No, Pep Guardiola's ideology is not "dead". But things are changing.
Read until the end for the twist
“In all team sports, the secret is to overload one side of the pitch so that the opponent must tilt its own defence to ccope. You overload on one side and draw them in so that they leave the other side weak. And when we’ve done all that, we attack and score from the other side. That’s why you have to pass the ball, but only if you’re doing it with a clear intention. It’s only to overload the opponent, to draw them in and then hit them with the sucker punch.”
— Pep Guardiola
Pep Guardiola’s methods have been “dead” for pretty much his entire coaching career at this pont.
It was over for him in 2010, when José Mourinho’s Inter knocked out his Barcelona from the Champions League by parking the bus. This showed us all that teams don’t “need” possession to win, that there was another way.
Football had apparently changed beyond recognition during his sabbatical season, when the Bundesliga sides outdid Barça and Real Madrid with a fast-paced transition game. We’d seen the next thing, and it looked nothing like “tiki-taka”.
The following season, his Bayern side lost to Real Madrid’s blistering counter attack and it was really over. Why would you need to dominate possession? Just hit them on the break.
Every time his sides face some kind of setback, his particular way of playing is declared “dead”. And yet he seems to have done alright for himself.
“The game is no longer primarily about finesse, speed or even transitions, as was the case as recently as 2022-23”, Miguel Delaney wrote in the Independent recently, based on conversations he seems to have had with sources at Premier League clubs. “It’s about “duels, duels and duels”, as a high-profile defender privately grumbled.” Delaney argued that football is moving very rapidly in the direction of more long balls and physicality, away from Guardiola’s methods. He mentions some statistics about longer throws and goal kicks increasing, Guardiola’s own apparent claim that “modern football is not positional”, and a repeated sense from his sources that we’re moving away from technicality. All of this, we’re told, means that football is witnessing its “end of history” moment (in that history did not end after the Cold War), and that Guardiola’s ideology is “dead”.
I’m not going to dispute that the game is changing. But let’s be clear about some things. First of all: what even is Guardiola’s ideology?