For nine years Pep Guardiola has not won the Champions League or even reached the finals • Although he has won titles in Germany and England, with the European title on the agenda, the Spanish coach is over-planning, cunning and failing time and time again • And is the blame for 2012's Chelsea?

• pp. Insisted on turning the knockout session into a doctorate

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It is impossible to take Pep Guardiola's achievements as a coach, let alone the quality of football. Still, this is one that has led three teams from three different leagues to eight championships. With all of them he also won such and other local trophies, and when he coached Barcelona he won the Champions League twice. 

Just to put things in proportion: Carlo Ancelotti, Zinedine Zidane and Bob Paisley are the only ones to have won the prestigious European title three times. Great coaches like Alex Ferguson, Jose Mourinho, Ottmar Hitzfeld, Arigo Saki and Joop Hinks have also won twice, while Jürgen Klopp, Luis van Gaal, Rafa Benitez and Johan Cruyff have won it only once. In this respect Guardiola's situation is quite reasonable, but the last few years reinforce the feeling that the two wins in question are too little for a coach who could have achieved more. 

The 3-1 loss to Lyon on Saturday closed nine years since the last time Guardiola lifted the trophy with big ears. So, in 2011, it happened with the great Barcelona of Messi, Xavi, Iniesta, Danny Alves and others, and it was definitely impressive .

The fact that he completed two wins in three years (along with 2009) positioned Pep as the one who holds the ultimate recipe for great European success. His Barcelona played a different style, Tiki Taka which was innovative and revolutionary in those days, and Pep seemed to have the ability to make a copy-paste on any team that would give him the resources. 

pp. Drew the joy of life from his players against Lyon // Photo: EP

Bayern Munich was the first to bet on the Spanish magician, Manchester City II, and seven years later the magic has not yet happened. Although Guardiola has won championships in Germany and England, in the Champions League - the enterprise for which he came - he was not successful.

With Bayern he was stopped three times in the semi-finals by Spanish teams, while with City did not pass the quarter-finals and was eliminated by Monaco, Liverpool, Tottenham and Lyon. Instead of bringing in the Champions League, Pep just distanced himself from the trophy.

"City's game plan was bad"

It’s hard to put a finger on when the business got out of hand, but apparently the loss to Gray Chelsea in the 2012 semi-final contributed to that. That evening when his oiled Barcelona finished its way to a factory at the Camp Nou, Pep the Champions League face is a different story. The brain wheels started working and have not stopped since for one second. The urge to succeed again in the most important enterprise of all did not give Guardiola rest, and the unnecessary thinking was in his back every time. 

When he coached Bayern he tried to stop Barcelona on personal guard and failed; Against Real Madrid he tried to play open and snatched; And as City coach bet on a tight link against Liverpool, he played too defensively in the first encounter against Tottenham and on Tuesday against Lyon drew all the joy of life from his team with a defensive and uninspired squad. 

On paper he always had the resources and tools to do more, but Pep really insisted on turning those knockout sessions into a doctorate in training. "True, Sterling recorded a huge miss," Chris Woodell wrote on the BBC, "but City lost mostly because their game plan was bad."

Sterling in terrible miss. If only it had come in ... // Photo: AFP

This sequence of failures does a bad service to Pep's status. Although there are still those who consider him one of the great coaches of our generation, quite a few think he is overrated. Winning championships with Barcelona, ​​Bayern and City is not great wisdom they argue, the real test is the Champions League, where Pepe has repeatedly failed in a way that is not committed to reality. 

"Maybe one day we will be able to break the quarter-final barrier," Guardiola summed up City's third straight loss at this stage, adding: "I have not been able to do that with this talented bunch yet, but we will keep trying in the future." Pep, as mentioned, is not going to give up on the possibility of winning the trophy for the first time since 2011, but maybe he should stop thinking about it so much.