With Manchester City currently, everything is complicated. The club is facing more than 100 charges relating to financial fair play, which began in 2009 and ended in 2018. During two years of that time, Pep Guardiola was manager. The problem some have is that the players acquired during that time helped a run of success for many more years.
What Guardiola did or did not know about what City did or did not do might never be known. What is is that he took those players given to him and turned them into a high-level success. Even if City broke Premier League rules (and that is still in question pending a review of a likely appeal from the club), the club wasn't the only one with excellent players.
Guardiola earned what he got, and he led his club to success and arguably would have done the same even if one or four excellent players hadn't been on the squad. He is that good of a manager and strategist, and he was so even before he came to east Manchster.
Pep Guardiola's Manchester City success was real, charges or no charges
Under Pep's oversight, the club won 20 trophies, and that included six Premier League titles. He won five Carabao Cup titles and, more importantly, one Champions League title. The latter proved Pep's greatness further because City wasn't facing clubs that didn't have elite players. City's best just beat other clubs' best.
It should also be noted that Man City's allegations get weird. The club is accused, in many different ways, of manipulating £900 million and putting that into the club, allowing the Blues to bring in players like Erling Haaland. If the Premier League allowed free spending and owners to pay what they could, the owner of City would have no issues.
Sheikh Mansour, who helms the Abu Dhabi Group that runs Man City, has a reported net worth of £22.62 billion to £28.65 billion. Mansour was accused of cooking the books, but it wasn't because he never had the money to begin with. He had more than he would ever need.
Did Mansour break the current rules of the Premier League and not disclose who and how things were being paid? Maybe, but an appeal could still overturn the guilty verdict against the club.
The bottom line is that no matter who was running the club and how the money was being spent, Pep Guardiola still had to turn his collection of players into a winner, and not every manager could do that. He is brilliant at what he does, just as he was when he was with Barcelona and Bayern Munich before coming to Man City.
Maybe Manchester City faces a brutal punishment after being found guilty of things the ownership group did, but that should not diminish what Guardiola did. He was and always has been brilliant. No one can take that fact away.
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