For all that has been celebrated during Pep Guardiola's time at Manchester City, it took a lot to get here. Setting aside his previous conquests at Barcelona and Bayern Munich, Pep's arrival in Manchester was met with as much fanfare as skepticism. A feeling that would only grow as his strange team selections, recruitment, and ostensive insistence on a certain style only scraped by the club's most meager expectations. Who could forget the might of a City side featuring a barely functioning Pablo Zabaleta at inverted fullback and an aged Gael Clichy tasked with covering an entire flank. Look upon my works ye mighty and despair, as the attacking brilliance of Jesus Navas and Nolito wreak havoc upon your wavering defenses.
Of course, as many a detractor will happily point out, the champagne problems hampering the success of their new manager would soon be rectified. The best and brightest of teams across Europe would soon be sucked into the planetary destroyer that is City Football Group. Minor pawns of a costly game of PR for more nefarious ends. But qualms concerning the politics of modern fandom aside, Guardiola's indomitable cast of weapons started to deliver. Moreover, they did so in a way that accomplished the goals of their ownership group. They didn't just win, they won in style. They didn't just score goals, they scored a lot of goals. They didn't just win titles, they broke records. They didn't just play football, they played football.
Consistent with the hallmarks of Guardiola's priors, Manchester City's newfound identity was now bathed in the redemptive light of 'good Football.' In so much as it found itself at odds with the rhetorical milieu of the British style it walked into, Manchester City became the catalyst with which the league's identity now finds itself. Rife with spatial manipulation and measured pressing & counter-pressing, Guardiola's influence on the culture that so actively sought to spit him out has been seismic. But in the same way that his employers have reaped the benefits of Guardiola's positives, so too have they seen the haunting specter of his weaknesses. The latter stages of Europe's premier competition have famously eluded the Catalan since he won it all twice, back in the early 10s.
For a while, this was the tradeoff we implicitly accepted. Guardiola's genius was understood and even celebrated within the context of year-long competitions but perhaps too idealistic for the volatility of a high-level knockout tournament. Maybe, armed with the greatest player of all time and in an era where his brand of possession-based manipulation was still groundbreaking, Guardiola taking big ears home big ears twice was conceivable. But with the progression of more modern defensive tactics and *not* Lionel Messi, the greatest trophy in world football would logically go elsewhere.
Of course, this line of thinking begs the solution English football never quite accomplished. For Guardiola to apex the mountain of global football once more, he would need to accommodate his idealism. Even if just for a proverbial moment, the abandonment of the tactical rigidity that brought so much consistency in domestic competitions would need to be tempered for the more transitional nature of knockout competitions. With elite teams able to capitalize on lesser chances, the high-risk, high-reward defensive style that allows City to plant their artillery weapon of an attack and mitigate counters would prove too dangerous for the world's best forwards.
Now, however, having reached the precipice once more, it's a cosmic irony to the Gods of narrative that nothing truly changed for Pep Guardiola. 'Nothing' is perhaps something of an understatement, as various player developments have been the most significant changes for the team. Phil Foden's growing influence as one of the best young 'wide forwards*' in the world (*to my estimation, a wide forward simply someone that can operate well in one of four of five positions across modern front lines, dribbling and creating from either out wide or in half-spaces), along with Rodri's marginal improvements as a lesser Fernandinho, and the explosion of Joao Cancelo as a player capable of taking advantage of the space given to him when inverting, are all things that have moved an already maxed out needle for Manchester City.
Major media outlets pointing to the one differing piece of City's defense in Ruben Dias is the kind of 1+2 logic a child might employ when asked to think critically, as nothing really suggests he's anything other than a physical specimen who performs that relatively simplistic role when the system demands it of him. If any one of City's 'defenders' should be singled out for praise, it's he who has always been there, John Stones, coming leaps and bounds to give what he was recruited for, brave and incisive ball movement in City's buildup, without the physical frailty that once seemed inherent to his lanky stature.
Unfortunately for those who hope for movie-like character development, Guardiola's idealism has largely remained. If anything, it almost got them in trouble in the first leg against Pochettino's PSG, where a freak goal from De Bruyne and a free-kick separated an otherwise even affair. One might even say that a conceit to nervousness and over-estimation from Guardiola, one supposedly inconsistent with the bravery he typically demands from his players in high stakes ties (y'know, like when he played a high line back three against peak Barcelona MSN), was on display when he played a conservative midfield double of Rodri and Gundogan to try and limit PSG's ability in transition.
But maybe Pep has always been right. After all, he's been saying it the whole time. He’s won games he didn't deserve to on Barcelona's road to world domination and lost games that favored a more courageous heart. Reaching this year's Champions League final is less a marker of any kind of development from the supposed headcase we hate to love and love to hate, and more another act of randomness in a season that probably shouldn't have happened anyways. As Pep’s bogey competition has come to define the latter parts of his exceptional career, it’s in the vein of a classic tragedy that his return to the Olympic heights of European football be in a manner unbecoming of his extraordinary ability as a manager. But it’s perhaps a perfect encapsulation of a sport whose presence in the cultural zeitgeist sits all too comfortably on the extrapolations of its outcomes.