the only real competition to the crown in European football before Romelu Lukaku’s infamous misses gifted Pep his first UCL for Man City.
So Guardiola’s career of achievement always came with the asterisks of Messi, underachieving in the big games at Bayern, and even underachieving in the Champions League at Man City. And everyone knew that there was the whiff of scandal both at Barca and Man City. But now that there is actually a guilty verdict and real evidence of wrongdoing that Guardiola benefited from, his claim to being the GOAT of managers has suddenly fallen paper thin, especially when Jurgen Klopp, for example, achieved great things with far less – and Jose Mourinho, too, looking past Chelsea whose unfair advantages didn’t quite veer off into something as grand of a scale as this. Guardiola is an innovator and a legendary manager whose acumen and obsession must be respected to the utmost degree, but as a sportsman and in terms of his actual achievements in comparison to what he was given, it is impossible to define him as the GOAT manager now
Purveyor of footy since the 90s. Favor the Premier League and old school Serie A with a touch of Bundesliga. More than a touch. Professional writer for 20 years, covering every sport but now focused on the Premier League and world football. You won’t be able to guess my favorite team.