Pep’s final act of passion: Amazon’s revealing Guardiola series pulls no punches

Having occupied a front-row seat for the final two seasons of Pep Guardiola’s gilded Manchester City tenure, the subject of Amazon’s A Beautiful Obsession, the surprise to me is how unfiltered the four-part series is. Particularly, the telling of the torrid 2024-25 campaign when the wheels came clattering off in the bleakest of mid-winter plunges that featured nine defeats and one victory in 13 aura-shattering games. To be shown from Wednesday on Prime, this series controlled and filmed by City is no hagiography of Guardiola or his players that seeks to paper over the great Catalan’s most harrowing season.

Neither is the decision to let go of the club’s greatest modern-day player, Kevin De Bruyne, soft-soaped. And the anger of Khaldoon al-Mubarak, the chair, at Guardiola’s odd decision to change 10 players for last season’s 2-0 Champions League loss at home to Bayer Leverkusen is not left on the cutting-room floor. Instead, the viewer witnesses up close and maybe too personal, when his divorce is cited as motivation, Guardiola flailing for solutions he fails to find.

And shown, too, is how the ruthless business of football reduces a peerless manager and De Bruyne to the commodities they are, as City’s “machine built for winning” (Khaldoon’s description) must thresh on. Guardiola talks about his marriage breaking down after a 2-0 defeat by Juventus in the Champions League on 11 December 2024. It was City’s seventh reverse in 10 games, so to try to rouse the team from their slump a disgusted Guardiola unloads about what went wrong between him and Cristina Serra.

How do you play football, because you are paid? Or because of something inside? Where is the passion?” This is an interesting choice.

If Guardiola has every right to talk about personal issues, the decision seems counterproductive: a crossing of the professional/private line that could, conversely, make him appear weaker before his team, as normal managerial modes of motivation have lost their power. As he says later regarding what makes a good No 1: “You have to convince your players [that they would] go to the penthouse, the roof and jump down [for you].” A year later, after the 10 changes against Leverkusen, Guardiola again says: “I leave my life, my divorce and my family is away, and everything for all of you. And what do you give back?” Manuel Estiarte, in the second episode named The Rebuild, compounds the sense of a man running out of ideas when Guardiola’s close friend, and City’s director of first-team operations, reveals he told the players about the divorce, to let them know this is why “Pep is anxious, sad, different”.

Estiarte continues: “I said to the team: ‘Please, you have to understand, you’re not playing with a coach who can be a bit impulsive, intense, sometimes a bit up and down. You’re seeing a human being. He’s getting a divorce.’ It was necessary for the team not only to visualise Pep as a manager but for the first time as a human being.” First, you wonder why Guardiola did not impart this sensitive information himself to the players, as this might have aided the intended impact.