How well do you think you know Pep Guardiola? Well enough to call him by his first name? Our exposure to public figures on social media and 24-hour rolling news tends to make us over-familiar with people. Through hours of screen time and watching them on the sideline, it is tempting to believe you can second-guess someone.
After all, Guardiola has now been coaching for 20 years. He has coached three clubs in three countries, overseen hundreds of games, and spoken for hours and hours in press conferences. Biographies such as Pep Confidential claim to have revealed the secrets of his philosophy and methodology.
And yet one of the reasons Guardiola remains so compelling is his elusiveness, his defiance of easy categorisation. You can’t pigeon-hole him. For instance, he loathes the term initially associated with his style — Tiki Taka — and insists he never played it. He has, in the past, left the impression of wanting to field a team of midfielders, only to win his second treble with four centre-backs.
Up front, he seemed to favour a false nine, no nine, a supreme ball-playing nine. Anything but an old-fashioned No 9. Are you still confident you’ve got Guardiola figured out? To borrow the slogan of an old MTV series: “You think you know, but you have no idea.”
When Man City signed Erling Haaland, he wasn’t considered to conform to the stereotype of a Pep player. The hot, evidence-based take of my former colleague John Muller made the case against signing him, citing the so-called Bundesliga tax, differences in style between Borussia Dortmund and Man City, and the expectations set by Guardiola when it came to the passing, dribbling and link-up abilities of his attackers.
Haaland’s fit for Pep Guardiola’s football was also questioned (Lionel Hahn/Getty Images)
Such micro-analysis of the Norwegian’s apparent deficiencies, such as his touch and the number of touches he doesn’t take, was an intellectually honest way of getting caught in the weeds. The big picture City never lost sight of was Haaland’s freakish outlier goalscoring. He became the fastest player to 50 goals in Premier League history, won the Golden Boot in two of his first three seasons, and is projected to beat Alan Shearer’s all-time record with four years of his nine-and-a-half-year contract to spare.
If scoring goals is the hardest thing to do in a low-scoring sport, then the fixation on other aspects of Haaland’s game is pretty odd. Which brings us to the other end of the pitch and his new team-mate, another giant, Gianluigi Donnarumma.
Donnarumma made his debut for Milan at 16 and was capped for Italy by 17. Playing for both of those teams, particularly on the heavily scrutinised stage of San Siro, can overwhelm players of far greater experience. But not Donnarumma. Still only 26 and closing in on his 500th appearance in professional football, he was born to do it and didn’t appear fazed by the expectations imposed on him by the Italian media as ‘the next Gigi Buffon’ or the status that came with being the highest paid player in Serie A when he was still a teenager.
At Milan and PSG, he established himself at the expense of goalkeepers signed from Real Madrid. Donnarumma was named player of the tournament at Euro 2020 when Italy won the competition for the first time in more than six decades. France Football awarded him the Yashin trophy the following year, a prize he is expected to collect again after his role in PSG’s first Champions League triumph. As the Opta data shows, only two goalkeepers operating in the top five leagues prevented more goals than the average shot-stopper (40.5) in the past decade than Donnarumma.
The only goalkeeper and Italian player on the Ballon d’Or shortlist, it is telling how all of these achievements are somehow sottovoce, secondary and underplayed.
Of course, some of that is down to the cyclical drama of Team Raiola-led contract negotiations, which have concluded in Donnarumma leaving his childhood club Milan and PSG under a cloud. It wasn’t a great look when Milan won the league in their first season without Donnarumma. His replacement, Mike Maignan, played a major role in that Scudetto, standing out for a combination of outstanding distribution and unreal shot-stopping.
But if you talk to Milan fans about Maignan now, they will lament his fragility and the subsequent drop-off in his ability to make saves. In terms of the goals saved above average stat, he was a bottom-half goalkeeper in Italy last season. This apparent decline has not persuaded France coach Didier Deschamps to replace Maignan with Donnarumma’s replacement at PSG, Lucas Chevalier.
Billed as a different profile of goalkeeper to Donnarumma, his acquisition from Lille wasn’t placed in the context of a protracted contract negotiation between PSG and the agent Enzo Raiola, which dragged on through the spring and into the Club World Cup. This was when the awkward possibility of Donnarumma seeing out the final year of his deal without signing a renewal emerged, along with the prospect of him leaving as a free agent in 2026.
Donnarumma waves goodbye to PSG’s fans before heading to Manchester (Tnani Badreddine/Getty Images)
Greater emphasis was instead placed on Donnarumma’s apparent shortcomings with the ball at his feet, even though Chevalier, for instance, ranked inferior to his predecessor at the Parc des Princes in metrics such as percentage of accurate passes, pressured passes, long passes, and xG build-up in last season’s Ligue 1. As ungainly as the 6ft 5in (196cm) Donnarumma looks on the ball, he isn’t bad on it. The intrigue is whether he’s good enough in the way Guardiola normally wants. Social media and the punditocracy have decided he isn’t.
If Donnarumma had joined Real Madrid or Atletico Madrid, maybe his distribution would have been less of an issue. For instance, under Carlo Ancelotti in the past and Diego Simeone in the present, the expectation on Thibaut Courtois and Jan Oblak was to be goalkeepers; that is, to keep goal, and the consensus, in the real world, is that keeping goal should always come first, playmaking second. In Guardiola’s time at City, however, the impression set in that keeping goal wasn’t enough.
He created an expectation when, as his first act at City, he removed a shot stopper like Joe Hart for a ball-player like Claudio Bravo. It didn’t work out. Then came the Brazilians. Ederson at City and Alisson at Liverpool set new standards in England. They were outfielders in gloves, pressing defusers and assist providers. A new generation of goalkeepers who could do the old stuff, too. A new normal that should not be considered normal.
If we look at the last two Champions League winners — Real Madrid and PSG — Courtois and Donnarumma have been out-sized protagonists with superhuman shot-stopping at one end and risk-taking dis-equilibrating dribblers at the other. Perhaps in a world without a striker who can play like a midfielder, without Kevin De Bruyne and with Rodri less and less of the time, Guardiola is acknowledging that a more chaotic City, a City less likely to have the relentless control of old, a City more likely to give up transitions, needs a Donnarumma.
“When a club like Manchester City wants you so badly, it means you’ve done a good job,” Donnarumma said after completing his £25.9million ($35m) move. “Being wanted by one of the best managers in the world is an indescribable feeling.”
If this is how City evolve, then perhaps the distribution-shot stopping trade-off will end up being a net positive. The recent success of PSG and Madrid reinforces the old Pantaleo Corvino mantra evoked by Antonio Conte at Tottenham: “You can marry the wrong woman, but you can’t sign the wrong goalkeeper or striker.”
Donnarumma is, in some respects, the Haaland of goalkeepers. His deficiencies are overplayed. His generational talent for the singularly most important fundamental of his position somehow continues to be underplayed.
(Top photo: Emmanuele Ciancaglini/Getty Images)
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