Pep Guardiola says Manchester City were almost perfect in the Champions League last season and was stung by them being branded a failure.
Pep Guardiola said: “In the quarter-finals, if we go to the next round, it will be in a month and I don’t know what will happen. We almost made a perfect Champions League last season. We played 13 or 14 games, we won 11, and drew one – when we were already qualified against Porto. We lost the final and it was like ‘What a f****** failure this team is’ – and it was not true. We made a perfect Champions League but in the final we didn’t perform as we normally do. That’s why, against a top side, a world champion – I congratulate them publicly for the first time to be Club World Cup champions – and the margin of the Champions League is in this detail. I am not going to hide behind the 0-5. We made in general very good things but we didn’t read the spaces to attack them in the way they move. The space was there and it didn’t really work.”
