Pep Guardiola’s list of symptoms is long and disturbing. He has trouble sleeping. He should only eat light meals in the evening. Some days he doesn’t eat at all. He finds it difficult to read because his mind keeps wandering. He sometimes feels intensely lonely. Things can get so bad that they start to take a physical form: bouts of back pain, pimples on his skin.
They are not unrelated to moments like those when the Manchester City manager is trapped, when his team is in a downward spiral and he has spent the better part of two months trying and failing to stop. In his own words, he is always like that. Guardiola cannot sleep, eat or relax, even when everything is going well at work.
Manel Estiarte, perhaps Guardiola’s most trusted confidant, used to call it the “Law of 32 Minutes”. Estiarte had spent enough time with Guardiola to calculate exactly how long his friend could last on another subject – literally any other subject – before his thoughts drifted back to football.
That image has long been included in Guardiola’s mythology. He is the obsessive genius, his brain constantly buzzing and buzzing, a synapse permanently on fire. His teams at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and then City represent his ideas turned reality, in perfect form. His genius is limited only by the limits of his imagination.
However, the costs of that commitment have been laid bare in recent months. As City’s form has slumped, Guardiola has given at least two unusually downbeat interviews: first to Spanish chef Dani Garciaand then to his former teammate and long-time friend, Luca Toni on Prime Video Sport. He told the former about the ‘loneliness of the football manager’, and how he discovered that – in defeat – there is ‘no consolation’ once ‘you close that bedroom door and turn off the light’.
In the meantime, he told Toni about the impact on his health: the skin problem that he has been dealing with for “two (or) three years”, the problems with sleeping and eating. “I’m not digesting food properly now,” he said, as if the metabolic shift is permanent. Sometimes, he said, he “loses his mind.”
Guardiola during Manchester City’s 2-2 draw against Crystal Palace this month (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
That he was so matter-of-fact about it—that he was able to insist a few days later that he was doing “fine”—may well have to do with the fact that none of it is new, not really. He struggled to sleep in his last year at Barcelona. When City beat Liverpool to win the Premier League title in 2019, he had long since stopped eating on match days. He said this in 2018 during a speech at the University of Liverpool that he couldn’t read books to relax, because “I start reading and before I know it I’m reading about Jurgen Klopp”.
However, it could also be because it has become the standard reality of those in his profession. Management has always been stressful. Many of Guardiola’s most famous antecedents – Bill Shankly and Arrigo Sacchi – resigned or retired due to the pressures the job put on them. The man he identified as the greatest opponent he had ever faced, Klopp, left Liverpool for similar reasons.
It has also always been a calling largely reserved for the determined, pathological and fanatical. And yet even those who choose to do it would acknowledge time and time again that it seems to be extremely bad for you.
Richie Wellens, the Leyton Orient manager, told The Athletics this year that he can no longer grow a beard due to the stress of his job; Nathan Jones, once of Stoke City and Southampton, bit his nails so feverishly that he bled. As early as 2002, (vaguely unscientific) experiments demonstrated this some managers were under such stress during matches that they suffered from irregular heartbeats.
“I definitely didn’t feel healthy at the end of my time at Chelsea,” Emma Hayes, now in charge of the United States women’s team, said last month. “I don’t want to say it’s busy. I think it’s just the stress, the toll it took on me.”
It is tempting to say that this is inevitable, given the size of the football industry, the money at stake and the unwavering control of the media. And yet, in some ways, management should now be less, not more, stressful.
Hayes walks out after altercation with then Arsenal Women manager Jonas Eidevall in March (Marc Atkins/Getty Images)
Most clubs have removed the burden of the post: technical or sporting directors take care of recruitment; CEOs handle contract negotiations; Entire departments exist to analyze matches and coordinate scouting. Shankly could not call on a psychologist, a specialist coach or a nutritionist.
Yet it seems to have had little effect; management has not become more manageable. Ange Postecoglou, the Tottenham Hotspur manager, may have been exaggerating a bit when he suggested it was the “hardest job by any means”, but it was not difficult to follow his reasoning.
“You can say politics, but this is harder,” he said. “The tenure and longevity of this role means that you go into it now and very few people will come out without scars.” Asked to compare it to the premiership of an existing country, he said: “How often does he have elections? I have one every weekend, buddy. There are elections and we are either voted in or out.’
In part this can be attributed to the fact that while football has delegated responsibility behind the scenes, it has not been done in front of the cameras. More often than not, especially in England, the manager remains the only public face of the club.
“They have to comment on everything,” says Michael Caulfield, a sports psychologist who works with Brentford, among others. BBC Radio 5 Live last week. “From Covid to Brexit and everything else you want to mention: potholes, traffic, the price of burgers. Football is not good at distributing that workload. It’s too much for one person.”
Brighton head coach Fabian Hurzeler at his unveiling in July (Steven Paston/PA Images via Getty Images)
That anachronism has practical advantages – as one club director has privately noted, it makes life easier if certain questions are asked of a manager who can legitimately say he doesn’t know the answer – but it gives the impression that absolute responsibility the well-being of a club rests on the shoulders of one person.
But much more important is the fact that football essentially actively discourages managers from quitting. Guardiola can be seen as an exception, but he is also presented as a model; the obsessiveness at the heart of his legend over the past fifteen years has created a blueprint for what a manager should be.
It is telling, for example, that Fabian Hurzeler – the 31-year-old head coach at Brighton – does not watch television or films, but does read books about ‘mindset’.
“What is the mentality of high-performance people? People like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg. I would like to understand how they behave, how they become so successful,” he said this season. Fabian Hurzeler’s reading material is its own thing, but this doesn’t sound like a turn-off.
Most Premier League managers struggle to describe how they relax. Many, of course, practice – a significant percentage are fond of padel, with Hurzeler being one of many lobbying his club to build a court at their training facility – but real outside interest seems scarce.
Nuno Espirito Santo likes to “go to the window and look at the River Trent”. The night before he was summarily sacked by Wolves, Gary O’Neil had taken time to watch the film Wonka with his children. He knew it was “important to turn off the brain.” But he also knew exactly how long he had left. “I’ll try to knock out an hour and six minutes,” he said.
The River Trent flows through the Forest land. Their manager Nuno finds solace in looking at the river (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Caulfield described Thomas Frank, his head coach at Brentford, as exceptionally balanced for a manager: he plays padel (obviously), he skis, he spends time at his house in Spain, he has friends who have nothing to do with football. – but even he has admitted that his “brain is thinking about the next game during almost every waking moment of the season.”
He says that he sometimes watches interior design programs on television with his wife. But only because she ‘forces’ him to do so. Roberto Martinez, now manager of Portugal, told us The Telegraph in 2015, he said he designed his living room to accommodate one sofa and two televisions: one for his wife to watch regular television, and the other for him to watch football matches.
None of this is healthy, of course. The League Managers Association, the umbrella body that lobbies on behalf of both current and former managers in England, has published a handbook to encourage its members to find some form of work-life balance; It takes effort to point out that they cannot function optimally when they are exhausted and tired.
“That’s the biggest problem,” Caulfield said. “Football is tiring. This culture of ‘being present seven days a week’ has to stop at some point. Managers need to manage their own energy as much as their players. We are not designed to work under that pressure and control seven days a week, 24 hours a day.”
Guardiola would be proof of that, it seems. The symptoms of what it is to be a manager are of course worse now. He always suffers more after defeats. But it’s not that different when things are good; he has been dealing with them for years. “I think quitting would do me some good,” he told Garcia, the chef, in one of those grim interviews.
He knows that, but he still won’t know. He, like so many of his colleagues, will keep coming back for more.
(Top Photos: Getty Images)