Has Pep Guardiola lost his magic touch? Coach's muddled selections leave Man City facing huge fight to keep season alive

Despite winning three Champions Leagues and lifting 12 league titles across his stints in Spain, Germany and England, in addition to countless other trophies, Guardiola has been haunted by his reputation for over-thinking the big games, particularly in Europe. It is a reputation he despises, and just last week he talked of being "massacred" for his decisions.

And yet there is a large body of work to back it up, such as fielding a front four for Bayern Munich against Madrid in 2014, starting the inexperienced Eric Garcia in a back three against Lyon in 2020 or playing Ilkay Gundogan as the holding midfielder in the 2021 Champions League final against Chelsea. 

To City fans' relief, Guardiola's surprising line-ups had seemingly ceased to be a big concern. His team selections were pretty consistent en route to City's first and only Champions League triumph in 2023, working a treat as they outplayed Madrid and Bayern before fighting their way past Inter in the final. 

City's elimination from the competition at the hands of Madrid in the 2024 quarter-finals via a penalty shootout could be put down to bad luck, while last season's emphatic elimination to Los Merengues could largely be blamed on City being in a terrible run of form at the time as well as the brilliance of Kylian Mbappe.

But Guardiola's tendency to spring a tactical surprise and pay a heavy price for it came back with a vengeance last week against both Madrid and West Ham.

Real boss Alvaro Arbeloa, on the losing side against Guardiola so many times as a player, foreshadowed the next day's events in his pre-match press conference when he said the City boss "always has a surprise planned". And in the Spanish capital, Guardiola fielded a bold attacking line-up that both disrupted everything City had been building towards in their previous games and flew against his usual desire to have control in the first leg of a knockout tie.

Guardiola dispensed with the consistent back four of Rayan Ait-Nouri, Marc Guehi, Ruben Dias and Matheus Nunes, who had started the previous four league games together. He also split up the midfield trio of Nico O'Reilly, Bernardo Silva and Rodri which had laid the platform for their recent resurgent run of results, which included winning six games in a row in February. 

O'Reilly, who was back at left-back for the first time in two months, was badly exposed by Federico Valverde for the opening goal, while Madrid bypassed City's wide open midfield each time they scored. Guardiola refused to admit he got things wrong, pointing to his side's domination of the first 20 minutes while claiming that Madrid had scored with their only shots on target. In fact, the home side had seven attempts on goal compared to City's four, and Vinicius Jr had wasted a chance to practically kill the tie when he missed a penalty in the second half.

Guardiola's explanation that he wanted to "make the Bernabeu feel that we are there" smacked of hubris. It was reminiscent of his naive set up with Bayern in 2014, which he has described as "the biggest f*ck up of my career", and soon after full-time, some damning quotes from Fabio Capello, which were made to Spanish newspaper El Mundo almost exactly a year earlier, began to resurface on social media. 

"You know what I don’t like about Guardiola? His arrogance," the former England manager said. "The Champions League he won with City is the only one where he didn’t try anything funny in the decisive matches. But all the other years, in Manchester and Munich, on key days, he always wanted to be the protagonist. He would change things and invent them so he could say: ‘It’s not the players who win, it’s me’. And that arrogance cost him several Champions Leagues. I respect him, but for me, it’s clear."

Unless City become only the fifth team in the competition's modern history to overturn a deficit of three or more goals and make it to the quarter-finals, then Guardiola's arrogance will have cost him another Champions League. But just three days after his blunder at the Bernabeu, the coach made an even more baffling selection call. 

Having gone gung-ho at the home of the most successful team in European football, Guardiola then opted to prioritise control at the London Stadium against relegation-threatened West Ham. Against a notoriously defensive-minded coach in Nuno Espirito Santo, the City boss opted to start Antoine Semenyo again at the expense of Rayan Cherki, whose ability to play in the small spaces and keep the ball under close control made him seem like the ideal candidate for such an occasion. 

Guardiola brought Cherki on with half an hour to go and threw on an extra three attackers, but it was too little, too late and City dropped points against a team fighting relegation for the second game running, falling nine points behind Arsenal in the title race, though they still have a game in hand.

This time Guardiola acknowledged his mistake, albeit with more of a hint of sarcasm: "Bad selection, now you can criticise me incredibly for the selection, now I deserve it."

Guardiola cannot afford to make many more bad selections over the next month, with City facing Madrid, Arsenal in the Carabao Cup final, Liverpool in the FA Cup quarter-finals and then visiting Chelsea before the title showdown with the Gunners on April 18. City's season, which just a couple of weeks ago promised so much, could crumble into irrelevance in the space of four weeks. And with there being an expectation that Guardiola could depart in June, it would be a very sour note on which to end his incredible decade with City.

The club's trophy hopes are not the only thing on the line right now, though. So too is Guardiola's legacy as a truly elite tactician. He deserves to go out on a high, but there is a risk that his legacy will be tainted by his inability to resist pulling surprises.