The age of Guardiola is waning and the game’s guru is baffled by what comes next | Pep Guardiola

The world is blasted, unfamiliar. Smoke swirls amid the gloom. Foul odours belch from the sulphurous earth. The landscape echoes to howls and grunts and screams. A great light has gone out and all that remains is confusion and fear. Everywhere coaches and managers, hunched under their doubts, scuttle hither and thither, desperately seeking a path through the wilderness.

From his very first season at Barcelona, Pep Guardiola’s way of playing football has been dominant. The effectiveness of his philosophy was so obvious and so pervasive that there is not an elite manager now who has not in some way been influenced by his philosophy, even if they are not, as many are, overt disciples.

But as the near-universal acceptance of his methods fractures, as other Premier League sides turn away from or adapt Pepism towards approaches based on counterattacking, set plays, players who run with the ball or a more direct style, the result is a profound uncertainty. Belief recedes to leave a wasteland of possibility.

The environment is akin to England after the reliance on W-M and the winger was shattered by Hungary in 1953, or 19th-century Europe after scientific discoveries had provoked the crisis of faith. If none of the previous assumptions are true, if we cannot trust the old doctrine, how do we know what is right?

This is the world that produced Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche and had Arthur Conan Doyle attending seances and believing in fairies, just as managers in the 50s started trialling strike pairings and back fours and had the Doncaster manager Peter Doherty assigning players with random numbers to spread confusion. Nobody knows what is true any more, and the consequence is a chaotic world of experimentation.

That sense of uncertainty may help explain why this was a summer dominated by the striker carousel, as large numbers of clubs sought a classic No 9, or at least the modern interpretation of that: a big player with pace, technically accomplished and capable of running the channels, a complete centre-forward in the mould of Didier Drogba or Hernán Crespo. As faith goes, what could be more comforting than reducing football to its most fundamental act, scoring goals? Never mind the process: a striker who can guarantee 20 goals a season assures a side of at least some measure of achievement.

Football has never known a moment quite like this before. Pepism is probably the most hegemonic style the world has known. It helped that he arrived just as background conditions were perfect for his style, as pitch technology improved to the point that first touches could be taken almost for granted, the liberalisation of the offside law increased the effective playing area and a crackdown on intimidatory tackling allowed technically gifted but diminutive midfielders to flourish.

The game was ripe for Guardiola-style innovation, but his ideas spread as they did because football has never been as globalised, never been as scrutinised. There has never been such an agglomeration of the world’s best players at such a small array of clubs, nor such focus on them.

Complete centre-forwards like Didier Drogba are back in vogue. Photograph: Scott Heavey/Action Images/Reuters

For 15 years or so, the world has accepted this is the most effective way to play. Even the hard-pressing of the German school and the Guardiola style, which could at one point reasonably be pitched as a way of playing based on regaining possession against a style that prioritised its retention, came in the end to an accommodation.

Which raises one of the paradoxes of Pepism, which is that it is so diverse as to be almost indefinable. Certain fundamentals can be identified: pressing, a high line, the use of possession for control, a suspicion of dribbling and long-range shots, a preference for the low cut-back over the booming cross from deep, and a paranoia related to the height of the line about the danger of being countered against.

But Guardiola is not a dogmatist in the way many of his followers are: he is flexible, forever innovating and tinkering. He likes a 3-2-5 defensive structure out of possession, but has achieved that in various ways over his career: one full-back overlaps, the other covers across; both full-backs push up, a central midfielder drops between the central defenders; a full-back inverts and tucks into midfield as the other covers across; the back four comprises central defenders but John Stones steps into midfield to create the second holder.

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Two current Premier League managers worked as Guardiola’s assistants, Enzo Maresca and Mikel Arteta. Although both have developed along their own paths, they offer a snapshot of where Pepism was at the moment they set out alone: Maresca comes from the days of control through possession; Arteta from the era of four central defenders across the back. A tactical assessment of the elite is like a vertical tasting of Pepism.

Mikel Arteta’s use of four central defenders was picked up from Pep Guardiola. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters

Although Guardiola had previously worked with Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Robert Lewandowski, the signing of Erling Haaland, a pure striker who shows little interest in or capacity for engaging with the midfield, represents the greatest rupture. The creative tension between his demand for directness and Guardiola’s cautious instincts brought the treble but may underlie the present problems.

The ostracism of Ederson and signings of James Trafford and Gianluigi Donnarumma, neither of whom has the sweeping capabilities Guardiola has demanded of his goalkeepers, feel like another step towards orthodoxy (or, depending who actually authorised the signings, perhaps towards City’s post-Guardiola future). Just as politics undergraduates have become used to answering the question: “Was Karl Marx a Marxist?” it may soon seem reasonable to ask whether Guardiola is any longer a Pepist.

But then Guardiola – paradoxically and in obvious contrast to his opposing manager on Sunday, the Manchester United manager, Ruben Amorim – has always been a pragmatist. He has always been willing to tweak and adapt; evolution, arguably, is itself essential to Pepism, which is perhaps to conclude that Pepism is ultimately so mutable as to resemble Peronism, a vast array of competing ideas whose one defining principle is their origin in one man.

And for now, after City’s two defeats in their first three league games, that one man seems just as lost in the wilderness, just as baffled as to which path to take next, as everyone else.

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