Manchester City’s post-Pep planning must avoid United’s failures

Many years afterwards, Pep Guardiola would joke that the reason he never took over at Manchester United was because he couldn’t understand Alex Ferguson’s accent. The pair went for dinner in New York in September 2012, when Guardiola was on sabbatical and pondering his next move. Over a luxurious meal and fine wine – all paid for by Ferguson – they talked falteringly about football and life and the future.

“My English is not so good,” Guardiola later said, “and when Sir Alex spoke quickly I sometimes had a problem to understand him. That’s why maybe I didn’t understand if I received an offer or not.”

It got a good laugh in the room at the time, but the truth was a little simpler and a little more complex. Ferguson had indeed identified Guardiola – whose Barcelona had demolished United in two of the previous four Champions League finals – as the leading candidate to succeed him after his retirement and was keen to gauge his interest.

But the plain reason no offer was made was because there was still no job to offer. Ferguson was yet to come to a decision or firm timescale on his own future. “I asked Pep to phone me before he accepted an offer from another club,” Ferguson wrote in his autobiography. “But he didn’t.”

As the months ticked by, United remained confident of securing Guardiola, but without much idea of how they were going to do it. The club’s chief executive at the time, David Gill – who was planning his own exit – and the owning Glazer family had essentially delegated responsibility for Ferguson’s replacement to Ferguson and were loth to force the issue. They did not know if Ferguson was going to quit, when he was going to quit, who his successor might be or how close they were to getting him. It feels almost