Who should replace Pep Guardiola? My pick.

Yes, I am clickbaiting you, but it'll be good

It used to be much simpler than this.

Back in the day, when a team in England needed a new manager, the challenge was pretty obvious: find the best person available. You were planning to give this person several years to sign their own players and build a new team. Tactics weren’t seen as so important back then, and there weren’t an awful lot of players who just wouldn’t fit the manager’s ideas. Just find the best one, and it should all work out.

That’s what Manchester City did when hiring Pep Guardiola. He felt like the centrepiece of a project they had wanted to build for a while, with Guardiola’s former Barcelona colleagues Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain running the show at the Etihad. To be honest, they didn’t do a great job of planning for this on the pitch, as Guardiola inherited a squad ill-suited to his football in many ways. But he wasn’t a short-term fix. He was given time to build the team he wanted, to play his football. Guardiola wasn’t hired for results, or even titles. He was hired to build a dynasty.

The next Man City manager will not be hired to build a dynasty. He will not, in all likelihood, be in charge for the next decade. Welcome to the real world.

The rumours keep on swirling that Guardiola will leave City at the end of the season. Even if it doesn’t happen this year, it will happen at some point. We’ll get onto who I think they should hire eventually, but I think the way to tackle the problem is to think of it the same way they would go about signing a player: first identify the specific skillset the team needs, then look for the options most fitting that profile. Some excellent footballers just aren’t going to fit City’s needs in a particular position. The manager job is no different. I would think the same way about any club looking for a new boss, so all of this can and should apply elsewhere. But let’s use City as an interesting example.

Guardiola’s methods have essentially been institutionalised, which is exactly what he was hired to do. Things haven’t been static. All sorts of things have changed about how he works, especially this season. But the basic rhythm of the day-to-day training sessions, and certain patterns of play, probably feel like second nature to a lot of this squad. Bernardo Silva and Phil Foden could do the basics of Guardiola’s football with their eyes closed. That gets us to the key question: how much should the next manager change things?

There are plenty of examples of managers coming into clubs and changing too much, too fast. The Manchester United squad didn’t take too kindly to David Moyes overhauling what had been a very successful approach. The nightmare scenario here is that, save for the trophies won, the legacy Guardiola left behind goes down the drain in one season, as a new man in charge throws out all of those foundations carefully built over ten years. That’s a real possibility City should be guarding against.

At the same time, Guardiola himself would not be static. He wouldn’t play some reheated version of his own football. He’d look to freshen things up, both with new players and new tactical approaches. The players expect to be challenged at this point, and they appreciate learning new things. Keeping things the same with a lesser coach than Guardiola doesn’t inspire.

This gets to the problem Bayern had when replacing Guardiola with Carlo Ancelotti. Obviously, Ancelotti isn’t particularly like Guardiola in his methods. He’s a laissez-faire manager who wasn’t going to institute his own ideology on the squad, but that was precisely the problem. The term “low intensity” got thrown around a lot in Munich around that period. After a period with Guardiola, players expect and demand certain levels every day that a lot of managers just aren’t going to meet.

So there are a lot of ways to get it wrong and not so many ways to get it right. This is a tricky problem to solve.

It’s a more interesting question because the people making it are a bit of a blank slate. Begiristain retired last summer, replaced as City’s sporting director by Hugo Viana. We don’t really know how Viana thinks about this problem. His major hiring decision at Sporting was to appoint Ruben Amorim, which worked out brilliantly. Amorim was hired on the back of doing impressive work with Braga, his first senior job. I don’t think Viana will be able to do something similar here, finding a really impressive manager overperforming at another Premier League club. Nor will he be able to call on his contacts in Portuguese football, since we all saw how things went once Amorim came to Manchester. Viana has to do something more impressive here.

I’d be surprised if he had free rein in this appointment. Soriano will surely have a big say. But this isn’t something City as an institution have needed to think about for a long time. Guardiola was such a no-brainer that anyone could’ve made that call. Before that, the current leadership hired Manuel Pellegrini, a perfectly agreeable coach who would not fit the bill this time. It’s going to need to be someone who can balance a lot of conflicting issues. So let’s run through the likely names, and I’ll tell you who I’d go for.