Pep Guardiola believes he has already completed the main challenge of his tenure at Manchester City. Guardiola is in his fourth season at the Etihad Stadium, meaning he is set to equal his joint-longest tenure at a club, having led Barcelona from 2008-09 until the end of 2011-12.
Nevertheless, he does not think trying to re-establish dominance in England, where City have won five of the past six major trophies and back-to-back Community Shields, would be as big a challenge as implementing his famed style of quick-passing positional play successfully at the Etihad Stadium.
Pep Guardiola said “The challenge is done for me – to come here and try to play like we did in Barcelona and Bayern Munich. That was the big challenge and, in the end, in England we were able to play the way that we wanted to play and we won enough titles. Considering the difficulty of this league, seven titles in three seasons is not bad. Now the challenge is to maintain what we did in the beginning and we have struggled a little bit, especially because we have an opponent who has not dropped points. If they had dropped points we would be closer but we are incredibly far away. Now the target is to win the next games – focus in the cups and try to win games in the Premier League.”