Guardiola leaves Manchester City as one of the game’s greats – and someone who knows its dark heart

Mount the iconic Jedi‑style woollen cardigan in the club museum. He really does seem to be done this time . In the absence of formal denials , it now seems highly likely the scheduled final year of Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City contract will be spent trawling the high-concept food ateliers of the Iberian peninsula, debating spatial architecture with a Slovenian Cluedo grandmaster over hummingbird martinis, and generally recharging after a decade of unceasing devotion to victory.

Barring some last ditch talks with – and this is significant – the vice-president of the United Arab Emirates, the dominant era of the 21st-century Premier League is now over. They’re selling Pep wigs in Woolworths, and it is time both to pay tribute and also, here at least, to talk about the oddly overlooked shadow story to that era. The cultural impact of Guardiola‑ism has been discussed in gushing tones over the past two days. But this is also football, a place where everything, no matter how lovely, must also be tainted, where every butterfly is broken on a wheel. And Guardiola’s impact is also wrapped up in the other part of this story, the dark heart of his sport. Not that you’d know it by the noise, which has been devotional, fawning and piously one-note. On Sky Sports, Micah Richards, also a club employee, discussed Pep’s departure in the awed, tearful tones of a man being forced to confront the death of his beloved pet rabbit. One BBC production labelled it “a seismic event in world football”. Mainly the eulogies have reflected Guardiola’s outsized sporting status as the brain, heart and Stalinist-scale face of the entire City project. Rightly so in terms of medals and content. Guardiola has overseen the winning of 17 major trophies, or 55% of all City’s major trophies ever. His teams have been relentlessly beautiful, from the brittle, fearlessly transitional early years, through the hyper‑engineered machine of peak possession-ball, to the more adaptive late period, the Midnight Cowboy odd-couple relationship with a thrillingly efficient Nordic centre-forward .

Key points

• Barring some last ditch talks with – and this is significant – the vice-president of the United Arab Emirates, the dominant era of the 21st-century Premier League is now over.
• They’re selling Pep wigs in Woolworths, and it is time both to pay tribute and also, here at least, to talk about the oddly overlooked shadow story to that era.
• The cultural impact of Guardiola‑ism has been discussed in gushing tones over the past two days.
• But this is also football, a place where everything, no matter how lovely, must also be tainted, where every butterfly is broken on a wheel.
• And Guardiola’s impact is also wrapped up in the other part of this story, the dark heart of his sport.