Why Kompany is well placed to succeed Guardiola at Man City

In the not-so-distant future, Manchester City will need to hire a coach to succeed Pep Guardiola. Nobody knows if it will be next year, the year after or even three years later, but for now the man who becomes the obvious candidate is Bayern Munich’s Vincent Kompany.

When Bayern face Arsenal in the UEFA Champions League at the Emirates on Wednesday, it could be argued that the two strongest coaches to replace Guardiola – Kompany and Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta – will face off in a battle of the contenders. But even though Arteta was Pep’s number 2 at City for three years before taking the job at Arsenal in 2019, he has become the embodiment of his own project at the Emirates to the extent that I don’t see him jumping ship to City.

I’ve known Kompany – let’s call him Vinny from now on – for almost 20 years, when we met through a mutual friend while he was playing for Hamburg in 2008, and I now believe he really can be the guy to succeed Pep at City.

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In football, it’s all about timing – many of Pep’s successors have been passed over over the years – and you have to take into account that Vinny runs a huge and powerful club in Bayern. But as a footballer, wherever you are, whether you are at Liverpool, Manchester United or elsewhere, which club would you need to get out? There’s a good chance it’s Real Madrid. And I think for Vinny, Man City is probably his Real Madrid.

In my opinion, he would be perfect to replace Pep at some point in the future. You have to have a big personality to follow someone like Pep Guardiola, and Vinny has that. He also has the political skills to manage above, below and on the side, whilst having the connection and love for the club. This is rooted in his 11 years as a player at the Etihad. He won 12 trophies during this period, 11 of them as club captain, including four Premier League titles.

But I think it’s worth describing Vinny’s personality and characteristics before talking about his football philosophy and why it would work for City. When our paths first crossed, he was playing as number 10 in Hamburg, alongside Rafael van der Vaart. He was something of a child prodigy, the kind of young player who made a splash in the video game Championship Manager, but he also immediately struck you as a really cool guy and we said we’d keep in touch.

A few months later, by pure coincidence, he ended up joining me at City. A few weeks later, the takeover of Sheikh Mansour transformed the club from what we called “Joke City” into a club that is today one of the biggest and most successful in the world.

Vinny was only 22 years old at the time, but his presence and leadership abilities were immediately evident. He commanded respect from everyone because he was a guy who could comfortably converse with his teammates in English, French, German and Spanish – any cliques that might have formed were broken by Vinny because he was a unifying presence.

He is one of those incredibly lucky or gifted people who excels at everything he does, but he also places a high value on hard work and innate ability. He’s an academic – he studied and completed a commerce degree at the University of Manchester in 2017 while captaining City – but also a hugely talented footballer.

But while he can be kind, Vinny can also be direct and he can be angry. I’ve seen this side of him, because there are certain things he won’t tolerate.

I remember playing alongside him in a pre-season friendly against Inter Milan in Baltimore in 2010. Inter had just won the Champions League and they were absolutely killing us. We ended up losing 3-0.

But because Vinny was so angry with our performance as a team, he started taking out his frustration on Inter striker Samuel Eto’o, who was one of the best players in the world at the time. Vinny could accept losing, but not when he felt the opposition didn’t have to work for it, and he kicked Eto’o all over the pitch.

At half time, Eto’o spoke to our teammates, Yaya and Kolo Touré, asking them to tell Vinny to calm down a little as it was only a friendly match. When the message reached Vinny, he responded by telling Yaya and Kolo that the more Eto’o complained, the more he would kick him. And that’s exactly what he did.

As a teammate, when you see that kind of drive, determination and anger, it raises the standards. Vinny could lead by example, and did, but he also has that fierce winning mentality that defines all great teams and great players. He was the natural leader as City captain, and I can see how he has incorporated that into his management in the way he motivates the players.

At Burnley he wanted the team to press more often and with more intensity, but he was smart in how he got the message across. Rather than imposing his demands on the team as a whole, he made each player believe that he was tailoring the message and tactics just for them. One of the strikers was on track to score 10-15 goals per season, but he wanted to score more, so Vinny convinced him to press higher up the pitch as he would win the ball back in more dangerous positions and, therefore, create more goal-scoring opportunities. The striker suddenly had plans to score more goals, but Vinny had actually convinced one of his strikers to do more defending.

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At Bayern, where he knows his team will dominate most Bundesliga matches, Vinny tasks his players with tactical plans to defeat opponents who try to stifle Bayern with different approaches. Some teams will double press, others will switch to clinch, some will defend low, others will defend high – and Vinny has had success deploying Harry Kane and Jamal Musiala as false No.9s. Some managers live and die by their philosophy, but sometimes it helps to not be so rigid.

That’s why Vinny will have relished the challenge of setting up at Paris Saint-Germain recently, when Bayern played with 10 players for the entire second half and still came away with a victory against the European champions. There was a level of courage, with periods of suffering, that will have pleased him because that kind of resilience and spirit is what wins things at the end of a season.

Vinny works under constant pressure at Bayern. They hope to win the championship every season and conquer Europe. Although many people doubted his credentials when he took the job after being relegated with Burnley 18 months ago, he proved them wrong and earned himself a new contract as reward.

He passes all the tests at Bayern, so he is much more likely to be a candidate for City than he would have been if Pep had resigned at the end of the 2023-24 season. His style of play, which requires his charges to be ready to receive the ball and play with pace and movement, would be easily welcomed by the City squad. His relationship with the fans and the club hierarchy would guarantee him the instant acceptance that David Moyes and Unai Emery did not have when replacing Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger at Manchester United and Arsenal respectively.

If he returned to City as manager, Vinny wouldn’t try to be Pep, and that’s a big factor. He would probably be nervous about taking on a challenge, but he is strong enough in his own beliefs to guarantee that he will take it on with the same strength of character he has demonstrated throughout his career. But it’s all about timing, and Bayern would be a great club to leave.

Ultimately, Vinny will want to test himself at one of the top clubs in the Premier League. There is nothing that suits him better than Manchester City.

Nedum Onuoha was speaking to ESPN Senior Editor Mark Ogden