Could this season be Guardiola’s last dance with Man City?

Pep Guardiola asked for a challenge with each cessation of his management career. Whether it is to exchange Barcelona B for Barcelona after a single season, to move to Bayern Munich or to take in the Premier League with Manchester City, it is generally out in mind.

During his first day at the Etihad stadium in 2016, he admitted that, despite trophies in Spain and Germany, the question of everyone’s lips before his arrival in England was: “What is the quality of the PEP?” He has already answered there once with 18 trophies in nine years in Manchester.

But in the middle of a change lap in City and the English football center, he faces the prospect of having to answer them again. In a career full of challenges, it may be one of the greatest to date.

If things had played differently, Guardiola could already take advantage of his retirement on a Maldives beach or a golf course in Portugal. He chose to stay in City, in part, because the start of last season – only the second to end without trophy during his fate at Etihad – was so difficult and he did not want to leave the club in disorder. It seems that he also realized that the club would find much easier to give a new manager during a summer that did not include the additional complication of a club World Cup.

Having decided to stay and sign an extension of contract until 2027, he took the task of trying to constitute another winning team of the title. It’s just that the landscape is now very different.

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From the team he chose for the Champions League final against Inter Milan in Istanbul barely two years ago, 15 players – including Kevin de Bruyne, Ederson, Kyle Walker and Ilkay Gündogan – left or were moved to fringes.

It was not only the staff who changed. At the same time as the features of a huge turnover, Guardiola also tries to adapt to what he considers a change in the balance of the Premier League.

At one point last season, discussing the success of teams like Newcastle, Bournemouth and Brighton, he said that “modern football is not positional, you have to make rhythm”. It was completely the admission of a coach who built an empire on a strict framework of positions and movements.

After the defeat of the City Champions League against Real Madrid in February, he said that “his tactics did not work as they did”. Earlier this season, he insisted that he “would never change his beliefs” and still likes his team to make “a thousand, millions of passes”.

However, it seems that he has reached an acceptance that he must change over time.

This season, he tries to marry his own desire for control with more pressing and faster and more direct attacks to reflect what is happening elsewhere in the League. This is one of the reasons why he chose Pep Lijnders as his assistant after the Dutch played a key role in the development of the “Heavy Metal” style from Jürgen Klopp in Liverpool.

It’s a good idea, trying to merge elements of two of the most prosperous teams in the modern era of the Premier League, but it came with teeth problems.

After starting with a hooked 4-0 victory in Wolves to open the 2025-26 season, City has lost its next two games. In the defeats against Tottenham and Brighton, they conceded almost identical objectives when the rapid ruptures have exploited gaping holes at the rear – gaps made more pronounced by the large load in charge privileged by the Lijnders.

This is something that Manchester United Manager, Ruben Amorim, will undoubtedly be noticed before the Manchester derby at Etihad on Sunday. City will start against United a point and four places under their neighbors in the table. They are already six points behind the Liverpool champions, who can now call on a new attacker of 125 million pounds Sterling Alexander Isak after the international break.

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No team since Manchester United in 1992-1993 has lost two of its first three games and continued to win the League. Even at this early stage, there is a lot of ground to invent if Guardiola wants to find the trophy he has raised six times in seven years between 2017 and 2024.

But if it will not be this season for City and Guardiola, then when? Guardiola has a contract over the next two years, but the staff have given up trying to predict when he could call him.

There is a feeling in certain corners of the City Football Academy that it could still be his last season. There are others who believe that, even if he admitted that he was approaching the end, the 54 -year -old could still be convinced to sign another new contract. It would depend a lot on his own energy level and the question of knowing whether the working relationship with the director of football Hugo Viana – who took over from the great friend of Guardiola, Txiki Begiristain – works well.

Anyway, the city’s bosses decided a long time ago that Guardiola had won the right to decide how and when he left. He accepted that last season was so bad in terms of City’s specific objectives that it could have been deleted by any other high -level club.

At the end of his 26 years in United, Sir Alex Ferguson bowed as champion after winning the title in 2013. Guardiola’s achievements deserve the same final.

To give himself the perfect dismissal, he will have to reconstruct another large team capable of prospering at a different age of the Premier League. This is another major challenge to check the list.