Running Through Pep Guardiola's Woes

This is soccer. Anyone who's any good is reportedly heading somewhere else. There are rumblings from locker rooms about discontent; agents have been spotted fraternizing with opposing clubs' executives; contract offers have been extended. Almost all of it is bullshit—based on quarter-truths or utterly fabricated by bored journalists. Pep Guardiola might one day coach at the Etihad because the world's biggest clubs pass managers between them like 10-year-olds swapping poop jokes, but the latest rumors about an offseason switch to Manchester City almost definitely aren't true. It's not the headlines from Europe's sports press that are worth considering, but what the headlines say about Pep's public persona.

Guardiola is the game's great delicate malcontent. There is a restlessness within him that sets him apart from his other highly successful peers. (This is the same trait that makes him the subject of frequent Pep-to-wherever scuttlebutt.) As top-level managers go, he is, if anything, under-traveled. His résumé consists of a season-long stint at Barcelona B, four years at the big club, and one-and-a-half with Bayern Munich. He's not a hired gun like José Mourinho or Carlo Ancelotti, though he's quite a bit younger than both so he still has plenty of time to become one.

But that wouldn't seem to suit Pep. He's a wanderer, not a careerist or a power-chaser. If and when he leaves Bayern Munich, it wouldn't surprise anyone if he took an extended sabbatical or quit coaching altogether, deciding it's too stressful or that he can't find the right employer. This is a man who walked away from the club he literally grew up in because "Time wears everything out. I need to find myself again… I really think that the next person who takes care of the team will give everything that I can't right now." He retreated to Manhattan for a year to recharge.

Barcelona, or the club's fans and sympathetic media members, call out to Pep every few months, but he has allegedly, in some dubiously factual remarks to close friends, said "If I ever think about going back to Barcelona, hit me over the head with a hammer." Again, you have to scrutinize the lies—he probably has never uttered those exact words—to get to the truth at the heart of them. Guardiola left Barça humbled and not a little bit sad, but also like he had been shot out of a cannon. He was tired, it's true, but he was also concerned with where the club was headed, and if Barcelona's scandal-fraught past couple of years are any indication, Pep was right to worry. As hindsight sharpens our understanding of past events, it becomes increasingly apparent that a sacred trust was broken, spoiling the relationship between Pep and the club's leadership, or even worse, Guardiola's idea of what the club is. The wound is still raw.

Both hopeful return narratives and stories about Guardiola moving on to a new challenge pop up constantly because he doesn't seem happy anymore. (For that matter, even when he projected and cultivated joy at Barcelona, he was apparently, beneath the surface, grinding himself down into handsome dust.) Managers are generally not gleeful figures, but Pep's brand of disatisfaction is strange. Dude positively radiates forlornness at times, Drake-ishly slogging from triumph to triumph, gulping champagne from a chalice and tasting nothing but regret. As with Drake, this makes him eminently mockable and the subject of much eye-rolling, but also magnetic. What does he want? Those who think he's a genius lean in close, curious to know.

Pep might emote more than his peers, but he's no bleeding heart. We will probably never find out what he's searching for, but from what we can discern from outside his confidence, it looks like he's not sure either. He talked openly in his first season with Bayern Munich about skipping town early: "I am here to help the club, and if the club do not want me, a handshake and no problem for me."

That sentiment has fallen away as he has become more settled in Bavaria, but it's hard to see him sticking around for a long time, in part due to the particularities of Bayern, but also because he's a figure who makes sense most when he is moving on—when he is sitting in a press conference lamenting what he could have done better and reflecting upon what he has accomplished, speaking as convincingly as he ever does about how he needs to do something different.

An entrenched and content Pep Guardiola would be difficult to reconcile with the one who appears before us now, winning but also grimacing, chasing something not altogether clear, blaring operatic self-pity rap out the whip. You look at him and wonder how a man so accomplished, decked out in tastefully tailored suits and presiding over numerous 3-0 victories, could be spiritually nomadic. Then you look a bit closer, glimpse the blood around the rims of his eyes and hear the wearied way he speaks in public, and there's your explanation.