After ten years of brilliance, Spaniard must now hand the reins to a successor who could quickly earn the title of bald fraud
We’ll get to Pep Guardiola and Manchester City in a moment. For now, picture yourself at a rooftop hangout with your mates, drinking beer and having fun. What’s your beer limit? Not that high but you carry on anyway. You’re having a good time so why stop?
The longer the party goes on into the night the more fun you have, and the better it seems to be. Everything is brighter. There is deep rumbling laughter, belly-quivering excitement. But also, the longer the fun goes on, the more painful the recovery is likely to be. What will midnight be like? How about 4am? 8am?
Guardiola has spent 10 years at City, and what a decade it has been. The club has seen good Pep, peak Pep, ultimate Pep, struggling Pep, fraud Pep, falling-to-his-knees-on-the-sidelines Pep. And how they have enjoyed it: six Premier League titles, three FA Cups, five League Cups, one Champions League trophy sealed in a treble-winning season.
It’s about as good as a golden age gets, and Guardiola is a superhero. But the longer such a hero stays, the more likely that they prove themselves a tough act to emulate. We have seen this play out with Manchester United and Sir Alex Ferguson. Can Enzo Maresca fill the absurdly large boots of modern football’s most dynamic and inventive genius?
“What a time we have had together.” 🩵 pic.twitter.com/WpkFecBYT4
— Manchester City (@ManCity) May 22, 2026
It is easy enough to understand City’s logic in the appointment of Pep’s heir. Maresca knows the club. He worked under Pep during City’s treble-winning campaign and believes in many of the same positional and possession ideas that created the most successful era in the club’s history.
If the succession planning is about minimising disruption as much as possible, continuing down the route of the elite Iberian style, Pepism as a football tradition, then few candidates fit more naturally. Luis Enrique perhaps, but the Spaniard is tied up at Paris Saint-Germain.
But at the same time, it is easy to find portents. For one thing, appointing Maresca represents a leap of faith. Chelsea’s decision to hire him in 2024 already carried that quality. At that point his senior managerial experience consisted of spells with Parma in Serie B and Leicester City in the Championship. How good is this man and can he handle the top level?
His subsequent record at Chelsea proved that he was tactically capable. The high point was thrashing PSG in the Club World Cup final last summer. He also won the Conference League and had Chelsea on course for a top-five finish this season before abruptly leaving the club in January.
North Stand to be renamed ‘The Pep Guardiola Stand.’ 🩵
Read more 🔗 https://t.co/IcuzmBkVXV pic.twitter.com/SrUqawbHWx
— Manchester City (@ManCity) May 22, 2026
But at the same time, the win over PSG was at an ill-omened, ill-placed and much disliked summer tournament after a long season. The Conference League is hardly a battleground for a club of Chelsea’s level. And Chelsea fans were discontent with Maresca for quite a lot of his time at Stamford Bridge.
His commitment to certain tactical principles – notably insisting on passing out of the back even when his side were bad at it – occasionally appeared rigid. At Leicester, there were similar periods when supporters were frustrated and felt keeping possession had become an end in itself.
It is worth noting that a possession-ball obsessive like Guardiola evolved during his final two years at City, moving towards a more direct way of attacking as the league and his squad profile changed.
Whether Maresca is capable of adapting his philosophy at City may prove one of the defining questions of his tenure.
Legendary. pic.twitter.com/KlwfpZn5jL
— Manchester City (@ManCity) May 22, 2026
Inevitably, Maresca will be compared directly with Guardiola. He will make clear that he is his own manager, certainly, but that won’t stop the comparisons. Take Arne Slot this season at Liverpool, recently having to deal with a near-mutiny sparked by a club legend, calling for a return to Kloppism. Guardiola has had far more of an impact on City than Jurgen Klopp on Liverpool.
Any successor would feel like a downgrade by comparison. Maresca will be called Pep-lite, Guardiola from Wish, a fraud. And not just any fraud, a bald fraud, the worst kind of fraud there is on the Internet’s banter-obsessive digital hive-mind.
How Maresca manages all that noise and delivers on the pitch will determine whether City’s belly-quivering excitement continues on the rooftop, or they experience the worst hangover ever.
