It’s official. After ten years, 20 trophies, and a complete transformation of English football, Pep Guardiola is stepping down as Manchester City manager at the end of this season. His final match in the dugout comes this Sunday against Aston Villa and then, one of the greatest managerial tenures in the sport’s history quietly closes.
He’s leaving with one year still remaining on his contract. Not pushed out. Not sacked. Just done, on his own terms, the way truly great managers rarely get to leave.
How Arsenal Clinching the Title Made the Goodbye Official
The timing wasn’t random. Arsenal’s Premier League title win this week secured after City dropped points against Bournemouth, sealed a second consecutive season without a league trophy for Guardiola’s side. For a man who demands relentless excellence, back to back near misses in the top flight felt like the natural punctuation mark on a chapter that had already said everything it needed to say.
Pep put it simply in his farewell statement: “Don’t ask me the reasons I’m leaving. There is no reason, but deep inside, I know it’s my time. Nothing is eternal.”
It’s not a bitter exit, far from it. He’s signing off with both the FA Cup and the Carabao Cup already in the cabinet this season. He leaves the club in genuinely great shape. He just knows when a story is complete.
And his ties to the City universe aren’t being cut either. Guardiola moves immediately into a Global Ambassador and Technical Adviser role for the City Football Group (CFG), working across their 11-club network including Girona, New York City FC, Melbourne City, and Palermo advising on coaching structures, talent identification, and footballing philosophy. Think of it as a working sabbatical with the family he built.
Club Chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak captured the mood in the official statement: “As we celebrate the past, we are also very happy to know that Pep will stay with the Group and we will be able to use his knowledge and experience in so many of our other clubs to help managers and players.”
The Numbers That Prove He Was Simply in a Different League
Pep Guardiola arrived at the Etihad in July 2016. What followed was not just a dynasty, it was a masterclass in sustained, relentless dominance that rewrote what was thought possible in English football.
Across nearly 600 games in charge, he maintained a win rate of over 70%. He averaged 1.5 major trophies per season, a pace that even Sir Alex Ferguson, at 1.05 per season during the Premier League era, never matched.
His complete trophy haul across 10 years:
| Competition | Trophies | Seasons |
|---|---|---|
| Premier League | 6 | 2017–18, 2018–19, 2020–21, 2021–22, 2022–23, 2023–24 |
| Carabao Cup | 5 | 2017–18, 2018–19, 2019–20, 2020–21, 2025–26 |
| FA Cup | 3 | 2018–19, 2022–23, 2025–26 |
| FA Community Shield | 3 | 2018, 2019, 2024 |
| UEFA Champions League | 1 | 2022–23 |
| UEFA Super Cup | 1 | 2023 |
| FIFA Club World Cup | 1 | 2023 |
| Total | 20 |
Twenty trophies. No manager in Manchester City’s history comes close.
Three Seasons That Defined a Generation
The full trophy list is staggering enough, but three specific campaigns stand out as the moments that proved Guardiola wasn’t just building a great team he was building historic ones.
The Centurions (2017–18) — After a transitional debut season, Pep’s second year at City produced something English football had never seen. City became the first and only top-flight team in history to reach 100 points in a single season, scoring 106 goals with a +79 goal difference. The blueprint was laid bare: this wasn’t just a good team, it was a new standard.
The Domestic Treble (2018–19) — Followed up 100 points with 98, edging out a brilliant Liverpool side, then added the FA Cup and League Cup to become the first English men’s team to win all three major domestic trophies in the same season. A year after breaking records, they went and built on them.
The Continental Treble (2022–23) — The summit. City finally conquered their one remaining mountain, the Champions League beating Inter Milan 1–0 in Istanbul to complete the full European treble alongside the Premier League and FA Cup. Only the second English club ever to achieve this. For fans who had spent years watching City come agonizingly close in Europe, this was the moment everything clicked into place.
And threading through all of it: four consecutive Premier League titles from 2021 to 2024, a feat that had never been done before in the history of the English top flight.
The Man Taking Over And Why His Appointment Comes With Drama
Manchester City have already moved. Enzo Maresca, former Chelsea manager and, crucially, Guardiola’s own assistant during the 2022–23 Treble season has agreed in principle to a three-year deal to take charge ahead of next season.
The logic is obvious. Some in football circles have already nicknamed Maresca “Diet Pep”, a man obsessed with positional play, inverted full-backs, and treating the pitch like a chessboard. He knows the squad. He knows the staff. He was in the room when the Treble was won. If anyone can maintain what Guardiola built without completely reinventing it, it’s him.
But the road to this appointment has been anything but clean. Maresca walked out of Chelsea on New Year’s Day, a sudden mid-season departure that the club’s ownership deeply resents. It has since emerged he had already been in contact with City representatives late last year about succeeding Guardiola, and that he used City and Juventus’s interest as leverage when seeking a new deal at Stamford Bridge. When Chelsea’s management found out, the relationship broke down completely.
Because Maresca resigned without a severance package, Chelsea still holds his contractual compensation rights. City will have to pay a significant, undisclosed fee to release him and make the three-year deal official. It’s a messy situation but from City’s perspective, he was the only candidate who made sense, and they’re willing to pay to get it done.
What’s Next for Pep?
At 55 years old, Guardiola is still in his managerial prime. But don’t expect him to dive straight into another club job. He’s spoken openly about the exhausting intensity of top-level management, and his move into the CFG ambassador role gives him exactly what Jurgen Klopp sought after leaving Liverpool, a way to stay connected to football without the weekly grind of press conferences, injuries, and matchday pressure.
When he does return to a dugout, all signs point to international football. Pep has repeatedly hinted at wanting to experience a World Cup or European Championship as a manager and because he’s said he has no interest in leaving City just to “do the same thing at another club,” the national team route feels inevitable.
The leading candidates for where he ends up:
Brazil have long been drawn to Guardiola’s philosophy, and the Seleção job carries a prestige that matches his legacy. England is another genuine possibility, the FA have admired him for years, and after a decade living in the country and knowing the entire generation of English talent intimately, the Three Lions job would fit naturally.
There’s also an Italian connection that shouldn’t be dismissed. Pep played at Brescia and Roma, speaks fluent Italian, and with the Azzurri going through a significant identity crisis ahead of Euro 2028 and the 2030 World Cup, some Italian football insiders view him as the dream candidate to lead a cultural reset.
A romantic return to Barcelona as manager is considered unlikely in the near term, Hansi Flick is firmly settled at the Camp Nou though nobody in football entirely rules out a future role at the club where it all began, perhaps in a sporting director or advisory capacity down the line.
The End of an Era — Literally
Guardiola’s ten years at City weren’t just a successful managerial stint. They were a generational shift in how English football thinks about itself. The way the game is played, discussed, analysed, and coached in this country has Pep’s fingerprints all over it. The 100-point season wasn’t just a record, it changed what clubs believed was achievable. The Treble wasn’t just a trophy haul, it proved English clubs could dominate Europe again.
Sunday’s final whistle at Aston Villa will mark the end of the Guardiola era on the touchline. But the decade he spent building, winning, and revolutionising Manchester City will be studied, argued about, and celebrated for a very long time.
As he said himself nothing is eternal. But some things leave a mark that lasts forever.
