All posts tagged: Guardiola

Pep Guardiola docuseries ‘A Beautiful Obsession’ to stream on Lionsgate Play

Pep Guardiola docuseries ‘A Beautiful Obsession’ to stream on Lionsgate Play

Published by Webster

Lionsgate Play will be releasing ‘A Beautiful Obsession’, a four-part docuseries following Pep Guardiola’s final chapter at Manchester City in India. All four episodes launch exclusively on Lionsgate Play in India on 21st August. The trailer offers a first look at the raw, unfiltered access granted to Academy and BAFTA award-winning filmmaker Kevin Macdonald. From never-before-seen dressing room moments to boardroom decisions, A Beautiful Obsession shows what was actually happening at the club during a disappointing 2024/25 season and the resurgence of the team to claim a domestic double. It captures a squad in flux: established stars departing, new faces finding their feet, and a manager wrestling with when to let go. Across two seasons, the series charts a dramatic emotional arc, from the shock of a string of defeats and the fight to claim the final Champions League spot in 2024/25, through a radical squad rebuild, to a redemptive 2025/26 campaign that culminates in a defining clash with Arsenal, an FA Cup Final, and Guardiola’s farewell to the club he transformed. The series is …

Guardiola, Pirlo and the twists

Guardiola, Pirlo and the twists

Published by Webster

Such was FIFA’s lavish guest list for the 2026 World Cup final that it was difficult to find a legend’s name missing. Paolo Maldini’s, certainly, was. While football royalty descended on New Jersey, the former Italy captain flew to Barcelona hoping to make Pep Guardiola an offer he could not refuse – Vito Corleone style. Italy had spent three successive World Cup cycles as spectators. The federation wanted resurrection, and Maldini had been handed the blueprint. When he returned, he told the press that the new Azzurri manager would be “ideally” announced in a week. It was. Only, it was not Guardiola, but Roberto Mancini. Maldini wasn’t the one announcing it. He was already gone. This is the saga of the latest Italian job. The story begins with Gabriele Gravina. In 2018, he was elected as the Italian federation’s president after winning 97.2% of the total votes. In his first address, he made one promise: rather than speak, he would listen. History may not remember his presidency kindly, despite the Euro triumph, but it cannot …

How Rodri won the Golden Ball with no goal, no assist, no defining stat

How Rodri won the Golden Ball with no goal, no assist, no defining stat

Published by Webster

Rodri and America. It was always meant to be; a unique relationship forged by chance and moulded by destiny. Sixteen years before he kissed the World Cup trophy, confetti showering on him and fireworks wiggling into East Rutherford skies, he was in Connecticut, almost 100 miles from the scene of his conquest, as part of an exchange programme. His father wanted him to pursue academics in the United States, but he was firm on his ultimate desire to be a footballer. But his father had other plans, and imagining that the American life would alter his son’s ambitions, he packed him off to a student programme in Connecticut. Rodri. Suddenly, the quiet teenager from the Madrid suburb of Villanueva de la Cañada found himself in the middle of a forest in Conn-et-ee-cut, as they call it. “It was like I was stepping into a Hollywood movie,” he wrote in Player’s Tribune. “You know the movies where the kids go to the camp on a big lake and there’s wooden canoes and you’re climbing trees and …

Man City appoint ex-Chelsea boss Maresca to succeed Guardiola as manager

Man City appoint ex-Chelsea boss Maresca to succeed Guardiola as manager

Published by Webster

3 min readJun 29, 2026 10:37 PM IST Premier League side Manchester City have finally found a name to replace departing coach Pep Guardiola, as Enzo Maresca has been appointed the new manager, the club announced on Monday. The Italian joins City following a mid-season exit from Chelsea and has signed a three-year contract. Maresca brings familiarity with Man City’s set-up, having previously coached the club’s youth team. He was also the senior side’s assistant coach under Guardiola during City’s 2018-19 treble-winning season. In what was termed as the end of an era, Guardiola left City at the end of the 2025-26 season after spending 10 long years. Guardiola, who took charge of City in 2016, won six Premier League titles — including four in a row — three FA Cups, five League Cups and the Champions League. The Spaniard left the club with a domestic double — the FA Cup and the EFL Cup — in his final season. Maresca called it a brilliant opportunity to be back with the club he says he “knows …

Uruguay coach Bielsa, an enigma who is rated by Guardiola, disliked by Suarez

Uruguay coach Bielsa, an enigma who is rated by Guardiola, disliked by Suarez

Published by Webster

When Pep Guardiola arrived at the house in Rosario, at his former teammate Gabriel Batistuta’s insistence, he assumed he would only have a brief conversation on coaching. He was there for 11 hours instead. When Héctor and Amalia Pochettino heard a knock on their door at 1 am in Murphy, they feared one of two things: trouble or tragedy. Instead, they found a football coach, who had heard a lot about their 13-year-old son, Mauricio, and wanted to meet him. Both Guardiola and Pochettino now regard the man they met as the best coach of all time. Given their résumés — Guardiola being one of football’s decorated managers, and Pochettino being a Ligue 1 champion — you would assume their shared idol ought to be a serial winner. He is not. He is Marcelo Bielsa — a man with six major trophies in a managerial career spanning nearly four decades. One could consider Bielsa a trailblazer who transcended conventional thinking to prove footballing success has little to do with trophies. Or, is he a benefactor …

A bit of Pep Guardiola in every English football game, from Premiership to Sunday leagues

A bit of Pep Guardiola in every English football game, from Premiership to Sunday leagues

Published by Webster

Ten years is too short to be called an era, but Pep Guardiola’s decade with English football is an era unto its own. Ten years of stacking trophies, of varied sizes, shapes and values; ten years of building an identity and heritage for a club that had languished in the shadows of the more historic institution in the neighbourhood, and ten years of refashioning the ideals and values, methods and style of the English game. He would be immortalised as the greatest Manchester City manager, as one of the greatest of the league, but his biggest legacy is that he changed the footballing mentality of a stubborn nation that claims to have discovered the game. He found the league in English and left it Guardiola-esque. Precisely for this reason, his time in England can’t be fully quantified. To call him a supreme tactician would be to limit his aura to the numerous innovations and inventions he produced with various iterations of City; to belittle the supreme man-manager he was, in how he coaxed his men …

Pep Guardiola set to leave Manchester City at end of season

Pep Guardiola set to leave Manchester City at end of season

Published by Webster

3 min readUpdated: May 22, 2026 04:38 PM IST In what is being termed as an end of an era, Manchester City announced that their decorated manager Pep Guardiola will be leaving the club at the end of the season with the match against Aston Villa on Sunday his last as City boss. With the Premier League title race already over with Arsenal clinching it earlier in the week, Guardiola leaves City with a domestic double– the FA Cup and the EFL Cup. Guardiola, who took charge of City in 2016, has won six Premier League titles — including four in a row — three FA Cups, five League Cups and the Champions League, but his side have not won the league in the last two years. Although City sealed the domestic cup double this season, Guardiola saw his dreams of ​a ​seventh Premier League crown dashed when they drew 1-1 at Bournemouth on ⁠Tuesday to hand Arsenal the title, with City set to finish second. “Don’t ask me the reasons I’m leaving. There is …

Pep Guardiola said what Mikel Arteta couldn’t: Arsenal are still in this | Football News

Pep Guardiola said what Mikel Arteta couldn’t: Arsenal are still in this | Football News

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5 min readApr 21, 2026 06:46 PM IST Pep Guardiola uttered the reassuring words every Arsenal fan wanted to hear from Mikel Arterta. “Who is top of the league?” the Manchester City manager asked the press brigade after his team shaved off three points from Arsenal’s lead. “We are not!” he emphasised. “In goal difference, who is better?” ‘They are.” The victory over leaders, he stressed, “gives us just hope.” Time permitting, he could have added: Who has the meanest defence? Who has scored the most goals? Who are the most prolific converters of the dead ball? When the myopic angst dissipates, the City defeat would feel perhaps lighter. The sense of fatalism, the hyperventilating fans would realise, is a mere history-driven panic attack. It’s not hope that flutters, but belief that swirls. It’s the game they lost, but one that could stir them to greater feats. It could unburden them in the sense that their last formidable game is over. It was a game in which they found clarity and relief. The defeat to …

Guardiola turns Gaffer: Once polar opposites, Pep, like Alex Ferguson, is now totem pole of adapting systems to players | Football News

Guardiola turns Gaffer: Once polar opposites, Pep, like Alex Ferguson, is now totem pole of adapting systems to players | Football News

Published by Webster

6 min readUpdated: Apr 20, 2026 10:24 AM IST The shadow of Alex Ferguson spread imperiously over Pep Guardiola when he arrived at the Etihad. In the unveiling ceremony in 2016, the Manchester City chairman Khaldoon al‑Mubarak, said he wished Guardiola built a dynasty like Ferguson at Manchester United. Nearly a decade later, he has built a seignorial empire in the EPL era after Ferguson. But more fascinating is how the shadows of the two managers have converged and how they resemble each other in their methods than ever before. Guardiola was the ideologue, the system’s man, the team’s structure and playing patterns stripped to detail. His football was chess in hurry, every move pre-arranged with forensic precision. He found men for the system he adhered to. Ferguson was a person’s manager; who flexed systems to the strengths of his men. He was a stickler for discipline but with emphasis on creative output, individual dazzle within a well-knit framework, football as an expression and reflection of personality rather than an ideology. But in his last …

In title decider, Mikel Arteta hopes to symbolically retire his master; Pep Guardiola sets out to render his protege an imposter

In title decider, Mikel Arteta hopes to symbolically retire his master; Pep Guardiola sets out to render his protege an imposter

Published by Webster

The introduction to the Pep Guardiola-Mikel Arteta action flick begins with a flashback set in the Catalan heartland at the stroke of the century. Guardiola, the midfield don of Barcelona, is watching a youth tournament with his understudy Xavi Hernandez. A skinny boy from the beaches with thick dark hair from the La Masia Academy impresses him. He whispers to his heir apparent, “You will retire me. This kid will retire both of us!” It turned half prophetic. Xavi became Barcelona’s rhyme and rhythm. The guy who was to retire them both, Mikel Arteta, waited futilely on the doors of one of football’s greatest empires and left disillusioned. But the bond of the La Masia brethren runs deep. Guardiola, by then the Czar of modern football coaching, had kept his ears firmly to the ground. He had heard that the boy anointed to retire them all, having ended a successful but not spectacular career, was nursing coaching ambitions. So, when Guardiola embarked into building the Manchester City dynasty, he checked with Arteta if he wanted …