Pep Guardiola: Chasing Perfection is a documentary for the many people who believe the Spanish football manager has already achieved it. More casual viewers – and forgive me for being such a basic, hun-loving celebrity documentary fiend – will not find another Beckham-on-Netflix here. This is a relatively dry, straightforward account of Guardiola’s working life, from his early days as a Barcelona player under his great friend and mentor Johan Cruyff, through his managerial career and huge successes. This documentary cuts him off just as Manchester City bag the treble, lifting the Champion’s League trophy in 2023.
Its working thesis is that there was football before Guardiola, and there is football after him, but the modern game was forged in Guardiola’s image and through his cerebral approach. “He changed the game of football. That makes him special,” says celebrity City fan Noel Gallagher, who also casually drops in that he and Pep would chat on the phone about the club’s prospects and what they were going to win. With the exception of Gallagher and a handful of players – Phil Foden, Rodri and Kyle Walker offer their support to the boss – the best-value talking heads here are more behind the scenes than front-facing. It’s likely that their analysis is more insightful, and it is certainly more frank. There is a consensus among the contributors, who use the same kinds of words to describe him. He thinks, he uses his brain and his mind. He is a genius, or a crazy genius, or variants thereof. He is groundbreaking. He has cracked the code of football. He is the greatest football manager in the world.
There is much to convince viewers that this is true. We begin in 2007, with a fresh-faced Guardiola being appointed manager of the AC Barcelona B-team, before taking the top job from Frank Rijkaard in 2008. We flash back briefly to his years as a player – one former mentor describes him as “thin as spaghetti”, but says that his appetite for success, and his tactical creativity and curiosity, were clearly the driving factors in his own style. There is old footage of a young Guardiola at La Masia academy, and it establishes Cruyff as a father figure, and their relationship as “probably one of the most important in the history of the game”.
The narrative is convincing and gripping. It whizzes through his time as Barcelona manager, emphasising his ability to make big decisions, to change things up, while also highlighting the work in progress and mistakes made along the way. The Messi years are thrilling and the rivalry with José Mourinho is fun, and by the time he leaves the club, having “won a few cups” and wanting to try something new, this should draw in more than the Guardiola faithful. Next is Bayern Munich, where we get to see Pep in lederhosen at Oktoberfest, and hear of disgruntled players who complained of “headaches” after training because he asked them to remember so much.
It revs up again for his move to Manchester City in 2016. Hearing City fans dismiss him early on, in audio taken from radio phone-ins, is a treat. “He’s been found out completely,” says one; another criticises his arrogance; yet more say he has to go. A press conference, in which he famously says that no, he’s not going to change, because he’s won 21 titles in seven years, is fantastic. One former colleague says that people thought “Pep won’t win in England. Heh,” he chuckles. But the road to the treble, to what Guardiola appears to view as the ultimate proof of his powers, is still rocky. He leaves Rodri on the bench for the 2021 Champions League final, when Chelsea go on to beat them. “No, he doesn’t explain,” says Rodri here. The phone-ins keep coming. “He made this final all about him,” says another irate fan. As viewers, at least, we know that salvation is on its way.
This is a film that is all about Guardiola, yet there is no Guardiola himself, which is both understandable – he rarely consents to an interview outside of a press conference – and also a shame. His brief appearances, at press conferences and in older, archive interviews, are intriguing, and with all this talk about him (sanctioned, I am sure), it would have been nice if they could have sat down with the man himself. As a result, it’s entertaining but not massively probing. They touch on the failures and the friction, but these are passed over speedily. There is only a brief mention of City’s enormous spending power, towards the end of the film. Even so, it’s easy to get on board with Chasing Perfection’s insistence that Guardiola has found perfection, at last.
• Pep Guardiola: Chasing Perfection was on BBC One and is available iPlayer
