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Despite all the success, it’s never been an easy ride for Pep Guardiola in the Champions League. As Manchester City’s coach reacquaints himself with the trophy he craves the most, Graham Hunter retreads the rocky path that finally took the Catalan back to the summit

Interview
A week before his Manchester City side beat Inter in Istanbul, I sat down with Pep Guardiola and asked him whether, in the darkest moments of a three-decade relationship packed with trials and tribulations, he’d ever grown to hate the Champion League? He certainly had his reasons. Let’s trace the scars.

We start in 1992. Just months after winning the European Cup as a 21-year-old pivote in Barcelona’s Dream Team came the disappointment of an embarrassing exit for the defending champions, humbled 3-2 at the Camp Nou by CSKA Moskva. The following season, they went all the way to the final, where they met an AC Milan side supposedly crippled by injuries and suspensions. Barcelona were humiliated 4-0 in Athens and Johan Cruyff duly dismantled that squad only to be sacked two years later. 

Guardiola did not get a sniff of another final until 2009, when his debut season as coach was topped off by Barça’s showpiece victory against Manchester United in Rome. It brought only temporary respite. The following campaign terminated in the last four after a gruelling bus journey to play Inter in Milan during the airspace shutdown caused by the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud. 

Victory in 2011, yes. But then the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune picked up pace. First came four successive semi-final exits. In 2012, holders Barça threw it away at home against ten-man Chelsea, with Lionel Messi missing a penalty. 

It was more of the same at Bayern, beginning when Guardiola committed “the worst f***-up of my career” by listening to his players’ tactical preferences only to lose 4-0 to Real Madrid in Bavaria for a 5-0 aggregate defeat. The next season, they were torn apart by his former club, with Messi to the fore in a 3-0 loss at the Camp Nou – it had been goalless at the 75-minute mark. And, in 2016, Bayern completed an unwanted hat-trick against Spain’s big three, beaten on away goals by Atlético de Madrid after Thomas Müller failed to convert a spot kick. 

Next the sky-blue thorns in Guardiola’s side. There were defeats by Monaco and Liverpool in ties that produced 18 goals in 2017 and 2018 respectively – before City learned to defend as stingily as they do now. Next up was Sergio Agüero’s missed penalty against Tottenham Hotspur and Fernando Llorente’s fortuitous second-leg goal in 2019. 

There was the miserable 1-0 loss to Chelsea in the 2021 final, an emotional strain to rival the physical pain Kevin De Bruyne endured before his early withdrawal. Then the coup de grâce: 5-3 up against Madrid in the 2021/22 semis after 179 minutes of the tie – but still knocked out. Feel some sympathy? I certainly reckoned that salt interminably being rubbed into wound after Champions League wound between 1993 and 2022 at least merited further questioning. So, did hearing the famous pre-match anthem ever make him shudder with dread rather than shiver with anticipation?

Even a week before Rodri healed those wounds with his winning goal in Istanbul, even before Guardiola moved behind only Carlo Ancelotti in the list of coaches with the most Champions League trophies, Pep firmly disabused me of that notion. 

“No, no! I look at it from a different angle,” he said. “The Champions League has given me so much more than I could have ever imagined. If my life were to end now, I’d have won one as a player for ‘my’ club [Barcelona], which I love so much, as well as winning two as manager of that club. In 14 years of coaching, I’ve reached ten Champions League semi-finals and four finals. Football both gives and takes away from you.

Pep first won as a 21-year-old with Barcelona in 1992 (above and right); the sting of defeat in Porto in 2021 (top right)
Pep first won as a 21-year-old with Barcelona in 1992 (above and right); the sting of defeat in Porto in 2021 (top right)
“The Champions League has given me so much more than I could have ever imagined. Football both gives and takes away from you”
UEFA Champions League Final. Athens, Greece. 18th May 1994. AC Milan 4 v Barcelona 0

“Life is full of unfairness. That’s how the world works. You have to be ambitious but not too greedy. This competition has given me very sad moments which hurt me, and they will always be on my mind. But it also gave me extremely beautiful moments, and they will also always be on my mind.” 

It was a truthful answer but also fitted the party line that this trophy, this competition, was by no means an ‘obsession’ for coach or club. They had astutely decided to play it softly, softly in order to deflect the growing pressure. They elevated the impressive consistency of getting to semi-final after semi-final above any supposedly desperate compulsion to win finals. 

Then, once Inter’s robust, demanding game plan had been overcome, the raw truth surged out. Moments after Szymon Marciniak blew the final whistle to confirm that City had won the Champions League, becoming only the eighth European club to claim a treble (Guardiola is the only coach to do so twice), we saw what it all meant. 

Out on the pitch, Guardiola made a beeline for De Bruyne, injured once more. He tottered up to him, arms outstretched, eyes brimming with tears. His voice was jumpy with sobs as they embraced, and he told his Belgian midfielder, “We did it! We did it! Seven years of fighting… We did it, Kev. Now we have it!” Such emotion. 

It was a real indication of how stress builds, gnaws, embeds and then erupts when you’re working in that rarefied atmosphere. The emotions cost him a slip too when, post-match, he spoke to the pitchside BT Sport presenting team, which included Rio Ferdinand, Cesc Fàbregas, Mario Balotelli and Joleon Lescott. “This f****ng trophy,” he exclaimed. “It’s so difficult to win it!”

He knows it’s harder still to retain. No club, with the glorious exception of Real Madrid between 2016 and 2018, has won back-to-back finals in the Champions League era. Can City, where Guardiola is contracted for two more seasons, add their name to that exclusive list of one? 

I’ve been interviewing Pep about the Champions League being a quixotic beast for 14 years now. Sometimes for Champions Journal, occasionally for television, even for a feature documentary with Universal Studios. We’ve teased out most of the things involved in what I insist can still look like a love-hate relationship. 

Back in 2011, before his Barcelona team went out and produced one of the great performances of any UEFA competition in the final, he discussed what winning it as a player in 1992 had felt like. He told me: “I recall the wait to go to Wembley to face Sampdoria was very, very tense. Many of us could feel the weight of the fact that Barça had never won this trophy, never been European champions. That we had to change that fact.

“We were a great group of footballers and a great team in the making. But, even then, I believed we couldn’t be regarded as genuinely ‘great’ unless we actually lifted the European Cup. In the end, winning it was a liberation for the club, a release. From that point on, we could build and things were simpler without the weight of not having conquered Europe on everyone’s shoulders.”

Again, honest words – but, retrospectively, they sound odd. The Dream Team, finally anointed thanks to winning at Wembley, immediately stalled in Europe. Brushed aside the season after, dismantled by Fabio Capello’s Milan a year after that. In fact, for all Guardiola’s talk of 1992 as Barcelona’s breakthrough year – in the way that 2023 is City’s – the Catalan club didn’t reach the final following their 1994 loss to Milan for 12 more seasons. 

Guardiola will be obsessed with that not happening to his men in sky blue. However, already the treble winners are shedding key components: assistant coach Enzo Maresca has taken up the reins at Leicester. Captain fantastic İlkay Gündoğan has departed for Barcelona. Others will follow. Pretty swiftly after his all-too-brief summer break, the pressure is back on Pep Guardiola. 

Next June, the final returns to his “fetish” stadium, as they call it in Spain: Wembley, where he lifted this trophy as both a player in 1992 and as a coach in 2011. He’ll be able to hear the siren song calling to him already. 

In the pre-Istanbul final interview, he told Champions Journal: “I believe this competition is fascinating both in the good and the bad sense. So many clubs have destroyed projects and ideas because they weren’t able to win this competition, and so many have become big clubs because they were able to win it. We have to win the Champions League; that’s something you can’t avoid. But the most important thing is to be there again and again and again.

“Two years ago, we were there. Two years later, we are here again. The most important thing is to be here again. That’s what defines a big club when, year after year, you make it to the Champions League, battling in the latter stages and winning the title.” 

All together now (you know the words and the tune): Que sera, sera. / Whatever will be, will be. / Is Pep going to Wem-ber-ley? / Que sera, sera. 

We start in 1992. Just months after winning the European Cup as a 21-year-old pivote in Barcelona’s Dream Team came the disappointment of an embarrassing exit for the defending champions, humbled 3-2 at the Camp Nou by CSKA Moskva. The following season, they went all the way to the final, where they met an AC Milan side supposedly crippled by injuries and suspensions. Barcelona were humiliated 4-0 in Athens and Johan Cruyff duly dismantled that squad only to be sacked two years later. 

Guardiola did not get a sniff of another final until 2009, when his debut season as coach was topped off by Barça’s showpiece victory against Manchester United in Rome. It brought only temporary respite. The following campaign terminated in the last four after a gruelling bus journey to play Inter in Milan during the airspace shutdown caused by the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud. 

Victory in 2011, yes. But then the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune picked up pace. First came four successive semi-final exits. In 2012, holders Barça threw it away at home against ten-man Chelsea, with Lionel Messi missing a penalty. 

It was more of the same at Bayern, beginning when Guardiola committed “the worst f***-up of my career” by listening to his players’ tactical preferences only to lose 4-0 to Real Madrid in Bavaria for a 5-0 aggregate defeat. The next season, they were torn apart by his former club, with Messi to the fore in a 3-0 loss at the Camp Nou – it had been goalless at the 75-minute mark. And, in 2016, Bayern completed an unwanted hat-trick against Spain’s big three, beaten on away goals by Atlético de Madrid after Thomas Müller failed to convert a spot kick. 

Next the sky-blue thorns in Guardiola’s side. There were defeats by Monaco and Liverpool in ties that produced 18 goals in 2017 and 2018 respectively – before City learned to defend as stingily as they do now. Next up was Sergio Agüero’s missed penalty against Tottenham Hotspur and Fernando Llorente’s fortuitous second-leg goal in 2019. 

There was the miserable 1-0 loss to Chelsea in the 2021 final, an emotional strain to rival the physical pain Kevin De Bruyne endured before his early withdrawal. Then the coup de grâce: 5-3 up against Madrid in the 2021/22 semis after 179 minutes of the tie – but still knocked out. Feel some sympathy? I certainly reckoned that salt interminably being rubbed into wound after Champions League wound between 1993 and 2022 at least merited further questioning. So, did hearing the famous pre-match anthem ever make him shudder with dread rather than shiver with anticipation?

Even a week before Rodri healed those wounds with his winning goal in Istanbul, even before Guardiola moved behind only Carlo Ancelotti in the list of coaches with the most Champions League trophies, Pep firmly disabused me of that notion. 

“No, no! I look at it from a different angle,” he said. “The Champions League has given me so much more than I could have ever imagined. If my life were to end now, I’d have won one as a player for ‘my’ club [Barcelona], which I love so much, as well as winning two as manager of that club. In 14 years of coaching, I’ve reached ten Champions League semi-finals and four finals. Football both gives and takes away from you.

Pep first won as a 21-year-old with Barcelona in 1992 (above and right); the sting of defeat in Porto in 2021 (top right)
Pep first won as a 21-year-old with Barcelona in 1992 (above and right); the sting of defeat in Porto in 2021 (top right)
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“The Champions League has given me so much more than I could have ever imagined. Football both gives and takes away from you”
UEFA Champions League Final. Athens, Greece. 18th May 1994. AC Milan 4 v Barcelona 0

“Life is full of unfairness. That’s how the world works. You have to be ambitious but not too greedy. This competition has given me very sad moments which hurt me, and they will always be on my mind. But it also gave me extremely beautiful moments, and they will also always be on my mind.” 

It was a truthful answer but also fitted the party line that this trophy, this competition, was by no means an ‘obsession’ for coach or club. They had astutely decided to play it softly, softly in order to deflect the growing pressure. They elevated the impressive consistency of getting to semi-final after semi-final above any supposedly desperate compulsion to win finals. 

Then, once Inter’s robust, demanding game plan had been overcome, the raw truth surged out. Moments after Szymon Marciniak blew the final whistle to confirm that City had won the Champions League, becoming only the eighth European club to claim a treble (Guardiola is the only coach to do so twice), we saw what it all meant. 

Out on the pitch, Guardiola made a beeline for De Bruyne, injured once more. He tottered up to him, arms outstretched, eyes brimming with tears. His voice was jumpy with sobs as they embraced, and he told his Belgian midfielder, “We did it! We did it! Seven years of fighting… We did it, Kev. Now we have it!” Such emotion. 

It was a real indication of how stress builds, gnaws, embeds and then erupts when you’re working in that rarefied atmosphere. The emotions cost him a slip too when, post-match, he spoke to the pitchside BT Sport presenting team, which included Rio Ferdinand, Cesc Fàbregas, Mario Balotelli and Joleon Lescott. “This f****ng trophy,” he exclaimed. “It’s so difficult to win it!”

He knows it’s harder still to retain. No club, with the glorious exception of Real Madrid between 2016 and 2018, has won back-to-back finals in the Champions League era. Can City, where Guardiola is contracted for two more seasons, add their name to that exclusive list of one? 

I’ve been interviewing Pep about the Champions League being a quixotic beast for 14 years now. Sometimes for Champions Journal, occasionally for television, even for a feature documentary with Universal Studios. We’ve teased out most of the things involved in what I insist can still look like a love-hate relationship. 

Back in 2011, before his Barcelona team went out and produced one of the great performances of any UEFA competition in the final, he discussed what winning it as a player in 1992 had felt like. He told me: “I recall the wait to go to Wembley to face Sampdoria was very, very tense. Many of us could feel the weight of the fact that Barça had never won this trophy, never been European champions. That we had to change that fact.

“We were a great group of footballers and a great team in the making. But, even then, I believed we couldn’t be regarded as genuinely ‘great’ unless we actually lifted the European Cup. In the end, winning it was a liberation for the club, a release. From that point on, we could build and things were simpler without the weight of not having conquered Europe on everyone’s shoulders.”

Again, honest words – but, retrospectively, they sound odd. The Dream Team, finally anointed thanks to winning at Wembley, immediately stalled in Europe. Brushed aside the season after, dismantled by Fabio Capello’s Milan a year after that. In fact, for all Guardiola’s talk of 1992 as Barcelona’s breakthrough year – in the way that 2023 is City’s – the Catalan club didn’t reach the final following their 1994 loss to Milan for 12 more seasons. 

Guardiola will be obsessed with that not happening to his men in sky blue. However, already the treble winners are shedding key components: assistant coach Enzo Maresca has taken up the reins at Leicester. Captain fantastic İlkay Gündoğan has departed for Barcelona. Others will follow. Pretty swiftly after his all-too-brief summer break, the pressure is back on Pep Guardiola. 

Next June, the final returns to his “fetish” stadium, as they call it in Spain: Wembley, where he lifted this trophy as both a player in 1992 and as a coach in 2011. He’ll be able to hear the siren song calling to him already. 

In the pre-Istanbul final interview, he told Champions Journal: “I believe this competition is fascinating both in the good and the bad sense. So many clubs have destroyed projects and ideas because they weren’t able to win this competition, and so many have become big clubs because they were able to win it. We have to win the Champions League; that’s something you can’t avoid. But the most important thing is to be there again and again and again.

“Two years ago, we were there. Two years later, we are here again. The most important thing is to be here again. That’s what defines a big club when, year after year, you make it to the Champions League, battling in the latter stages and winning the title.” 

All together now (you know the words and the tune): Que sera, sera. / Whatever will be, will be. / Is Pep going to Wem-ber-ley? / Que sera, sera. 

We start in 1992. Just months after winning the European Cup as a 21-year-old pivote in Barcelona’s Dream Team came the disappointment of an embarrassing exit for the defending champions, humbled 3-2 at the Camp Nou by CSKA Moskva. The following season, they went all the way to the final, where they met an AC Milan side supposedly crippled by injuries and suspensions. Barcelona were humiliated 4-0 in Athens and Johan Cruyff duly dismantled that squad only to be sacked two years later. 

Guardiola did not get a sniff of another final until 2009, when his debut season as coach was topped off by Barça’s showpiece victory against Manchester United in Rome. It brought only temporary respite. The following campaign terminated in the last four after a gruelling bus journey to play Inter in Milan during the airspace shutdown caused by the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud. 

Victory in 2011, yes. But then the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune picked up pace. First came four successive semi-final exits. In 2012, holders Barça threw it away at home against ten-man Chelsea, with Lionel Messi missing a penalty. 

It was more of the same at Bayern, beginning when Guardiola committed “the worst f***-up of my career” by listening to his players’ tactical preferences only to lose 4-0 to Real Madrid in Bavaria for a 5-0 aggregate defeat. The next season, they were torn apart by his former club, with Messi to the fore in a 3-0 loss at the Camp Nou – it had been goalless at the 75-minute mark. And, in 2016, Bayern completed an unwanted hat-trick against Spain’s big three, beaten on away goals by Atlético de Madrid after Thomas Müller failed to convert a spot kick. 

Next the sky-blue thorns in Guardiola’s side. There were defeats by Monaco and Liverpool in ties that produced 18 goals in 2017 and 2018 respectively – before City learned to defend as stingily as they do now. Next up was Sergio Agüero’s missed penalty against Tottenham Hotspur and Fernando Llorente’s fortuitous second-leg goal in 2019. 

There was the miserable 1-0 loss to Chelsea in the 2021 final, an emotional strain to rival the physical pain Kevin De Bruyne endured before his early withdrawal. Then the coup de grâce: 5-3 up against Madrid in the 2021/22 semis after 179 minutes of the tie – but still knocked out. Feel some sympathy? I certainly reckoned that salt interminably being rubbed into wound after Champions League wound between 1993 and 2022 at least merited further questioning. So, did hearing the famous pre-match anthem ever make him shudder with dread rather than shiver with anticipation?

Even a week before Rodri healed those wounds with his winning goal in Istanbul, even before Guardiola moved behind only Carlo Ancelotti in the list of coaches with the most Champions League trophies, Pep firmly disabused me of that notion. 

“No, no! I look at it from a different angle,” he said. “The Champions League has given me so much more than I could have ever imagined. If my life were to end now, I’d have won one as a player for ‘my’ club [Barcelona], which I love so much, as well as winning two as manager of that club. In 14 years of coaching, I’ve reached ten Champions League semi-finals and four finals. Football both gives and takes away from you.

Pep first won as a 21-year-old with Barcelona in 1992 (above and right); the sting of defeat in Porto in 2021 (top right)
Pep first won as a 21-year-old with Barcelona in 1992 (above and right); the sting of defeat in Porto in 2021 (top right)
“The Champions League has given me so much more than I could have ever imagined. Football both gives and takes away from you”
UEFA Champions League Final. Athens, Greece. 18th May 1994. AC Milan 4 v Barcelona 0

“Life is full of unfairness. That’s how the world works. You have to be ambitious but not too greedy. This competition has given me very sad moments which hurt me, and they will always be on my mind. But it also gave me extremely beautiful moments, and they will also always be on my mind.” 

It was a truthful answer but also fitted the party line that this trophy, this competition, was by no means an ‘obsession’ for coach or club. They had astutely decided to play it softly, softly in order to deflect the growing pressure. They elevated the impressive consistency of getting to semi-final after semi-final above any supposedly desperate compulsion to win finals. 

Then, once Inter’s robust, demanding game plan had been overcome, the raw truth surged out. Moments after Szymon Marciniak blew the final whistle to confirm that City had won the Champions League, becoming only the eighth European club to claim a treble (Guardiola is the only coach to do so twice), we saw what it all meant. 

Out on the pitch, Guardiola made a beeline for De Bruyne, injured once more. He tottered up to him, arms outstretched, eyes brimming with tears. His voice was jumpy with sobs as they embraced, and he told his Belgian midfielder, “We did it! We did it! Seven years of fighting… We did it, Kev. Now we have it!” Such emotion. 

It was a real indication of how stress builds, gnaws, embeds and then erupts when you’re working in that rarefied atmosphere. The emotions cost him a slip too when, post-match, he spoke to the pitchside BT Sport presenting team, which included Rio Ferdinand, Cesc Fàbregas, Mario Balotelli and Joleon Lescott. “This f****ng trophy,” he exclaimed. “It’s so difficult to win it!”

He knows it’s harder still to retain. No club, with the glorious exception of Real Madrid between 2016 and 2018, has won back-to-back finals in the Champions League era. Can City, where Guardiola is contracted for two more seasons, add their name to that exclusive list of one? 

I’ve been interviewing Pep about the Champions League being a quixotic beast for 14 years now. Sometimes for Champions Journal, occasionally for television, even for a feature documentary with Universal Studios. We’ve teased out most of the things involved in what I insist can still look like a love-hate relationship. 

Back in 2011, before his Barcelona team went out and produced one of the great performances of any UEFA competition in the final, he discussed what winning it as a player in 1992 had felt like. He told me: “I recall the wait to go to Wembley to face Sampdoria was very, very tense. Many of us could feel the weight of the fact that Barça had never won this trophy, never been European champions. That we had to change that fact.

“We were a great group of footballers and a great team in the making. But, even then, I believed we couldn’t be regarded as genuinely ‘great’ unless we actually lifted the European Cup. In the end, winning it was a liberation for the club, a release. From that point on, we could build and things were simpler without the weight of not having conquered Europe on everyone’s shoulders.”

Again, honest words – but, retrospectively, they sound odd. The Dream Team, finally anointed thanks to winning at Wembley, immediately stalled in Europe. Brushed aside the season after, dismantled by Fabio Capello’s Milan a year after that. In fact, for all Guardiola’s talk of 1992 as Barcelona’s breakthrough year – in the way that 2023 is City’s – the Catalan club didn’t reach the final following their 1994 loss to Milan for 12 more seasons. 

Guardiola will be obsessed with that not happening to his men in sky blue. However, already the treble winners are shedding key components: assistant coach Enzo Maresca has taken up the reins at Leicester. Captain fantastic İlkay Gündoğan has departed for Barcelona. Others will follow. Pretty swiftly after his all-too-brief summer break, the pressure is back on Pep Guardiola. 

Next June, the final returns to his “fetish” stadium, as they call it in Spain: Wembley, where he lifted this trophy as both a player in 1992 and as a coach in 2011. He’ll be able to hear the siren song calling to him already. 

In the pre-Istanbul final interview, he told Champions Journal: “I believe this competition is fascinating both in the good and the bad sense. So many clubs have destroyed projects and ideas because they weren’t able to win this competition, and so many have become big clubs because they were able to win it. We have to win the Champions League; that’s something you can’t avoid. But the most important thing is to be there again and again and again.

“Two years ago, we were there. Two years later, we are here again. The most important thing is to be here again. That’s what defines a big club when, year after year, you make it to the Champions League, battling in the latter stages and winning the title.” 

All together now (you know the words and the tune): Que sera, sera. / Whatever will be, will be. / Is Pep going to Wem-ber-ley? / Que sera, sera. 

Insight
“We did it. It’s done”

The hug with Kevin De Bruyne at the final whistle in Istanbul said it all. Finally, the trophy Guardiola and his talismanic midfielder had pursued for so long was theirs

“When we arrived seven years ago, people said we had to win [titles] at Manchester City – probably because of my past at other teams – but I didn’t have that feeling,” Guardiola explained in July. “After winning four or five Premier Leagues, everybody started to say that if we didn’t win the Champions League, it wouldn’t be a complete success. We could accept that reality, but it was because of the previous five Premier League titles we had won. We had reached a final where we didn’t really perform [against Chelsea], then reached a couple of semi-finals. We could feel that we were really close. 

“However, we always spoke about it: it wasn’t about reaching this final and then not showing up. The most important thing is that we have been there or thereabouts for a long time, and when you consistently get there over a long period, you’ll win eventually. Kevin is the only player who was already there when I arrived. [İlkay] Gündoğan arrived at the same time as us, the same for John Stones, but Kevin was the only one who was already here under the previous manager. 

“Our relationship is special; we have been through so much together. We have fought a lot, we have hugged a lot, and it was a moment to say, ‘We did it. It’s done.’ They said those previous Premier League and FA Cup titles we had won [would mean] nothing if we didn’t win the Champions League. Well, they will have to find another argument because we won it.” 

Insight
“We did it. It’s done”

The hug with Kevin De Bruyne at the final whistle in Istanbul said it all. Finally, the trophy Guardiola and his talismanic midfielder had pursued for so long was theirs

“When we arrived seven years ago, people said we had to win [titles] at Manchester City – probably because of my past at other teams – but I didn’t have that feeling,” Guardiola explained in July. “After winning four or five Premier Leagues, everybody started to say that if we didn’t win the Champions League, it wouldn’t be a complete success. We could accept that reality, but it was because of the previous five Premier League titles we had won. We had reached a final where we didn’t really perform [against Chelsea], then reached a couple of semi-finals. We could feel that we were really close. 

“However, we always spoke about it: it wasn’t about reaching this final and then not showing up. The most important thing is that we have been there or thereabouts for a long time, and when you consistently get there over a long period, you’ll win eventually. Kevin is the only player who was already there when I arrived. [İlkay] Gündoğan arrived at the same time as us, the same for John Stones, but Kevin was the only one who was already here under the previous manager. 

“Our relationship is special; we have been through so much together. We have fought a lot, we have hugged a lot, and it was a moment to say, ‘We did it. It’s done.’ They said those previous Premier League and FA Cup titles we had won [would mean] nothing if we didn’t win the Champions League. Well, they will have to find another argument because we won it.” 

Insight
“We did it. It’s done”

The hug with Kevin De Bruyne at the final whistle in Istanbul said it all. Finally, the trophy Guardiola and his talismanic midfielder had pursued for so long was theirs

“When we arrived seven years ago, people said we had to win [titles] at Manchester City – probably because of my past at other teams – but I didn’t have that feeling,” Guardiola explained in July. “After winning four or five Premier Leagues, everybody started to say that if we didn’t win the Champions League, it wouldn’t be a complete success. We could accept that reality, but it was because of the previous five Premier League titles we had won. We had reached a final where we didn’t really perform [against Chelsea], then reached a couple of semi-finals. We could feel that we were really close. 

“However, we always spoke about it: it wasn’t about reaching this final and then not showing up. The most important thing is that we have been there or thereabouts for a long time, and when you consistently get there over a long period, you’ll win eventually. Kevin is the only player who was already there when I arrived. [İlkay] Gündoğan arrived at the same time as us, the same for John Stones, but Kevin was the only one who was already here under the previous manager. 

“Our relationship is special; we have been through so much together. We have fought a lot, we have hugged a lot, and it was a moment to say, ‘We did it. It’s done.’ They said those previous Premier League and FA Cup titles we had won [would mean] nothing if we didn’t win the Champions League. Well, they will have to find another argument because we won it.” 

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