Outbreaks of chaos expose fatal flaw that keeps denying Guardiola European glory

At what point does just one of those things become more than just one of those things? If Manchester City’s defeat to Real Madrid on Wednesday night were a one-off, it could be written off. What can you do about luck like that? If you have nine shots on target to the opposition’s none in the first 90 minutes and still lose 2-1 what, really, have you done wrong? Especially when you’ve dominated the first leg as City had done.

But this keeps happening. Season after season, Pep Guardiola finds his teams dominating Champions League ties and losing. Bad luck follows him: the Icelandic volcano that forced Barcelona to take the bus to Milan in 2010, Fernando Llorente’s handled goal in 2019, Raheem Sterling missing an open net from six yards in 2020 …

The pattern then becomes self-fulfilling: the more disappointment that accretes the greater the temptation for Guardiola to second-guess himself, and the more he must feel time’s breath upon his neck. Already 11 years have passed since his last Champions League title. That means even if he wins the competition next year, he will have recorded the third-longest gap between European Cup/Champions League titles by a manager (after Jupp Heynckes’s 15 years and Ernst Happel’s 13 – and neither of them spent such long periods in charge of clubs of such status). Few managers endure much more than a decade at the highest level.

What to do then? Is this simply a case of the gods of football tormenting Guardiola? Or is there something deeper that links the near misses? The defeat he referred to after Wednesday’s exit was Barcelona’s against Chelsea in the 2012 semi-final. But that was especially freakish and stands alongside Bayern Munich’s away-goals exit to Atlético Madrid in not quite