Twenty major trophies. Six Premier League titles. A century of points. A Treble. And now, a stand bearing his name.

Pep Guardiola will leave Manchester City after Sunday’s season finale against Aston Villa, bringing an end to a decade that didn’t just win things — it changed how the game is played. He departs having guided City to both the FA Cup and League Cup in his final season, though the Premier League title slipped away to Arsenal this month.

City confirmed the departure on Friday. Guardiola, 55, signed a contract extension in November 2024 that ran through 2027, but told his players this week that deep inside, he knew it was time. “Nothing is eternal,” he said in a farewell message. “If it was, I would be here.”

A tactical revolution in plain sight

The numbers are staggering — the 100-point season in 2017-18, the 106 goals scored, four consecutive league titles from 2021 to 2024, the 2023 Treble that only Manchester United had previously achieved in English football. But the true measure of Guardiola’s decade isn’t in the silverware. It’s in what you see at any ground, on any Saturday, at any level.

Semi-professional teams playing out from the back. Junior coaches drilling inverted full-backs. Goalkeepers judged on their feet as much as their hands. The “six-second rule” to win the ball back. These ideas weren’t invented in Manchester — Guardiola carried them from Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona through Bayern Munich — but they were weaponised and popularised on English soil.

“Pep’s legacy is far greater than Manchester City,” former City defender Joleon Lescott told BBC Sport. “His legacy and the importance he has had is huge throughout the football pyramid.”

His coaching tree now spans the elite game. Mikel Arteta, who delivered Arsenal’s first Premier League title in 22 years this season, was his assistant at City. Enzo Maresca, the frontrunner to replace him at the Etihad, was another. Luis Enrique won the Champions League with Paris St-Germain after working under Guardiola at Barcelona. Vincent Kompany manages Bayern Munich. Xabi Alonso is the new Chelsea manager. All of them carry traces of the same philosophy.

The genius question

The asterisk has always followed Guardiola, and he knows it. Lionel Messi at Barcelona. A Treble-winning squad at Bayern. The deepest pockets in English football at City. As The Independent’s Miguel Delaney noted, the “one purely football caveat” in Guardiola’s record is that he has never had to work somewhere that required compromise.

Then there are the 115 charges of financial irregularity still pending against City — a Premier League investigation that has shadowed his tenure and fuelled the argument that the achievements come with fine print.

The counter-argument is simpler: lots of clubs have money. Only one manager produced this.

The impossible replacement

City have reportedly agreed a deal in principle with Maresca, according to The Guardian, though Chelsea are entitled to sizeable compensation after the Italian’s acrimonious departure from Stamford Bridge on New Year’s Day. But whoever takes the job faces an impossible brief — not to win, but to win beautifully, to sustain a standard that made anything short of brilliance feel like failure.

City owner Sheikh Mansour perhaps captured it best, saying the imprint Guardiola leaves is “borne more from how he won than from the many trophies he lifted.”

The newly developed north stand at the Etihad will bear Guardiola’s name. A statue will stand outside it. On Sunday, he walks down the tunnel for the last time. Football’s defining tactical mind, off to wherever geniuses go when they decide the eternal has to end.

Sources