When Pep Guardiola arrived in English football in the summer of 2016, there was a degree of scepticism. The quality of the football produced by his Barcelona had been extraordinary – and it’s perhaps difficult now, 18 years on, to remember the impact that side had when they first emerged, how incomprehensible the focus on passing and the manipulation of space seemed.
But his Bayern Munich had not won the Champions League and it was reasonable enough to ask whether that very precise, technically accomplished style would be as effective amid the hurly-burly of an English winter as it had been in Spain and Germany.
