For a manager who has spent the best part of a decade and a half operating at the pinnacle of European football, Pep Guardiola has rarely had to incorporate a new centre forward into his famously intricate tactical set-up. The thing is, if you can count on the extraordinary talents of either Lionel Messi or Sergio Aguero for years at a time, you do not really need anyone else.
On the few occasions that Guardiola has had the opportunity to change the focal point of his attack, he has often shunted them out wide. David Villa arrived as a striker but played on the wing. Gabriel Jesus’s career has followed the same trajectory, albeit over a longer timescale. When it comes to out-and-out No 9s, Guardiola has had varying degrees of success. For every Robert Lewandowski, there is a Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
Ibrahimovic is the best known case of a more traditional centre forward malfunctioning in a Guardiola system. Their year together at Barcelona was not an outright failure, bringing a La Liga title, but its greatest contribution to posterity was the reams of quotable material it produced for Ibrahimovic’s autobiography, in which he is not exactly complimentary of his former manager or how he used him.
