Guardiola squares the circle

Pep Guardiola scratched the back of his neck in a nervous gesture while thinking of an answer, when he was asked this Friday what his next challenge was after having won the fourth Premier since 2017. "We want to take our game to the next level," he said, mimicking with the fingers of the right hand, as if turning the wheel of an imaginary thermostat.

"We raised the bar!"

Just when his project was beginning to show signs of exhaustion, with many players struggling to find a way out —Sterling, Zinchenko, Gabriel Jesús, Aké or Bernardo Silva— the Manchester City manager has decided to act against the reaction that in similar situations usually pushes his colleagues toward conservatism.

Faced with danger, Guardiola has decided to take a leap into the void.

He wants to elevate his elaborate gaming model to the highest expression of sophistication known.

Never since he left Barça in 2012 had he had the necessary pieces in his squad to take his team to the ultimate limit, the most perfect border between frustration and the sublime.

After a decade of searching, Guardiola has found two attackers capable of crowning the idea.

Seemingly so different from each other,

Erling Haaland and Julián Álvarez share a quality that has motivated their signings.

They are two gifted with unchecking in depth.

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Guardiola's "momentum"

"There are 200 professional attackers in Europe with the same conditions as Julián Álvarez in terms of speed, passing, dribbling or decision-making ability outside the box," says a coach who has attended City training this summer.

“Álvarez only stands out in two things: a devastating first control and an uncheck so surreal that he is as if he acted with information that nobody has.

He looks like he moves after seeing the play on TV.”

It is not easy to find this kind of talent.

Nor is it easy for clubs to invest in their hiring with knowledge of the cause.

Guardiola knew this when as soon as he arrived in Munich, in 2013, he found himself misunderstood by the board in the face of Mario Mandzukic's trial.

Neither Uli Hoeness, nor Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, nor Franz Beckenbauer, understood the Spanish coach when he explained to them that the striker of the team that had just won the treble —Bundesliga, Cup and Champions— was not fit to play the football he wanted.

Guardiola warned them that after directing Ibrahimovic, Eto'o, Villa and Messi, he had understood that the most unstoppable teams were built with

highly mobile like the last three.

Not even Ibrahimovic, the most agile of the traditional spikers, had adapted to the model.

They say in Bayern that Guardiola stimulated a deep debate in a club historically accustomed to culminating its lineups with

tanks, or assimilated, such as Jancker, Makaay, Élber, Luca Toni or Mario Gómez.

Come Christmas of his first season, however, the coach found himself with a fait accompli.

Unbeknownst to him, Bayern had signed Robert Lewandowski, who was free.

Guardiola's horror was so great that, according to what they say in Munich, that same winter he made the decision not to renew his three-year contract.

He ignored the offer that doubled his salary, up to 20 million euros net, so demoralized that he was faced with the prospect of building attacks that ended up in the center of the pot to be finished off by another

, more acrobatic than Mandzukic, but pigeon maker

.

Guardiola reacted responsibly.

He organized Bayern to produce scrap metal in industrial quantities in the area, and thus Lewandowski's opportunism would shine.

But in tight games, like that 2015 Champions League semifinal that he lost against Atlético after creating 50 chances, the system showed his shortcomings.

Time, they say in Munich, proved the coach right in the face of leaders who lived in contradiction, as Martí Perarnau's interview with Rummenigge in the book Herr Pep reflected.

"If Pep had won the Champions League, he would have shown that with his philosophy you can win everything," said the Bayern president in May 2014. "The problem I see in German football is that he doesn't take care of the tactic.

The vision of the game is very physical, direct and fast, and that is enough.

Soccer is much more.

If you measure him exclusively by the titles won, you're wrong... [But] if someone like Lewandowski is released on the market, it would be crazy not to try to hire him.

walls and left

Ever since Guardiola signed for City six years ago, he has striven to give the game the flexibility and surgical precision that he was unable to achieve in Munich.

First, he reached a compromise to take advantage of the popular Agüero as nine, even though he didn't like him;

and later he traced sequences to reach the goal with attacking midfielders instead of center forwards, through a fundamental route: the walls and quick drops in the interior corridors.

With Álvarez and Haaland, access to the goal reveals its most unstoppable dimension in maneuvers without the ball.

If his heavyweight body is fit, no footballer in the world possesses Haaland's cognitive ability to draw career paths when low-block player traffic turns areas into jungles.

"I don't care how many goals he scores as long as he keeps playing the way he feels about football," Guardiola says.

“There is no doubt that he will score goals because we will make chances and he is a finisher.

He will have to adapt to the way we play, and we will have to adapt what we do in the last third of the pitch to his game.”

Witnesses from City training speak of fabulous duels in the attacking simulations in confined spaces.

Stung by the short Álvarez, the gigantic Haaland multiplies his battery of unchecks every day in an unknown scenario in City practices.

Until this summer, the interiors had to devise millimetric passes and strenuous movements to find the tips.

With Álvarez and Haaland the task is simplified thanks to the unusual intuition they show to generate passing lines in the eye of a needle.

City has spent just 80 million euros on its two new attackers.

Guardiola encourages them to make filigree.

If the team does not accompany them, demoralization could precipitate an end to the cycle.

If they connect, it will be

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