Pep Guardiola hopes that Manchester City’s precarious Champions League position could force the whole club to take the competition more seriously.
Ever since Guardiola arrived at City in 2016 he has been encouraging the club’s fans to value the competition, and to respect the quality of the sides that City face. In his first year City were knocked out by Monaco in the last-16, while last season City strolled through the group stage before being eliminated by Liverpool in the quarter-finals.
This year, City began in the worst possible way, losing their first group game at home to Lyon last month, adding extra pressure to Tuesday night’s game at Hoffenheim – the first of their “five finals”. But Guardiola, who won the competition in 2009 and 2011 as Barcelona coach, sees the positive side in City’s predicament.
Speaking at his press conference outside Heidelberg on Monday evening, Guardiola said that he thought it might do Manchester City some good to “realise how complicated” the Champions League is, to respect the competition more and maybe to improve their performances in the knock-out rounds. If everyone took the Champions League as seriously as Guardiola does, then City might perform better in it.
“It’s a top-level quality competition,” Guardiola said. “Every team is so good. That’s why it is so complicated. Except Real Madrid, in the last few years nobody can win the Champions League. It’s a tough competition for all of us. We try to be stable in that competition, and in the last five or six years we were always there, I think we made a step forwards.”
But this year’s early slip could even help City. “Maybe we need, as a team, as a club, to live this moment in that competition. The last two seasons when I am here, we qualified quite comfortably. Maybe we have to realise how complicated that competition is, to suffer in the group stage. To realise that to make a step forward in the knock-out games. And if we are not able to do that, we are not good enough, and we prepare much better for next season. It’s simple like that.”
This means that City’s five remaining group games, starting in Hoffenheim on Tuesday night, are “five finals” before the knock-out stage. “We have five finals to qualify for the Champions League,” Guardiola said. “We don’t have the time to lose a lot of games, and we lost the first one. So we have five finals, and tomorrow is the first one.”
While many people are focusing on City’s trip to Anfield on Sunday as City’s next big game, Guardiola does not want his players to think that way. He wants them to be fully focused on Hoffenheim first, before they start to think about Liverpool.
So when Guardiola was asked whether he might risk Sergio Aguero, or save him for “such a big game” at Anfield, he made his point very clear. “Such a big game is tomorrow,” Guardiola said. “Such a big game is tomorrow. He is here because the doctors and physios say he is able, much, much better. Still he has pain, tomorrow going to decide if he plays or Gabriel. Everyone is here because he is able to play.”
