Guardiola’s First Season: Success or Failure?
W
hen it was announced in
February 2016 that Pep
Guardiola would take
charge of Manchester City in the
2016/17 season it was set to mark the
entering of a new era for the club. He
was heralded as the football genius
who would bring a new philosophy
that would crack Manchester City’s
Champion’s League conundrum, but
just how successful has Pep been so
far?
Pep and his newly acquired Manches-
ter City side started the season in
quite literally record breaking fashion,
becoming only the second team to
win their first ten competitive games
(including a win against Jose Mour-
inho’s Manchester United at Old Traf-
ford) since the double winning Totten-
ham side of the 1960s. No team, in-
cluding the dominant 70/80s Liverpool
and 90/00s Manchester United teams,
had managed to achieve this feat and
many City fans had begun to believe
that the league was already won. Un-
fortunately for them, that proved not
to be the case.
October would see City go without a
win for the entire month; defensively,
they had collapsed. Newly signed
goalkeeper Claudio Bravo struggled
to transition to the Premier League
and went unaided by City’s poor back
line. Three aging fullbacks in Gael Cli-
chy, Bacary Sagna and Pablo Zabale-
ta and the inexperience of centre
backs John Stones and Nicolas
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