Guardiola the GOAT? Beyond the billions he has changed world football

Istanbul Is The New Cool. Or at least it is according to the city’s latest tourism advert, a collage of chic, blase young people parkouring down Byzantine streets, goofing about next to Ottoman palaces and generally having a hyper-chilled time. Hmmm. Istanbul: meet Pep.

Famously Manchester City’s manager is too stressed, too wired, too unshakeably uncool to eat before kick-off on match days, restricting himself to a few grudging cubes of cheese late into the night. That man in the skinny black jeans with the maniacally whirling arms, out there on his touchline looking like the outlaw general of a mercenary private army signalling attack formations to his personal helicopter gunship? He’s not actually feeling that cool.

Indeed, given the 10pm local time kick-off for Saturday’s Champions League final, followed by the endless round of ritual post-match duties, all drenched in a brain-mangling sense of personal destiny, Pep in Istanbul already looks like one of the more exhausting feats of managerial endurance. Frankly, we’re going to need more cheese cubes.

That pressure comes in many different ways. Manchester City will walk out at the Atatürk OlympicStadium as overwhelming favourites to beat Internazionale and become champions of Europe for the first time. City are quite clearly the best football team on the planet right now; not to mention the richest, most tactically coherent and most supremely well run, the final expression of a brilliantly realised 15-year project.

So much so that for the neutral much of the drama may well end up focusing on Guardiola and the issue of ultimacy: the strangely divisive question – filtered via opposing armies of Pep Stans and bald fraud truthers – of his status among the greats of the