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Pep Guardiola is on to the fifth Manchester United manager of his reign at Manchester City. Under normal circumstances, that would illustrate the difficulty of coaching in the same city and competing with him. After all City had 14 managers and four caretakers during Sir Alex Ferguson’s epic reign at Old Trafford. Now Ruben Amorim makes it five United managers, plus two caretakers, Michael Carrick and Ruud van Nistelrooy, since Guardiola arrived in 2016. As his new contract lasts until 2027, there is time for another.
And yet Amorim’s Manchester derby debut offers him the chance to complete a rare feat. On the worst run of his managerial career, Guardiola has already lost twice within a few weeks to Ange Postecoglou. Amorim has the opportunity to emulate him, but to do a double with different clubs. His penultimate game with Sporting CP was a 4-1 triumph that took the Portuguese club second in the Champions League.
“I would like to play the game like we played in Lisbon on Sunday, believe me,” said Guardiola. And if he can be a contrarian, it was a reference to City’s dominance for much of the first half, when they should have extended their lead, before Sporting’s four-goal comeback. There was a reminder that it may be too soon to say United’s new manager has got his number.
“Two seasons ago we won 5-0,” he recalled. “Maybe [they learn] the lesson better because they beat us 4-1.” That 5-0 rout in February 2022 has a different pertinence now. It led Guardiola, no stranger to exaggeration, to brand Matheus Nunes “one of the best players in the world today”.
On Sunday, Nunes, who made his way from Amorim’s Sporting to City via Wolves, may instead be reinvented as a makeshift full-back as Guardiola looks for a solution to an injury crisis that, along with Rico Lewis’ suspension has reduced him to three available senior defenders. Other options include mimicking Amorim’s preferred 3-4-3 formation or using one of his wingers – presumably Bernardo Silva or Jack Grealish – in a back four. “I don’t know what I have to do,” admitted Guardiola. “I need players.”
Which was not as simple as saying he wants to buy. “What I want is my players back,” he said. Lacking them, Grealish operated as a holding midfielder away against Juventus. For the seventh time in 10 games, City lost. Amorim’s Sporting inflicted the third of a run of five successive losses. Guardiola is uncharted territory, but in a different respect. His team were booed after they lost a 3-0 lead to draw at home to Feyenoord.
“I know our fans are sad and I understand completely,” he said. “Maybe we lost seven or eight games in a year in some seasons and now we have done it in a month-and-a-half. They are sad but they know that this group of players has made an era of eight-to-ten years that no one has done.” And suddenly it has felt as though an era is ending.
Guardiola would disagree. He believes results have been worse than performances, suggesting issues at either end of the pitch and an inability to sustain their levels for 90 minutes have cost them. “I have a certain authority on what happened in my career as a player and manager that I know perfectly whether we are playing good or not good,” he said. “We have to shoot more in the final third. We have to defend better. We have to avoid making mistakes at both ends, yes. Except the Liverpool and Bournemouth games, [in] the rest of the games we were there. We were not consistent for 90 minutes. I know the reason why.”
He attributes City’s slump to absences. “No team can play without central defenders, without a Ballon d’Or winner, and the best player in the Premier League all season,” he said. But John Stones, Nathan Ake, Manuel Akanji and Rodri will miss the derby, though presumably Phil Foden will not. City’s healthy financial results, with a profit of £73m while, for the second successive year, making more than £100m in player sales, may have come at a cost, leaving them short-staffed.
But Guardiola argued: “When we won the treble or four [Premier League titles] in a row, we had one, two or three muscular injuries and were so stable. That’s why we could compete and now we cannot. There are more games than ever, we have more injuries than ever. It made me reflect that with this calendar you need a squad of 25-30 players. People say, ‘what is the problem?’ It’s the schedule. It’s not the training, not the doctors, not the physios, not the players, not how they eat or how they rest. It’s just one problem: the schedule.”
And City’s problems have multiplied during their schedule of late; a meeting with Amorim’s Sporting is a reason why their Champions League campaign has gone wrong. He can see the Portuguese’s influence already at Old Trafford. “It’s already there,” he said. “They start to do all the patterns, how the good the movements are, everyone does it and the runners and the pace. He will do a good job at United, I’m pretty sure of that.”
Guardiola has sometimes lost the battles against United – Jose Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Erik ten Hag all got notable wins against City, even if Ralf Rangnick did not – while winning the wars. But that was then, before a slide that was accelerated the last time he met Amorim. And in a rematch, Guardiola is looking to his depleted team to start a revival. Perhaps he really does want them to play as they did in Lisbon. But he certainly hopes for a very different result.
