Manchester City’s Premier League title challenge ended at Bournemouth on Tuesday and the expectation was Pep Guardiola would soon confirm the inevitable, that he will be leaving at the end of the season. Then the days ticked by.
Media reports on Monday night had shattered the public illusion that Guardiola was going nowhere — for months he had uttered the words, “I have a contract”, his version of saying he was staying, and on several occasions he talked about plans for next season — but as the days went on, City fans hoped that he would be staying after all, that the stories were false.
By Thursday night, Guardiola still had not told his players and staff members of his plans, but everything changed on Friday morning. Official confirmation that his decade in Manchester is coming to an end arrived at the slightly unusual time of 11:10. It took the form of a three-minute video, which he narrated. Talking about subjects from City’s style of play to the Manchester Arena bombing in 2016, he closed with a correction to Tony Walsh’s famous poem, “This is the Place”. ‘I’m sorry Tony,” he said. “This is my place.” He wrote the script himself.
Guardiola had shown the video to the players before it was released to the public. He then had lunch with all members of first-team staff. He talked about what Manchester meant to him and there were tears, both from the manager and others.
Behind the scenes, he had long planned to leave the club this summer. City had conducted a detailed search for a successor last year and, as revealed by The Athletic this week, the chosen replacement, Enzo Maresca, has already started working with director of football Hugo Viana on plans for the summer and beyond.
Guardiola is considered hard to read even by those who know him, and at times it has felt obvious from his public comments that he is leaving, yet at other times he has appeared to speak sincerely about preparing the team for the 2026-27 campaign. In reality, he had planned months ago that this would be his final season at City. “It’s time,” he said in a press conference on Friday. “It’s not wake up and say, ‘Now is the time to leave’ — it is a process that I felt for a while.”
In the summer of 2024, he had decided to leave in 2025, alongside director of football Txiki Begiristain. It was a shock, therefore, when he signed a new contract in November 2024, not least because he had not even told his staff he was going to sign it.
It was an even bigger shock that he signed a two-year deal, but Guardiola had a strong idea even then that he would in fact only do one, taking him to this summer. In the past couple of months, he decided to stick with that idea.
It was always possible Guardiola would change his mind again and City were hopeful the manager would confirm his plans. Sources familiar with the matter — like others referenced in this article speaking anonymously to protect relationships — suggest the pursuit of Maresca accelerated around then.
Speaking about the planning involved in replacing him, Guardiola said on Friday: “Always the club respected me unbelievably, with the decision, of course the club has to be ready.”
Guardiola may have had said he needed to hold a final conversation with his chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, to draw a line underneath his time at the club, but the outcome was already settled, no matter how much fans had hoped for a U-turn, because his exit has been thoroughly planned across various different departments of the club. Discussions were held about naming the redeveloped North Stand ‘The Pep Guardiola Stand’, with official confirmation coming soon after the club announced his departure. A statue has been commissioned, too, something Guardiola found out about on Friday morning via a call from Al Mubarak.
In late 2025, City began to consider the potential candidates who could replace Guardiola, taking in various factors, including their style of play and personality. The club deny drawing up a shortlist. Multiple sources have told The Athletic Xabi Alonso, the Real Madrid manager at the time, was one of the names mentioned.
City already had Maresca at the front of their minds due to his history with the club and things stayed that way. The Italian had been recommended to Begiristain by former City manager Manuel Pellegrini years ago, leading Begiristain to recommend him to the club’s academy as somebody they should interview for the role of under-23s coach.
Pep Guardiola and Enzo Maresca enjoy a good relationship (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Academy staff were blown away by his preparation, including endless folders on his laptop containing tactical research on teams across the world. He was hired, and his job working with City’s most talented youngsters, including Cole Palmer, Liam Delap and James McAtee, meant Begiristain considered him a potential option either to work alongside, or replace, Guardiola one day.
Notable former club figures had long planned to attend Sunday’s final game against Aston Villa, knowing it would be Guardiola’s swansong. The official announcement came with the news that he will take up a role as global ambassador across the City Football Group. The City boss had thought hard about his own goodbye; as well as writing and performing the words for the announcement video, he initially suggested he would like a farewell event during the summer. It was felt, though, that things will have moved on, that the new manager will be in place, and that capitalising on the end-of-season emotion would be best.
The event at Co-Op Live on Monday, billed before confirmation of his departure as a chance to celebrate the men’s domestic cup double and the Women’s Super League title, was always about ensuring Guardiola could enjoy a proper, special send-off after a bus parade around the city.
His recent visit to Stockport County also appeared to be related to a potential exit; he is friends with the club’s owner, Mark Stott, who owns the building Guardiola lives in, and figures at the League One side were under the impression the City boss was fulfilling an old promise to attend a match before he left England. In the days after the game, whispers coming out of Stockport suggested Guardiola was going at the end of the season.
Last week, there were rumours Guardiola had had a change of heart, and that he wanted to stay after all. He had apparently asked Bernardo Silva to stay with him for one more year, though the midfielder says he was being asked that question throughout the campaign.
Those who spent time with Guardiola last week insisted they had not noticed any change in his demeanour and still expected him to go. After the FA Cup final against Chelsea on Saturday, at least two people close to him felt the Catalan was speaking in a way that suggested his time at City was coming to an end.
There were more public clues at Wembley, for example the way he waited on the pitch to take pictures with backroom staff and others in his setup, some of whom looked shocked to be asked.
But there were no exaggerated waves in front of the fans, the kind that everybody understands as a goodbye. At Bournemouth on Tuesday, there were even fewer signs, as he simply walked over to the away end, clapped briefly, and headed back towards the tunnel.
He sat and faced the press afterwards and talked, again, about preparing the team for next season. Pushed on his future, he said he would speak to his chairman to see, among other things, if he would stay or not. It gave fans hope that the matter was not settled, and that is the impression Guardiola had wanted to give all along.
“Always, I said that fighting for the titles or qualifications or Premier Leagues or FA Cups, the reason you don’t go, in that first moment there is a problem, the players don’t follow you anymore,” he said, explaining that he had not wanted to announce anything and impact City’s push for trophies.
Pep Guardiola had been sticking to the mantra that he had another year left on his contract (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
He has not wanted to let it slip but he has been speaking like a man who is leaving for months. It was not long into the New Year, shortly after Maresca had left Chelsea, in fact, when he broke the habit of a lifetime and started turning on referees in public. He has been shouting in their faces for years, but has never wanted to look like he is making excuses by blaming them in press conferences.
That changed with an outburst at Newcastle United following a win in the Carabao Cup, and since then he has made plenty of jibes. He has also started bringing up long-forgotten controversies, and indeed incidents that never seemed controversial in the first place, like an N’Golo Kante challenge on Ilkay Gundogan from 2016, that nobody other than him noticed at the time.
He has spoken nostalgically, as if looking back on his time, about turning up to FA Cup away games against lower-league teams and missing stadiums like Goodison Park and Craven Cottage.
When it comes to succession planning, City have always favoured candidates they are familiar with. Had Guardiola left City years ago, Patrick Vieira, another former U23 boss, and Mikel Arteta, Guardiola’s former assistant, would have been in the frame.
Some figures at City were also admirers of Ange Postecoglou due to his work with City Football Group-affiliated club Yokohama F Marinos in Japan.
Interest in Maresca should come as no surprise.
While many of the influential figures he had worked with previously have left the club, such as Begiristain and, to a lesser extent, academy director Jason Wilcox, recommendations had been passed on to Viana. Guardiola himself was obviously a big factor, considering their time working together during the 2022-23 season, when City won the Treble.
City reached out to Maresca at the end of last year, and due to the terms of the Italian’s contract at Chelsea, he informed his employers about the talk. Things appeared to go downhill quickly and soon afterwards they parted ways.
Chelsea were, and still are, furious about how things played out. Sources at the club say it was Maresca’s decision to leave, even though his contract still had a minimum of three and a half years left to run. Sources close to Maresca suggest he told the club he was happy to stay and agree a new deal when informing them of Manchester City’s approach. No such discussions took place. From Chelsea’s point of view, they felt it was premature to discuss fresh terms so soon after signing a long-term agreement the year before when hiring the Italian from Leicester City.
The London club had wanted to avoid making a managerial change halfway through a season, as they had done with Thomas Tuchel in 2022 and Graham Potter a year later. The plan was always to review everything about Chelsea, including Maresca, at the end of his second year in charge. Chelsea turned to Liam Rosenior, who was in charge of Strasbourg, in early January as Maresca’s replacement but his reign lasted just 107 days. The disruption caused by Maresca’s departure is regarded internally as a key factor in why results deteriorated and they failed to qualify for the Champions League via a top-five finish in the Premier League.
Multiple sources say issues between the club and Maresca grew after he guided Chelsea to the Club World Cup. For example, Maresca made his desire for the club to sign a centre-back public last August after Levi Colwill was ruled out for several months with a serious knee injury. It caused tension on both sides and that lingered for several weeks after the season started. One Chelsea insider spoke about how they noticed a change in Maresca’s personality after winning the FIFA tournament that summer. People close to Maresca insist he remained the same and was just happy to see the work put in achieve success.
Since leaving Chelsea and in preparation for moving to City, Maresca appears to have been on a mission to absorb as much information from as many different fields as possible. The search of inspiration is Guardiola-like. He read the book Football and Chess, by Adam Wells, while on holiday in the Maldives and has spoken to Italian sporting legend Julio Velasco, the man who made the Italy men’s volleyball team world champions in the 1990s and the women’s team Olympic gold medallists in 2024.
Enzo Maresca has been out of work since leaving Chelsea (Mattia Guolo/SPORTWEEK/Fashion Director/Styling: Gianluca Zappoli)
He has also spent time with Ettore Messina, Italy’s most successful basketball coach, who has worked at the San Antonio Spurs, and Nicolo Govoni, an activist behind humanitarian project Still I Rise, aimed at getting impoverished kids into school.
At a recent awards dinner in Italy, he was asked about his time working with Guardiola: “First of all, he taught me the methodology, how to put it into practice because you can imagine he does things, but you then have to understand how he does them; working with him, I was lucky enough to see how to approach certain tasks.
“One thing that doesn’t often get remarked upon is his work ethic: when you hear people say he arrives at seven in the morning and leaves at seven at night, and is the last to turn out the lights at the office — that’s Pep through and through. So his work ethic is one of the most wonderful things and it demonstrates the passion he has for his job.”
Over the past few months, it had become common, and also understandable, for City fans to grow frustrated with media reports about Guardiola’s future, with the manager insisting he had one year left on his contract, and only ever hinting through body language and nostalgic comments that he was planning to leave.
But this has been a change a long time in the making.
