Does Man City’s guilty verdict impact Guardiola’s legacy as an all-time coaching great?

Pep Guardiola won 16 major honors during his 10-year reign as Manchester City manager before he left in the summer. They all now count for nothing.

Under Guardiola, City won a Champions League–Premier League–FA Cup treble. They became the only club in English history to win four successive league titles. They were the first team to achieve a domestic treble, and the only side to win the title by amassing 100 points. All of it was built on a false premise.

To borrow a phrase from the Premier League statement that condemned the club’s “systematic rule-breaking for almost a decade” following an independent commission’s finding that City were guilty of more than 100 breaches of rules between 2009-2018, it was all a “sham.”

Man City? Sham City more like.

– Marcotti: Hard to see how City recover from extraordinary guilty verdict
– Dawson: Man City’s guilt the talk of the town around English soccer
– Watch: Full reaction to ‘the biggest sporting cheating scandal ever’

The egregious actions of City’s owners — Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan’s Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG) — and executives has destroyed the reputation of a 146-year-old club. City have said they will appeal the verdict, and they maintain they are innocent, but Guardiola cannot escape the damage caused by a prolonged and systematic program of financial deception because much of it was done for his benefit.

Abu Dhabi built a club and a team fit for Guardiola, but it was a construction built by ill-gotten gains. The advantages Guardiola had at his disposal are now proved to have been unfair. As former Manchester United captain Roy Keane said this week: “[City] won it on the pitch because cheating was going on.”

Financial mismanagement, chicanery, deception — whatever you want to call it, the foundations of Guardiola’s City empire are rooted in the rule-breaking that happened before and during his time as manager, so his record-breaking era at the club is tainted by all of it.

But there are two sides to the Guardiola story at City. The former Barcelona and Bayern Munich coach arrived at the Etihad in the summer of 2016 having already won six league titles in Catalonia and Bavaria, as well as two Champions Leagues with Barça. His status as the world’s preeminent coach was already secure.

Guardiola is a coaching genius, a man whose tactical brilliance built arguably the world’s greatest-ever club side at Barcelona. He reinvented the way the game was played, and his influence is now seen at every level of the game.

It’s why City’s Abu Dhabi hierarchy, led by Sheikh Mansour and club chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak — who is also CEO of Mubadala, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, and holds senior positions within the Abu Dhabi government — made such strenuous efforts to hire Guardiola in the first place.

The game Guardiola brought to the Etihad only embellished his reputation as the world’s greatest coach. Perhaps the best ever. There can be no denying he made his players better and cemented his reputation as a coach that will forever put him in the conversation of master tacticians.

But what about the trophies and the conveyor belt of success? Guardiola’s tactical acumen was in-built, but the super-charged squad building at City could only have happened by the club breaking the rules, which they did time after time after time.

Guardiola’s City story did not begin on his arrival in July 2016. That was simply the culmination of Abu Dhabi’s long-term plan to install him as coach.

The first building blocks were put in place with the hiring of Ferran Soriano as CEO in August 2012 and Txiki Begiristain as director of football two months later. Both men worked closely with Guardiola at Barcelona — Soriano was Barça vice-president and Begiristain the club’s director of football — so their recruitment by City was all about getting the band back together, with Guardiola the final, dazzling piece of the jigsaw installed four years later.

And here’s the thing. The most damning evidence unearthed by the independent commission that considered the Premier League’s 115 charges against City was that the club’s owners artificially inflated the club’s sponsorship revenue by a staggering £830 million ($1.08 billion) between 2009 and ’18. But when the seasons are broken down individually, the numbers — the financial doping — began to grow aggressively from 2012-13 onward.

In Soriano’s first season as City CEO, the club’s owners, in contravention of Premier League financial rules, topped up their commercial income by £105.75 million. In 2013-14, it was £111.5 million extra; and £107.2 million, on top of the real figure of £16 million, in 2014-15.

In the season before Guardiola arrived, that additional off-the-books figure climbed to £120.17 million– a financial bonus that helped City prepare for Guardiola’s arrival with the signings of Kevin De Bruyne (£55 million from Wolfsburg) and Raheem Sterling (£49 million from Liverpool) in the 12 months prior to their new superstar coach taking charge.

Guardiola told Bayern in December 2015 he would be leaving at the end of that season. However, sources have told ESPN that it was made clear to Sterling that Guardiola wanted him at City, despite his move happening a full year before he left Munich for Manchester.

So Guardiola arrived at City in 2016 with a team fit for a king. It was a little like a Formula 1 team hiring the best driver after constructing a car with a bigger engine, better tires and the best aerodynamics — all in breach of the rules — and telling him to win, win and win again. And that’s what Guardiola did, with continued help from Abu Dhabi’s rule-breaking payments — known as Tagged Sums — which climbed to £129.59m in Guardiola’s first season and then to £134.73 million in 2017-18.

Imagine giving the best coach in the world all that extra money to make his team better? No wonder City dominated to such an extent under Guardiola.

Guardiola has since said — incorrectly — that “nobody from the staff, backroom staff or mainly the players and the manager was here” when the rules were broken between 2009-2018. Guardiola and his staff were there in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

Guardiola, 55, who left City at the end of last season, also said: “I trust them [City’s owners]. I spoke with them and trust how they behave and how they did,” when asked about the charges against the club.

Prior to the 2008 Abu Dhabi takeover, City were an English version of Espanyol or 1860 Munich — a club with a long, unsuccessful history that was overshadowed by much bigger local and national rivals. Only Guardiola knows what he knows and whether he ever questioned how City suddenly became one of the most powerful in the world. A club that was able to grow revenues greater than Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester United and Liverpool and one that could attract superstar names including Erling Haaland, De Bruyne, Sergio Agüero and himself as coach.

For a midsize club with no global fanbase or extensive trophy-winning history to do all of that legitimately through sheer hard work is remarkable, maybe the greatest sporting story of all time.

But we now know that it was anything but. It was a fairy tale, but a twisted one with a sinister ending, and Guardiola and his teams are inextricably linked to that.