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A dive into Pep Guardiola’s genius: His loneliness, how Man City saw him as an ‘unbalanced’ person, how he spoke about his divorce to the players, and how he kept going anyway.
Pep Guardiola (Picture Credit: AP)
“So, are you a happy man?” Pep Guardiola is asked sometime during the 2025-26 football season.
“In my job, yeah. In my job, yeah,” he says.
Guardiola has left the Premier League poorer after deciding to quit Manchester City following winning the double of the FA Cup and the League Cup in his final season, which made it 20 major trophies in his time. It was always clear that it wasn’t an overnight call, but as it turns out, Guardiola quit City several times before; he just didn’t leave until 2026.
In A Beautiful Obsession, a four-part documentary series focused on Guardiola’s final two seasons in Manchester, we learn that the Spaniard had resigned from his job on multiple occasions in recent years, only to be stopped by the club chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak.
News18 Sports had early access to review the series, and like every behind-the-scenes show, it’s made to confirm some preconceived beliefs about arguably the greatest football manager ever born, and challenge other opinions.
The series starts slowly, with Guardiola going in a spiral in the 2024-25 season. Every game, he would try to revive an injury-hit City’s season, and every game he would fail.
It’s hard to imagine Guardiola like this until you see it. How can he not have any answers? Still, in this phase, you learn more about what the players go through, their emotions and superstitions, and how leadership within the playing group is a tough balance to crack.
Guardiola’s assistant coach, former Liverpool man Pep Lijnders, later says that players who motivate the team before the manager gets a chance are crucial.
But Guardiola also tramps over the same group — when Kyle Walker is full of hearing his name in team meetings about mistakes, he unloads his anger on the manager and eventually leaves the club. Guardiola, always doing his part in having the final say, shreds his respect in front of his teammates after he’s gone.
‘I feel alone’
At the heart of it all, Guardiola comes across like a flawed parent. As the episodes roll on, and as he signs a new contract with City at their lowest lull in years, it becomes clear that he derives pleasure not only from overcoming challenge, but also from a sheer disdain for abandonment.
He loves his players, and for him, it seems like the joy of football doesn’t lie in the wins, as we often assume. He seems to genuinely revel in trying what a group of men who understand each other can create on a grass field, running around with a leather ball.
He almost takes it too literally. In one instance, he tells Erling Haaland that he needs to press harder, contest the duels strongly, even though Guardiola will ‘love him like a father anyway’.
That’s why he’s not afraid of opening up to the team about his divorce, and how much he loved the ‘most beautiful woman in the world’, and how a lack of passion killed their relationship. It’s a father telling his sons that without this passion, there’s no point in him being there and ‘fighting for them’ with the new contract.
That’s his art. A tactical genius but also a leader of men, who sees football as a medium of facilitating true human connection, and not the other way around.
It’s also his poison. He tells his players after one defeat that he ‘feels alone’ when they don’t play well.
The series is peppered with hints about Guardiola almost crying for help, about how he wants more from his life than just football, about how it often gets too ‘much’, or how he hates that he ‘doesn’t have time to watch a series’.
How City saw him
After a trophyless (apart from the Community Shield) 2024-25 season, City decided that to get back to their winning ways, they needed to refresh the squad and get rid of the oldies. Kevin de Bruyne cries, and Guardiola speaks about being ‘cold’ to improve the team.
Guardiola mentions multiple times how much it hurts him to see so many quality squad members don’t get the game-time they deserve. He takes too much responsibility for it.
It’s in one of these overthinking fits that we get a hint of how the City management saw Guardiola. When he makes the ludicrous call to make ten changes for City’s Champions League match against Bayer Leverkusen, the suits in Manchester label him as ‘unbalanced’, stereotyping him as your friendly neighborhood genius who just can’t be ‘normal’.
Guardiola seems surprised when he’s told this fact, and though he accepts, he makes sure to say that everyone expects him to be perfect. And why should he be?
The players seem to find it difficult too. Manel Estiarte, Guardiola’s right-hand man who ‘lives in the shadows’ and answers his late-night calls, says he needed to step in and assert to the players that their manager was human when they felt anxious about his mood swings.
He was as flawed as anyone. After a similarly poor run of results in the 2025-26 season, Guardiola and City are happy to clog the squad further with the January splurge to sign two of the best players in the league in Antoine Semenyo and Marc Guehi, despite it pushing the fringe players further into the bomb squad category.
It’s the kind of thing that’ll unfortunately never leave him. Despite being a City-produced series, there’s an acceptance all around that the club’s success is built on a maddening infusion of money, before and during Guardiola.
This being a City-produced series, it deliberately keeps several things out, like the players’ reaction in the weeks before Guardiola’s departure was announced — the time when it became obvious he was leaving, with reports all over in the media.
His exit is shown without an insight into actual conversations when these things are never as straightforward, least of all after 20 trophies.
Guardiola wins it all in the end. Semenyo and Geuhi help him win his domestic double, and his other stars take them close in the title race. The man who beats him for the League, Mikel Arteta, and the man who replaces him at the job in City, Enzo Maresca, are both his apprentices who’ll carry his legacy and indelible imprint on the game for years to come.
Knowing all of it, he cries in the dressing room after his side fail to beat Bournemouth away in the penultimate game of the season, where Arsenal’s title was confirmed. He sheds tears before immediately turning around to see the tactic board on where he went wrong, and then almost pulls himself back to congratulate his team, tell him they did their best.
Somewhere in the series, he says success is not winning; it’s the persistence to keep getting up and trying again when you fail. That was him, and boy, wasn’t he successful.
‘A Beautiful Obsession’ premiered on Lionsgate Play on 21st August.
Key Questions Answered
Ask News18It is highly unlikely that Pep Guardiola will manage another Premier League club, as reports indicate his time in England is over after leaving Manchester City.
Ask News18August 22, 2026, 13:40 IST
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