WHEN Manchester City first announced that Pep Guardiola would become their manager in the summer of 2016, I interviewed Thierry Henry about his former Barcelona boss.
Four hours later I was finally able to put the phone down on the greatest player of the Premier League era telling me about the man who was going to revolutionise English football.
Coming from someone who had spent his entire Arsenal career playing for Arsene Wenger that was quite some statement.
Now obviously Guardiola’s prior record at Barcelona and Bayern Munich confirmed that he was going to be pretty special. But surely he couldn’t be that good, could he?
But it turns out that even Henry was underselling him when he spoke – at extraordinary length – about Pep’s obsessive eye for detail, his clarity of vision, tactical awareness, drive, passion and ability to get the very best out of every player he coached.
And with City now standing on the brink of a Champions League, Premier League and FA Cup treble, it is time to crown the 52-year-old Spaniard the greatest manager of all time.
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Since becoming the youngest coach to lift the Champions League in his very first season in charge of Barcelona, Guardiola has won 30 major trophies in 14 years, including ten League titles across Spain, Germany and England.
Of course he has been fortunate to work with some of the greatest players to ever kick a ball including Messi, Iniesta, Xavi, Henry, Lewandowski, Neuer, Aguero, De Bruyne and Haaland.
And, no, he hasn’t yet won as many League titles as Sir Alex Ferguson nor as many European Cups as Carlo Ancelotti.
Others will argue that he has simply inherited the Total Football blueprint developed by Rinus Michaels and passed on by Johan Cruyff.
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And I’m sure some broadsheet nerds will argue the case for Arrigo Saachi, Valery Lobanovskyi and Ernst Happel as contenders for managerial GOAT.
Others might suggest names like Jose Mourinho and Jurgen Klopp.
Or figures from the past such as Bill Shankly, Matt Busby, Bob Paisley and Alf Ramsey
But Pep tops them all.
It’s not just the sheer weight of success which makes Guardiola stand out from the crowd. It’s the absolute brilliance of his football.
His teams don’t just beat opponents, they overwhelm them.
When Erling Haaland hammered the final nail into Arsenal’s coffin on Wednesday night, that was the 995th City goal of Pep’s reign.
The way things are going, there’s every chance they will make it to 1,000 at Fulham on Sunday.
Poor Arsenal were reduced to chasing shadows at the Etihad the other night as the painful realisation of how far they are behind the Champions hit home.
After the game Kevin De Bruyne spoke of how they had changed their tactics to counter Arsenal’s man marking.
But they made the transition look so easy that you were left wondering if they have discovered some kind of cheat code to cope with every question opponents ask of them.
It wouldn’t be the first time they have been accused of bending the rules after they were hit with more than 100 historical charges of financial impropriety by the Premier League last month.
But the rest of Europe shouldn’t hold their breath on that independent commission clipping City’s wings any time soon because the club have vowed to fight their corner in every court in the land.
And we all know how quickly the wheels of justice usually turn.
Guardiola has loudly proclaimed his club’s innocence even though he wasn’t at the Etihad when most of the alleged chicanery was taking place between 2009 and 2018.
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Perhaps it’s that permanent whiff of backstage dodginess which prevents many observers from giving City the credit for their brilliance on the pitch.
What they can’t deny is that Pep has raised the bar so high that it is going to require a football version of the Fosbury Flop to catch him.
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