Pep Guardiola is a failure. By his own admission, anyway. The Manchester City manager has started to take a criticism levelled at him – or, more accurately, his Champions League record – and adopt it, while mocking it. Sometimes there can be a surreal element to Guardiola’s rationale: he deemed himself a failure last month on the grounds that Julia Roberts preferred to watch Manchester United. By any objective criteria, Guardiola is a huge success. But for a perfectionist like the Catalan, there may be a feeling of failure about his European record since 2011. When he claims, as he has, that he would rather win the Premier League or that the domestic division is harder to win, it only serves to underline that European glory is the prize he wants most.
A return to the Allianz Arena should secure him a 10th Champions League semi-final as a manager; it may also remind him of the start of a sequence. If it is a dozen years since Guardiola’s Barcelona won the 2011 final in such a manner to suggest they were the finest team ever, Roberto Di Matteo has lifted the Champions League more recently than Guardiola. This is his 10th campaign since leaving his boyhood club: whether with Bayern Munich or City, his European runs have ended in disappointment. His case to be deemed the greatest manager ever is weakened, despite the prospect of an 11th league title in 14 seasons, without conquering Europe again. He is aware that he has not won the Champions League without Lionel Messi: that Messi has triumphed in both the Champions League and the World Cup without Guardiola embellishes his claim to be the outstanding footballer in history.
