🔍 Is This How It Ends For Salah & Guardiola?

Something has changed this week. It might be that, at long last, the sun has returned to England: the bright blue skies arrived quite suddenly on Tuesday, and it felt for the first time in a very long time like maybe it wasn’t winter anymore. Or it might be that, after an equally long slog, it feels like the football season is getting somewhere, too.

We are at the stage of finding out how things end. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we saw all but two of England’s contingent drop out of the Champions League, falling as soon as the gradient kicked upwards and the air grew thinner.

The most significant elimination, I think, was that of Manchester City. Pep Guardiola’s team could still finish the week with a trophy, of course, but it looks increasingly likely that this season will conclude in another anticlimax, one that would not be offset by beating Arsenal to the Carabao Cup. The question that poses is a much larger one: is this the sort of end that Guardiola himself had in mind?

Only a little more than a year ago, Mohamed Salah was smuggled into Anfield under cover of night. The stadium was all but empty. The operation was shrouded in as much secrecy as both Liverpool and Salah’s representatives could muster. This was, after all, the update the world had been waiting for, and nobody wanted to spoil the surprise. 

When the (then) 32-year-old arrived, he found that props had been provided: a rich scarlet carpet had been laid on the field; a deep red sheet had been strewn on top of it, artfully ruffled to convey luxury and wealth; and, at the center, a gilt-edged chair, one sufficiently ornate that it might be described with only a little poetic license as a throne.

This was the shot that Liverpool wanted, that Salah wanted, that millions of the club’s fans had wanted: proof that Salah, in the middle of arguably the most productive season of his already-astonishing career, had signed a new contract; that Liverpool, after months of anxiety and worry and doubt, had managed to secure the future of their king.

Looking back now, of course, those images seem misguided at best and downright hubristic at worst. Liverpool’s flailing season has engendered, broadly speaking, two emotions: among the club’s own fans, a frustration that is now increasingly curdling into outright anger; among everyone else, it has brought a pure, uncut, gleeful schadenfreude.

Beneath that initial, reflex response, though, there is a sadness to seeing what has happened – almost overnight, it feels – to Salah. He is, by any measure, one of the finest players in Liverpool’s history. His name sits next to countless records. This is not a club that lightly bestows the title of king; Kenny Dalglish has occupied the position for half a century.

For 45 minutes on Wednesday, following what may well be the worst penalty he has ever taken, Salah looked like his old self. As Liverpool, unfamiliarly assured, swept past Galatasaray, the Egyptian bubbled with verve and menace. He scored one, created two, and might have had several more. Anfield echoed to his name. 

It was a stark contrast with much of the rest of what is likely to be his last season at Liverpool. His form has been abject: he scored 34 goals last year, but has managed just nine so far this time around; his lowest total, across nine seasons at Liverpool, is 23; he is on course to muster barely half that number. 

Watching him, over the last few months, has been to see a player whose powers have not just waned but abandoned him altogether, a human being shorn of all confidence in both himself and those around him, a force of nature instantly stilled. It borders on awkward, seeing him play now, as though you are witnessing first hand the fading of a star. The defining act of his last season at Liverpool may well prove to be his outburst over Arne Slot in a car park at Elland Road in November. They were the words of a man raging against the dying of the light. Salah and Liverpool, it seems obvious now, should have called time last season. He should have taken the chance to walk out on a high.

All of which should, really, be treated by Pep Guardiola as something of a parable. It has become pretty clear, over the last few months, that Guardiola is coming to the end of his time at Manchester City, too.

As Sam Lee, who covers the club for The Athletic, has noted, he is not really bothering to hide it: barely a week seems to go by without the Catalan discussing what his post-City life might look or feel like.

His contract – like Salah’s – runs until 2027. It is hardly unreasonable to suspect he may not be planning on seeing all of it out. He certainly has the air of a man who is figuring out the best way to say goodbye.

My personal suspicion has always been that Guardiola, understandably, believes he has earned the right to leave on his own terms. Last season, I wondered if he might have decided to step away if Manchester City won a fifth straight Premier League title, or managed to regain the Champions League. He signed his new contract, his current contract, at the point when it might have become obvious to him that neither of those things were going to happen.

This season, too, there is evidence of Guardiola hunting a golden swan song. The signing of Gianluigi Donnarumma was the essence of what we think of as “win now.” The capture of Marc Guéhi, in January, had a similar timbre. This City no longer really looks or feels or plays like a manifestation of Guardiola’s lifelong grand projet to reinvent the game in his image; it has, instead, a slight “Ocean’s Eleven” vibe.

The problem, of course, is that things have not quite worked out as Guardiola might have wished. Real Madrid eliminated City from the Champions League on Tuesday. Arsenal now leads the Premier League by nine points; OK, having played a game more; OK, Mikel Arteta’s team still has to travel to the Etihad. City is not quite out of the running yet.

But with every week that passes, City’s chances of reclaiming the championship diminish a little, and so do the odds on Guardiola ending this campaign with – at best – a haul comprising only England’s two domestic cups. Lifting the FA Cup and/or the Carabao Cup would be a moment to celebrate, of course. Whether it is a fitting farewell to one of the most successful managers England has ever known, whether it is how Guardiola has envisaged taking his bow, is a distinctly different matter.

As Salah has discovered at much the same time, though, football does not do sentimentality. It rarely offers satisfactory closure. Arsène Wenger did not sign off at Arsenal with a trophy. Jürgen Klopp’s last year at Liverpool brought only the Carabao Cup. Alex Ferguson, almost, alone managed to go out on a high, as a champion, but most are not afforded that privilege. 

So what does Guardiola do? Does he stick, or does he twist? Does he run the risk that next year might not be any better? Does he keep chasing the dream, or does he accept what he has? One trophy might not be the goodbye Guardiola wants. He may recognize, though, that it might be the best goodbye he gets.

Given the circumstances, two English teams making it to the Champions League quarterfinals probably has to qualify as a small – very small – win. Arsenal and Liverpool will fly the flag for the world’s loudly self-proclaimed best domestic competition in the world next month. One of them is much more likely to stick around than the other, but that’s by the by.

You will, at this stage, have read countless explanations for why so many of their peers fell by the wayside. They will have mentioned fatigue, English football’s attritional quality, the economic power of the continent’s elite, and they will have acknowledged that on some level there is no great shame in losing to PSG, Real Madrid or Barcelona. 

What has struck me, though, over the course of the last two weeks is how baffled the Premier League teams seemed to be by opponents who did not want to play the way that has become standard in England. They did not have an answer against sides who wanted to keep the ball, who were happy to play around a press, and, most of all, who allowed their best players to express just a little ingenuity.

The goal that encapsulated it was Atlético Madrid’s fifth in their home leg against Spurs. I can’t remember the last time I saw a Premier League player produce something along the lines of Antoine Griezmann’s deft flick to set Julián Álvarez away. Not because they lack the talent or imagination to pull it off, but because the tactical systems they deploy discourage such invention.

Tottenham seemed equally surprised by it. Why did Griezmann not take the ball down, wait for his teammates to run their established patterns, and then set the play in motion? It makes me wonder if the Premier League is now bordering on over-coached, too reliant on strategy, and too devoid of improvisation. England’s harrowing couple of weeks, in that light, is probably a good thing. There should be a level even the richest league in the world has to strive to reach.

Rog and Rory go deep into the Champions League and talk about why the Premier League keeps suffering in Europe. They discuss the disappointing performances from teams like Manchester City, Tottenham, Liverpool and Chelsea, and wonder why the world's richest league seems to struggle in the UCL knockouts.

Watch on YouTube or listen here.

The centerpiece of the English weekend is, very obviously, the Carabao Cup final: not just Guardiola’s chance to shape his (potential) goodbye, but Arsenal’s put-up-or-shut-up moment. It might be England’s least prestigious trophy, but the Carabao quite often acquires a significance beyond itself. This edition is no different.

But it is not, as it happens, the most appetizing game on Sunday. That honor falls not to the Tyne-Wear derby – absolutely worth watching though it will be – but to Tottenham’s encounter with Nottingham Forest. I’m genuinely not sure I’ve ever looked forward to a game more: if there was a platonic form of a relegation battle, it would be this. With West Ham surging, for a given value of surging, it feels like whoever loses in north London will be on the precipice. As long as you’re not emotionally invested, it’s just great content.

In many ways, the email that Carl Bridwell sent to [email protected] should have made me angry. I lost several hours of my week because of it, for a start, investigating what life is like in Bozeman, Mont., where Carl lives. And then several more wondering whether I could persuade Rog that we should do a live MiB show there. (Ordinarily in these circumstances I daydream about maybe living in a place, but Bozeman appears to be out of my price range.)

Anyway, Carl is a world history teacher in what I can now confidently identify as Montana’s fourth-largest city, nestled between the Bridger Range and the Spanish Peaks, with their many hiking trails. And he has drawn on his experience of working in a school that is about to institute a cellphone ban in order to protect the soft, wet brains of its students to point out one of modern football’s many little absurdities.

Before technology, he points out, a manager who had been banned from the touchline “had to sit in the stands with the rest of the paying proletariat, and enjoy or stress from a visual distance. But if Daniel Farke can [now] just use his assistant as a puppet, then does the touchline ban actually matter?”

I found this question as compelling as the Museum of the Rockies, Carl, because I’ve often thought the same thing: what is supposed to be a punishment for a manager who has crossed a line is almost nothing of the sort. They get a nice seat, a better view, and can communicate their instructions as clearly as they like through their assistants.

They might find being a little more distant frustrating, but it would not appear to be any hindrance at all in terms of actually doing their jobs. I would be intrigued by what a more stringent sanction might look like, what form that might take: banning them from the stadium altogether? Forcing them to watch in a room inside the stadium without any means of communication, but listening to the noise of the crowd? Tasking them with following the game through Twitter but on unreliable Wi-Fi? That might be the cruelest. We should do that.

That’s all for this week – if you want to force me down a Google rabbit-hole looking up small towns in the United States, write in with a question and tell me where you live. Let’s see how ineffective I can be during the international break. I bet it’s pretty ineffective!

Have a great weekend,
Rory

👋 As always, you can send any feedback, thoughts, or odes to Terry’s Chocolate Oranges to [email protected].

🙌 If you’re enjoying The Correspondent, we’d love an assist. Forward this email or share this URL with a friend, family member, or fellow football fan.

📧 First time with us? Sign up here to get Rory’s next newsletter sent straight to your inbox, and be sure to check out our other newsletters too.