The reality might read like an error, but it’s not. Pep Guardiola, master tactician extraordinaire, left his footprint all over English football during his trophy-laden Manchester City spell – but he didn’t bring his style to these shores. In many ways, he simply brought it back.
For years, Guardiola’s football was treated as an import. Heavily technical, fluid roles, possession hungry, at odds with the homegrown traditions inspired by rolled-up sleeves and elbow grease. Yet some of the deepest roots of his football don’t start in Barcelona or Amsterdam, they lead back to Britain.
There’s a case to be made that the style of play Guardiola was expected to have to adapt to the English game when he first arrived in 2016 was carrying British fingerprints all along.
That doesn’t make Pep’s well-known origin story any less true. Made in Barcelona, inspired by Johan Cruyff and the man who has single-handedly changed English football at every level in his time at Manchester City, but it doesn’t look at the full picture.
Zoom out further and many of those principles were first seen in Britain, buried under a century of travel, neglect and reinvention. But while Jimmy Hogan and Peter McWilliam may be far from household names, the DNA helixes they sit at the top of eventually feed into Guardiola.
This isn’t a tub-thumping claim of British genius, though. In fact, it took somebody of Pep’s stature and reputation to end decades of ignorance of a style that’s long been shunned by the majority.
Hogan, in particular, was sidelined by the country’s football elite when he first preached his belief in the importance of technique, repetition and passing – only earning recognition when he moved to mainland Europe in the early 20th century.
At the time and for countless decades later, English football was dominated by industrial virtues of hard work and direct play, and Hogan found fertile ground in Austria, Netherlands and Hungary for his philosophy. Along with other leading coaches in the region, Hogan’s influence helped to form what became known as the Danubian Style that inspired some of the most iconic sides ever to play the game, including the Austrian Wunderteam, Hungary’s Magical Magyars and the great Dutch side of the 1970s.
Inspired by a traitor?
But despite starting his managerial career at the likes of FC Dordrecht, Wiener Amateur-SV and MTK Budapest, the Lancastrian wasn’t deliberately trying to stick it to the country of his birth for not giving him his big break. When Hogan returned home in 1918, the FA branded him a traitor for working abroad during the First World War, ending up with him heading back to the continent instead.
England’s loss was mainland Europe’s gain, as he went on to work as Hugo Meisl’s assistant in Austria’s innovative national team of the 1930s and working closely with Gusztav Sebes, who coached the Hungarian side of Ferenc Puskas that consigned England to their first ever defeat at Wembley in 1953. After Hungary’s generation-defining 6-3 win, Sebes said, “we played football as Jimmy Hogan taught us. When our football history is told, his name should be written in gold letters”.
That revered side would see its football mimicked and tweaked into what became Total Football under Rinus Michels with the Dutch national team, Ajax and Barcelona, and later adopted by his muse Cruyff when he became a coach. Those ideas were influenced by Hogan’s ethos, trickling down into Guardiola’s work.
Football can’t be tied up in one tidy family tree, though, with a different set of British genealogy also part of the making of the outgoing Manchester City boss. And that branch runs through Tottenham, rather than Budapest or Vienna.
McWilliam is another figure who tends to vanish from the conversation, but his two spells as Spurs manager in the early decades of the 20th century helped to shape the modern game.
Laying British roots
The former Scotland international created a club culture based on passing, movement and technical craft at a time when English football rewarded urgency rather than subtlety, but created a band of disciples that carried the ideas on. Among them was Vic Buckingham, who carried them abroad to place them in two of the most important environments in Guardiola’s football education – Ajax and Barcelona.
Buckingham laid the groundwork for Total Football to take hold at both clubs in the 50s and 60s, and was the man who gave Cruyff his first-team debut. While he had nowhere near the success of Michels or Cruyff, Buckingham proved an important gateway to their later tactical development, bringing professionalism and fresh thinking to the Netherlands at an important time.
That – combined with the work of another Englishman, Jack Reynolds, at Ajax – provided a foundation that Michels, and then Cruyff, interpreted to create the philosophy that would combine with Hogan’s Danubian Style. It all led to the version of football that has proved so successful for Guardiola in the past decade at City.
While his tactical revolution may have arrived with Catalan charm, that genius came from an environment carrying British watermarks. English football spent time years starting at Pep’s City as something imported from another planet, although but for different attitudes to his coaching forefathers, it could have been part of the sporting make-up of the country decades earlier,
Pep was part of the inheritance and helped them grow into something else, finally achieving what others before him failed to do by fundamentally changing the British game. The question if those lessons stand the test of time or whether they needed Guardiola’s genius to keep the ideas alive.
