Time Has Come for Pep Guardiola to Show He Can Cut It in a Competitive League

There is no manager in modern football so constantly engaged in the game as Pep Guardiola. To watch him during a game is to see a brain constantly at work as he fizzes around his technical area, forever making changes, shouting instructions, looking for every possible advantage.

He probably covers more ground per game than Yaya Toure did in certain matches last season. He is intense and demanding, and—like new Manchester United boss Jose Mourinho—it may be that his intensity wears players down eventually, but his method is hugely successful. Or, at least, it has been up till now.

Manchester City is his biggest challenge yet and, while the difficulties he will face are many and various, it will be his ability to adapt his tactical thinking that will be key.

To start with, there is the workload. Bayern Munich last season played 53 games, while Manchester City played 59, but that only tells part of the story.

Trying to come up with a metric of the competitiveness of the league is all but impossible, but even the staunchest fan of the Bundesliga must acknowledge that City will face more challengers to win the Premier League this season than Bayern faced to win the Bundesliga in any of Guardiola’s three seasons there.

There will be no respite—and the additional games means there is less time to prepare for each individual match, something that is all the more pertinent given Guardiola’s preference for tailoring his approach to each opponent.

Then there is the style of football. English football is harder and more percussive than football in Spain or Germany. Statistics from WhoScored.com show that there are a little over seven percent more tackles attempted per game in the Premier League than in the Bundesliga. Physically, that takes a toll.

It may be that Guardiola needs to be slightly less demanding in his approach, that he cannot insist upon the ferocious pressing game that was his trademark at Barcelona.

To an extent, that process has already begun. At Bayern he was far more flexible tactically than he was at Barca. There were times against Borussia Dortmund, for instance, when he essentially played long-ball football to bypass the pressing game of his opponent.

His Bayern were not as relentless as his Barca. Perhaps that was simply because the circumstance was different: There …

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