This was not a vindication of his style and his philosophy, or the final proof that he can work his magic without an army of sorcerers, as he had at Barcelona and Bayern Munich. Tuesday’s 3-1 victory does not mean that the mission set by Manchester City’s owners, to turn a once-unfashionable team into a member of the elite, is complete. It does not make history. It simply begins to write it.
In England, as in continental Europe, every club interprets its relationship to the Champions League differently. Real Madrid sees it as a divine right, as though it is the natural state of affairs that the trophy should reside at the Bernabeu and that any other outcome reveals something gone badly awry with the universe.
Barcelona, by contrast, regards it as an aspiration, not an expectation — something to win rather than to be lost. Bayern Munich starts every season intending to win the Bundesliga and believing it can, but not should, win the Champions League. The differences are subtle, but significant.
So, too, for Premier League teams. It is the stage on which Manchester United believes it belongs, the stage that is central to Liverpool’s identity, has afforded Chelsea rapid legitimacy and is a source of Arsenal’s frustration as much as its inspiration, a seemingly unobtainable missing piece.
Manchester City has always been a little more ambivalent. Until Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan’s takeover in 2008, City’s Champions League ambition was not an issue anyone dedicated much time to contemplating, about as relevant to day-to-day existence as how you might breathe if you happened to move to Mars.
To City’s new backers, however, the Champions League was first the destination and then the staging post in the club’s transformation. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars for their managers, Mark Hughes and, later, Roberto Mancini, as they pursued a top-four finish in the Premier League, which would mean a place among Europe’s elite.
Qualification for the Champions League was the springboard that would enable City to become everything its owners hoped it would be.
The fans were not so easily convinced. A long-simmering feud with UEFA — the Champions League anthem is still jeered whenever it blares out at Etihad Stadium — over City’s punishment for transgressing the organization’s Financial Fair Play rules did not help, but, in truth, the root cause lay elsewhere.
To City, what matters, even now, is the Premier League. The idea that this club, for so long synonymous with failure and regret, can lord it over its domestic foes — particularly those on the other side of Manchester — remains a novelty to many.
Champions League nights at Anfield, Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge have a magical quality about them. All too often in recent years, even as City made painstaking progress under Manuel Pellegrini from the group stage to the round of 16 to the quarterfinals and then the semis, that quality has been conspicuous by its absence at Etihad Stadium. There is no fervor, no frenzy; victory would be nice, but defeat is no disaster.
The club did what it could to fire the imagination: choreographing prematch displays, dimming the floodlights, encouraging or seeding the use of suspiciously pristine, professional flags. It hoped, too, that sightings of Europe’s aristocrats would change the attitude, but if anything, the visits in recent years of Barcelona, Bayern and Real have only reinforced the impression. Seeing those teams swat City aside, the host playing the acquiescent role of underdog, diminished the appetite instead of simulating it.
It would be tempting to dismiss such an attitude as proof that City is, at heart, soccer’s great arriviste: toytoying with sophistication, affecting it, but not really ready or able to appreciate the world of the genuine aesthetes.
Again, the reality is more complex. The reason the Champions League is special to Liverpool and United is the history imbued in every match: Each (increasingly rare) time “Zadok the Priest” booms out at Anfield or Old Trafford, it signifies another episode in a continually evolving myth.
The music, the occasion, automatically invokes memories of St.-Étienne in 1977, Chelsea in 2005, Juventus in 1999 or Barcelona in 2008. City’s detractors say it lacks pedigree in European competition, when really what it needs is context, something to serve as a comparison and a watermark.
For all the memories City’s rebirth has brought — notwithstanding the club’s 1970 Cup Winners’ Cup triumph — they have mostly come in the Premier League: winning 6-1 at Old Trafford, Agüero claiming the championship with the last kick of the season. Europe has been less fertile: wins against Hamburg, in the Europa League, and Roma, in the Champions League, games in Munich remarkable for Carlos Tevez’s going on strike and Pellegrini’s settling for second.
That is what Guardiola meant when, surveying the finest performance the club has produced in Europe, he described it merely as “a good step.”
Beating Barcelona was not just a powerful riposte to those who have suggested, as City stumbled in the league, that perhaps his methods might need to be tweaked if they are to work; nor was it just the first time in a long time — since a loss to Chelsea in 2005, maybe — that Barcelona has been outplayed by a Premier League team, rather than caught with a sucker punch.
More than that, it gave City a beginning. “Our victory is so important, considering our situation,” Guardiola said. For situation, read context: the sense that City does not belong here, in this illustrious company, that Barcelona is to be feared, not confronted.
“We were playing against us, our tradition, what we have to do,” Guardiola said. “Barcelona, Bayern, Madrid are in this competition every year. You need time. This is a good step: Once in our lives, we played the best team in the world, and we competed with them. But they have been playing these games for 25 years. We are three or four months.”
He knows it takes more than one game, one win, no matter how ecstatic, to build a tradition. He used the word “history”: Only once that has been established can City, players and fans, know that succumbing to Barcelona and its ilk is not inevitable, that it is possible to go face to face with them, that City belongs.
City has overlooked the Champions League because it has not felt as if it is part of the club’s story. It has been, at best, a tangent and, at worst, an unwanted digression. Beating Barcelona may, in time, come to be the point that changed, when Europe became another chapter, rather than a different book.
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