Are Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City The Greatest Of All Time?
Manchester City are three games from greatness and securing the Treble under Pep Guardiola will see many rushes to anoint them as the best club team of all time – if they aren’t already.
Victory over Chelsea on Sunday would secure a third league title in a row, with an FA Cup final against Manchester United to come before the Champions League final against Inter Milan.
Who is the best team they have ever seen? Our football writers have their say below, and you can vote for your winner, too.
I never thought I would say there is a greater club side than Guardiola’s Barcelona which won the Champions League Final in 2010-11. But if his Manchester City of 2022-23 land the Treble, then they will surpass them.
That Barcelona team also won the Treble of the League, cup, and Champions League and, inspired by Lionel Messi, were utterly dominant. But there is just something in the way that City blows away the opposition that makes them so peerless.
There was a brutal beauty to it as they swept aside the European champions Real Madrid, just as they did Bayern Munich, just as they did their closest Premier League rivals, Arsenal. It is the kind of dominance that is almost scary for the opposition but is achieved by some of the most aesthetically pleasing football imaginable. Unlike Barcelona a decade ago they do not, as City have been accused in the past, over-play but a wonderfully-balanced team full of imagination, flair, and a phenomenal work rate and will to win.
Who or what was Mediolanum? Why did Franco Baresi appear to be in his late 40s? Where could you buy one of those red and black shirts in London in the Eighties? Could they be beaten? The great AC Milan team of 1989 had a mythical status if you were growing up in that decade. English clubs were banned from Europe until 1990. Italian football was on Channel 4. Even Marco van Basten’s name felt like it should be the Dutch phrase for the ball hitting the back of the net.
AC Milan were the ultimate club side. They beat the second great Eighties Steaua Bucharest side 4-0 in the 1989 European Cup final, having defeated Real Madrid 5-0 in the second leg of the semi-final at San Siro. Five years later they would win the final by the same margin against a Barcelona side that included Pep Guardiola.
They were one of the most stylish football teams ever to play, with that Dutch troika bringing the flair to a group of wonderfully composed and cynical Italian legends with immaculate Eighties hair. Against Steaua they were four goals up with a minute of the second half played. They had four within the hour in the 1994 final. Sir Alex Ferguson once mused how it must have felt for Fabio Capello in 1994, able to stand on the touchline for half an hour enjoying the game with the European Cup in the bag. A pleasure always denied to the Scot himself.
That earlier Milan team was Italy’s ‘Invincible’ – a 58-game streak between 1991 and 1993. But memory can also play tricks too. Looking back they were banned by Uefa for the 1991-1992 European Cup when they were at the peak of their powers, and would surely have been favorites to win it again. They even finished third in Serie A in 1988-89. That must have been some league.
Barcelona 2008–2011
Still, for me, the greatest club side of all time. Guardiola’s side hoovered up all six trophies available to them in their first year together and were the perfect construct.
It was like Guardiola had knitted together all the most fetching elements of the great footballing philosophies, ideas and beliefs of the past 50 years and reimagined them in his own startling vision.
There have been great European sides to savour over the decades: the AC Milan of Arrigo Sacchi, Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten and Frank Rijkaard and Ferguson’s Manchester United treble winners and cavaliers among them, and Guardiola’s current Manchester City may get as close to challenging Barcelona’s supremacy as anyone.
But none of them had the purest footballer of the lot, Lionel Messi, as visually arresting as anything that has graced a football pitch, and the joy of that Barcelona was their ability to marry endless flair and artistry, and intuition within the context of Guardiola’s carefully honed system. It was systematic perfection without ever feeling systematic.
The 2011 Champions League final victory over United at Wembley remains arguably the high bar for footballing performance on the biggest stage, and I can still remember a shell-shocked Ferguson admitting afterward that he had never been given a “hiding” like it.
Manchester United 1998/99
From goalkeeper to striker and through to the substitutes, this team had world-class players but their greatest asset was how they would always find a way to win in any circumstances. During their glorious Treble season they could have been knocked out in the FA Cup semi-finals but for Peter Schmeichel’s penalty save to deny Dennis Bergkamp. Against Bayern Munich in the Champions League final they were second best for most of the evening until producing one of the greatest comebacks and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.
In Ferguson they had the greatest manager, who put together a team with different qualities. Roy Keane setting standards in midfield, David Beckham’s delivery on the right was bettered by nobody, with Ryan Giggs’s pace on the other flank. All four strikers – Andy Cole, Dwight Yorke, Teddy Sheringham and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer – had different qualities and were effective at different times, none more so than Solskjaer at the Nou Camp.
Barcelona 2008–201
Guardiola’s Barcelona team changed football, and they did it with a collection of homegrown players, led by a homegrown manager, and a style of play that had been passed down through the club’s history and then perfected in spectacular fashion.
This was ultra-modern football, inspired by Barcelona’s heritage, and it was produced by a group of diminutive and slight technicians at a time when physical power seemed to be becoming more important than ever.
The brilliance of Xavi, Andrés Iniesta, and Messi represented a triumph of technical skill over muscle, of brainpower over aerial power. It felt like something new and, for this observer at least, it proved inspirational.
