Pep Guardiola, the most successful manager in Manchester City’s history, has once again reiterated his firm intention to quit coaching after his contract at Manchester City ends.
“I know that after this stage with Manchester City I’m going to stop, that’s for sure; it’s decided, more than decided,” Guardiola said. “I’m going to leave after this stage with City because I need to stop and focus on myself, on my body.”
In a long ranging interview with the lifestyle major, Guardiola would start off when asked what he feels his age to be when Cridtiano Ronaldo said he reckoned he was 28. “I’m now, I’m 75 years old [laughs]. I’m a wreck, everything hurts right now. So, if it’s my biological age… Maybe if I take the test, it’ll come out younger. I hope to be better than I am now in a while. That’s why I need places like this to get better,” he would say on the sidelines of a longevity, neuroscience facility in Barcelona.
Speaking about last season’s woes, Guardiola told GQ, “I don’t think I’d attribute it so much to last year, but rather to the last seven years. When you win six Premier Leagues, there comes a time when you go downhill. It’s human nature. Back then, we probably should have moved more players, but it’s very easy to say that after the fact. It’s a process that had to be experienced, which happens, which took longer to happen, and when it happened, it went deeper than we could have imagined. Not deep in the sense of ending badly, because in the end, we reached the Copa del Rey final and finished third, not twelfth. It hasn’t gone so badly. In retrospect, we’ll see that it hasn’t been such a bad season. But we have gone for many months without winning games. We’ve gone like 13 or 14 without winning, and that was… It had never happened before. But it puts you in your place.”
Guardiola said sport was tightly wound up with failures, even the most successful careers. “In sports, you can’t always win every competition you play.
He told GQ You know why? Because it’s impossible. Impossible. So you lose sometimes, well yes, that’s part of sports. Michael Jordan was the greatest. He won six rings playing for fifteen years. He lost more than he won. Tiger Woods was the greatest. He won fourteen Grand Slams. Do you know how many he’s played in his life? More than a hundred. He lost more than he won. In sports, you lose more than you win. I’ve played in 16 leagues and won thirteen. So, well, yes, I’ve lost some. But it hasn’t gone badly. And then, as part of sports, part of the process is thinking that the others are also good, that they also do well, that they also prepare, that they also have the people to do well. Ah, this year, if we give up, I’ll tell you, we’re twelfth, and we’re not giving up. We were very bad, very bad, but we were there, we were there… And in the end we finished third, which in the Premier League, I can tell you, isn’t bad,”
Guardiola, widely regarded as one of the greatest managers in football history, has won 18 trophies with Manchester City, including six Premier League titles and a long-awaited Champions League crown. Yet the relentless pressure of elite coaching has taken its toll.
“There’s no profession where 60,000 people want you to lose your job. But we’re so well-paid, we can accept this. The emotional stakes are high; if I win, I laugh at my neighbour; if I lose, he laughs at me.”
