The Key to Manchester City’s Dominance

Since Pep Guardiola stepped in to become Manchester City’s new manager in the summer of 2016 to succeed Manuel Pellegrini, even though with him Manchester City continued to impress with constant top 4 finishes for a good amount of time. Guardiola’s first year was rather quiet as he provided City fans with a strong 3rd place finish thus reserving a spot for Champions League football in the 2017- 2018 season.   

But before fully finding out about how and why Manchester City are such a force to be reckoned with this year in World and European football, we first have to find out about the man who is in this club’s driving seat, Pep Guardiola.  

Before Guardiola started training to eventually become a manager, he was a talented, playmaking midfielder for Johan Cruyff’s FC Barcelona back in the 90’s. Guardiola was a gifted player and won 4 La Liga titles with the Barcelona “Dream Team” from 1991 to 1994. Cruyff’s success as a manager came from a very renowned system of play that he invented called, “Tiki-Taka”, which is an intricate system of ground passing to break down a defense with short passes in the midfield which led to successful runs from the final third of the pitch to allow the attacking team to score an abundance of goals. Cruyff also played an aggressive high press style of football which went well with Tiki- Taka. During Guardiola’s long time at Barcelona he was a key part of Cruyff’s system as well as Louis van Gaal’s Tiki-Taka system. After his prolonged time at Barcelona, he kept on moving from club to club around the world until he retired in 2006. Clubs that he went to after Barcelona were, Brescia, Roma, Al-Ahli, and Dorados de Sinaloa.   

When Guardiola became manager of Barcelona B, he adopted Cruyff’s Tiki-Taka system which led to Barcelona B, FC Barcelona’s reserve team which currently plays in La Liga 123 dominating the league. His performance led to him becoming manager of FC Barcelona and delivering them 14 Spanish and European titles in 4 years. This display of excellence at Barcelona gave him a job at Bayern Munich in the German Bundesliga where he delivered by winning giving them 7 German and European titles until he left to Manchester City in 2016.  

Now, at Manchester City he has signed quite a lot of youngsters like Bernardo Silva from AS Monaco and stealing Leroy Sané from FC Schalke 04. Guardiola was able to grow these already developed young stars into world class players along with developing experienced players in the club like David Silva, Kevin De Bruyne, and Kyle Walker even more. He was able to bring the Tiki-Taka system into Manchester City which ended up making the team very dominant in all competitions.  

This is why I believe that Manchester City are as dominant as they are right now in World Football.