Pep Guardiola is Leaving, and Everything is Different Now: Tracing time, surviving eating disorders, and growing up.

Bé, suposo que això és madurar…

I don’t know how I’m supposed to move on. I’d been anticipating the news for weeks, probably months. I’d already spent my time in denial as the rumours were drip-fed from Christmas onwards, so I’d reached the point of acceptance by the time it was confirmed. And yet, the weight of it all still caved my chest in: Pep Guardiola, after 10 years in the Manchester City dugout, wouldn’t be managing my team anymore.

In footballing terms, it’s always a bittersweet shame to wave goodbye to someone whose impact on City has been unquestionably positive, but the timing feels right. I’d have been confident of lifting another Premier League title in May 2027 had Pep reversed his decision at the 11th hour, but beyond that I think it would have begun to resemble a marriage of habit rather than one of genuine spark and love. We’ve done everything together and we were perfectly suited to each other. But, maybe, as a consequence of nothing more than the passage of time, we’re no longer so perfectly aligned.

Guardiola has — at least to my eyes — softened. We are several years away now from the “We are tired? Fuck you!” Guardiola of 2018 and even the “academy is ready” Guardiola of 2023. These days he comes across (in public) as less of a paranoid eccentric and more of a sentimental father figure. The passion of the feisty 45-year-old Catalan that City hired still remains, but the intensity feels diluted by his now 55 years, his bad back, and the perspective that his decade in Manchester has both granted and burdened him with. He’s suffered tremendous personal losses in his family, he’s missed periods at City owing to that dodgy back and the surgery it required, his dad has entered his 90s, and the status of his actual marriage to his friend of 37 years and wife of 12 years Cristina Serra remains uncertain.

He’s now said it himself, that too much has happened to Pep for him to be the same man, to be the man capable of giving the level of dedication and commitment that he believes the City job deserves.

On the business side of things, the profile of player signed by new director of football Hugo Viana, the hiring of Jurgen Klopp’s former assistant Pep Ljinders to the management team, and the patches of inconsistent form over the last 18 months have all contributed to the City of 2026 feeling less shaped by Guardiola’s hand. Even if he’d completed the final year of his contract and lifted one last Premier League trophy in 2027, I’d still believe that City fans at the Eithad Stadium would be watching him slowly pass the torch to somebody else anyway.

Which is to say that, despite how upset I am that Pep won’t be my manager anymore, the weight I’m feeling has very little to do with football. Like his greatest rival Klopp, Guardiola’s smart enough to know that football management will be the death of him if he doesn’t walk away. Now his most successful protégé, Mikel Arteta, has lifted the Premier League title ahead of him. Trust Star Wars to produce the perfect line to explain the difficult truth that all masters must understand: masters are what their apprentices grow beyond. So, yes, as painful as it is to know that the curtain has now descended, it’s right that Guardiola’s moving on at this point.

The weight of it all has everything to do with everything else.

I’m 32 next month. I turned 30 in 2024. Expecting a third-of-life crisis, I actually woke up on my 30th birthday feeling mostly serene. I felt mostly serene for the rest of the day and, truth be told, right the way through to my 31st birthday. My 20s were unbelievably tough (as I’ll go into) but things had turned around, so — after receiving some timely advice from a friend entering his 40s — I was hopeful that my 30s would be a time of steady progress and relaxation. That feeling has stayed with me for almost of all of my early 30s so far but, with each passing day and each passing milestone and and each passing life event, I’ve felt that third-of-life crisis coming on. It turns out it was always in the post and now, it seems, Guardiola’s departure has finally stuck it through the door.

Anniversaries — or departures after long stays —always invite comparisons between two time periods. The concertinas of time are squished by the bookending dates being squeezed together. The density of nostalgia begins to crush hard. Pep is leaving after 10 years, from June 2016 to June 2026. Decades pack so much in. Too much, maybe, for the soul to fully cope with. Suddenly, under that kind of microscope, everything in my life that Guardiola has touched or been present for has taken on a greater significance. It’s all heavier, almost. Talking about Pep in the past tense is going to be difficult. So much has changed in those 10 years but Pep has remained in place as one of very few constants. He’s been there every weekend and every midweek and I naively assumed the major milestones of my life would continue to be marked with him in association.

I was 21, almost 22 when Manuel Pellegrini alerted the world to the news that he would be stepping aside for Pep to take charge of City at the beginning of the 16/17 season. On the day the news broke, I was still living under my parents’ roof. We were renting a flat in Manchester, sort of in that nameless bit of the city between Ancoats and the Green Quarter. My girlfriend at the time was spending every day with us. Her living situation at home wasn’t easy for her and she worked a retail job in the Arndale, which meant our flat was a convenient and safe place for her to stay.

She’d tried to involve herself in my love for City at the beginning of our relationship but, ultimately, she found she didn’t care much for football — to the extent that the name of a manager who had won the Champions League twice in the last seven years had totally passed her by. She glanced at Sky Sports News for a second as she prepared for her evening shift. “Pep Guar-di-ola — who’s he then?” She slowly worked her way through every syllable. “He’s basically the best manager in the world, and now he’s ours.” “Oh, well that’s good for you guys, isn’t it?” “Hopefully, yes, it really will be.” She moved to London six months later and our relationship sadly didn’t last beyond Pep’s first season.

Were I Mike Skinner in ‘Weak Become Heroes’, this would be the point when the girl in the café would tap me on the shoulder and I’d realise 10 years had gone by and I was older. For as far back as I can remember I’ve always traced key moments in my life by their relationship to City, and for 10 years now I’ve traced them all with Pep at the helm. My ex-girlfriend and I split up the day after a 0–0 draw at home to Stoke in his first season. I’m married to somebody I didn’t know when he took over. I was introduced to my wife via Tinder on the day City beat Watford 5–0 at Vicarage Road (the name of the road we now live on, ironically). We own a house as husband and wife, with a mortgage and everything. And now Pep is leaving.

My family left Manchester and returned to our hometown of Stockport just as City became Centurions, and I moved in with my wife just before Covid-19 stopped the 19/20 season in its tracks. I passed my driving test around the time Kevin De Bruyne announced he’d be leaving City in the summer of 2025. My wife and I were married in August of the same year, the week before Pep’s final season got under way. My life’s been up and down since Pep greeted the City crowd. He’s been there through it all.

It took four months of dating for my wife and I to declare ourselves exclusive. Blame me for that. Uncertainty after the end of one long-term relationship clouded my judgment about when to start the next one. Thankfully my wife has the patient and grace of a saint. Still, amid my spells of nervousness, we shared so much joy and excitement during the summer of 2017 — the first we ever spent in each other’s company. During this time, I eased her into the role City play in my life — that I’m a season ticket holder and had been (at that time) for 14 years, that it was something I shared with my mum, that sometimes we might need to adjust plans because of rearranged fixtures. She still can’t get on board with football or City, but we have our ways of discussing football and she understands what City and Pep have meant to me during our time together.

The earliest example was a long-running joke between us that began while we were still only dating and lasted until two months into our relationship. Between 26th August and 30th December, City won every Premier League game they played. All 18 of them. A new English record. I’d text her, saying “Off to City today x” or “Watching City today x” and she’d reply “No worries, see you after x”. I’d get home and text her, saying “Back from City x”, to which she’d ask “They win again? x”, to which I’d laugh, “Yes, lol x” complete with a roll-eyes emoji. We did that for 18 weekends in a row. Pep had turned City into a machine unlike anything I’d dared to dream about, even during the days when Roberto Mancini and Manuel Pellegrini took us to Premier League titles. I was almost embarrassed to speak to her about each match in any depth because I felt like I supported a massive playground bully, picking on the smaller teams at will.

City finally dropped points on 31st December against Crystal Palace. A 0–0 draw at Selhurst Park. My wife and I had been together for just over two months. It was a match I had to watch on my phone while on the train down to London. My wife was in her last year of university and had visited her family in London over Christmas. I was to join them for New Year’s Eve celebrations and meet her parents for the first time. I wasn’t scared of the prospect. I actually generally prefer meeting people who are older than me. But I was nervous all the same. I realised, though, that I felt far more nervous watching Eliaquim Mangala struggling to cope with Christian Benteke that day. Pep seemed to feel the same way, and Mangala never played for City in the Premier League again.

As City moved towards lifting the title at the end of the 17/18 Centurions season, my parents made the decision to move back to Stockport earlier than planned. My granddad (on my dad’s side) had deteriorated. Vascular dementia. He’d been diagnosed two years earlier but had managed to live by himself. Until now. He’d phone my dad in a panic, my dad would drive 30 minutes to help him, sit him down in front of the TV (or maybe put him to bed if it was late) and then drive back to Manchester. It eventually got to the point where our phone was ringing again by the time my dad was coming back through the door. My parents moved in with my granddad in February, while I was to stay in our Manchester flat on my own for the last five months of the rent lease. Owing to everyone’s new living arrangements, my wife came to the last two home games of that season: Huddersfield and Brighton. She still remembers who Yaya Toure is because we spent 30 minutes watching Pep and the Etihad say goodbye to him.

The Centurions season ended, the summer came, I moved back to Stockport after six years away, and my wife returned to London to take her masters degree. This is where things get dark for a while. I moved into the garage at my granddad’s house, which we’d had renovated by a tradesman we fortunately had in our family. I dubbed my new bedroom The Grodge (named after the way Rivers Cuomo pronounced ‘garage’ in that 1994 Weezer song) in order to make myself feel better, but in reality my life had stalled. I was still living at home, my world had been squeezed into a grodge, I was watching my gentle granddad fade away, and my girlfriend had moved back to London. I worried that our relationship would go the way of the last one that had a major move to London planted in the middle of it. A secret I was just about keeping from everyone as well was that my health was deteriorating. Coeliac disease, and its complications, had brought on a worsening eating disorder (ARFID, look it up). The weight was beginning to drop off me and I felt powerless to reverse everything. Eventually, people did start noticing.

One thing I rarely see discussed about eating disorders is how physically exhausting it becomes just to be alive. My diet was white meats and white fish, very specific green vegetables, and bananas. I’d occasionally allow myself a mint tea. It wasn’t enough but any time I tried to nudge the levels back I’d be sick. My BMI dropped outside the normal range to 16.5 (that’s bad). To walk up the stairs in my granddad’s house felt as though ropes were attached to my legs and were pulling me backwards. I’d wake up feeling as though I could face the day… until I stood up. I couldn’t face work. I couldn’t face supermarkets. I couldn’t face going outside. And I stopped being able to face going to City. The last game of the 18/19 domestic treble season that I attended in person was the nervous 1–0 win over West Ham, in February. It knackered me out too much just to sit there.

I watched the rest of the season either from my own bed or from a hospital bed. I remember not having the energy to celebrate suitably after Vincent Kompany’s goal against Leicester on 6th May. Days later, I received a call from Salford Royal Hospital telling me that a bed was ready for me. After some tests I’d had in March, which saw me spend a week on a ward, I was to have a nasogastric feeding tube fitted. I deferred for a few days more. My body could barely take it but I felt as though I had to watch the conclusion of the 18/19 season at home. I’d decided that this iteration of City, and our manager, were honestly worth endangering myself for. On 12th May, Pep guided City to back-to-back titles after a 4–1 win at Brighton. I slept for days after that, only rising to sit in bed or move to the sofa. On 19th May, City completed their unprecedented season with a 6–0 thumping of Watford to win the FA Cup. 24 hours on, I checked into Salford Royal.

You find out what keeps you going when all you really want to do is die. My wife, down in London; the prospect of my death potentially shattering my family; even living to see the end of Game of Thrones. My therapist really, really didn’t like it when she asked if I was planning to commit suicide and I responded “No no no, I’ve got to see how Game of Thrones finishes first” and laughed. But the truth was, I meant it. The only thing I’d poured myself into more than my wife and Pep’s City was that HBO fantasy series. It’s a good job I fell in love with its brave (if controversial) conclusion. But when I wasn’t sustaining myself by arguing with other nerds on the internet about the [spoilers, sorry] tragic and fatal downfall of Daenerys Targaryen, I was looking ahead to the next City game, which was never more than four or five days away. The style of football Pep had us playing, and my attempts to understand how he’d turned City into a team capable of securing 198 points across two seasons, caused me to develop an addiction to City like never before. It’s hard to think about dying when you’re wondering how the fuck City are meant to win 14 consecutive games to defend their title.

You realise what your lifebloods are when you don’t have the energy to commit to anything else. Sorry for the neologism there.

For a short while, that feeding tube worked. I left hospital after two weeks and I was able to witness the start of the new season in person. That frustrating 2–2 draw vs Spurs, the 4–0 win over Brighton, and then an 8–0 trashing of Watford (what did Pep have against Watford?) — I was able to see all of them live. In October, my wife moved back to Stockport. Before she arrived with her parents, I watched Adama Traoré take all three points from the Etihad back to Wolverhampton from my living room. Pep raged.

Now I had my life and my wife in the same town, I expected things to perk up. I had the upcoming Aston Villa home game in my sights. But things didn’t perk up for my health, sadly. It all got much worse. I didn’t return to the Etihad until almost two years later — the final day of the 20/21 season, when 10,000 people were allowed to see a 5–0 win over Everton as City lifted the Premier League title. After a brief bit of respite, I just couldn’t face the exhausting journey again. Around Christmas, I stopped tolerating the nutritional feed I’d been given back in May and I was asked to trial a new one. This new feed didn’t even come in liquid form, it was a powder that I had to mix with sterile water. This was my last chance really. I spent three weeks in Salford Royal on this occasion, watching Pep and City reach a League Cup final despite losing the second leg. I reserved the TV room so that my parents and I could watch City ease past Fulham in the FA Cup (4–0) on the BBC.

There was another City fan on the ward. We’ll call him Steve. Steve was 56 and had aggressive lung cancer. He was scheduled to undergo 16 hours of extensive surgery on the day I was discharged. We got to chatting as I streamed a 2–2 draw vs Crystal Palace on my laptop. He told me that growing up in Moss Side meant there was only one team for him. He also told me that growing up in Moss Side meant there was only one life for him, and that he’d spent — in total — 25 years inside across dozens of prison sentences for robbery, burglary, and petty theft. Pep raged on the touchline as Fernandinho’s 90th minute own goal gave Palace a point.

That was, as of May 2026, the last time I was admitted to Salford Royal. I may end up back in there one day, but that period of my life has finally, finally become a memory. It’s only with distance that I realised how close to death I actually was. I was severely underweight for two years, I had a feeding tube in for 15 months and it only worked successfully for half of the time it spent in my face, my internal organs were reacting badly to malnourishment, I’d even considered total parenteral nutrition (TPN) because I was convinced my digestive system was permanently broken. I met another man on the ward — not a City fan, not even a football fan —who told me all about his life on TPN, how he and his wife went on cruises around the Arctic and the Mediterranean and had TPN bags waiting at the dock for them whenever they arrived to board the ship. I looked ahead to what I was sure would be the reality of the rest of my life. None of it has come to pass thus far.

Three short weeks later, at the end of February 2020, one of my mum’s closest friends of 40 years died after a long illness. Six months after that, my mum’s brother went to bed one night and never woke up. Midway through 2021, another of her friends was taken by cancer. They were all big Blues. The three men who, between the three of them, ignited, nurtured, and then cemented my mum’s loyalty to City between the late 1970s and mid 1980s. She spent the entirety of the 20/21 Champions League run begging City not to win it right then and there. Not so soon after her brother had gone. Her brother was as much of a Barcelona fan as he was a City fan and he especially loved continental football and the Champions League. I think she breathed a sigh of relief when Pep went with no defensive midfielder in Porto and Chelsea lifted the trophy instead.

While I sat in that bed at Salford Royal, thinking about how short my life might end up being and watching City games with ex-convicts, Covid-19 first hit the headlines. By the time I was discharged and living in mine and my wife’s first ever flat together, we were six weeks away from lockdown. To tell you the truth, I feel a tremendous amount of survivor’s guilt over lockdown. What I needed as 2019 turned into 2020, more than anything, was for the world to just stop turning for a second. I’d been running to stand still and then collapsing due to malnourishment for more than a year now. With lockdown, the world did finally pause for a moment. Well, more than a moment in the end. As chaos and disease reigned outside, I made a little den for myself in our small flat and carried on with the new powder feed, mixing it with water. I even found space to expand my diet again, and for once my body didn’t reject it. The malnourishment was subsiding. Slowly but surely the weight came back. My shoulders weren’t so bony anymore, chairs didn’t feel so uncomfortable to sit on, and at last I stopped being able to see my ribs in the mirror. I started going for walks again, I was able to be a partner to my wife, I was present in conversations once more. My BMI returned to normal levels in June 2020. The feeding tube came out three months later. All that was left was to get back to City.

We were on the Angelsey coast when the email came through: my mum and I had been successful in our ballot entry to buy tickets for the Everton game — the final game of the 20/21 season and the first to host fans after the Covid-19 pandemic. A major day in City’s history. The day we lifted the Premier League title for the fifth time. Sergio Aguero’s last ever game for City. He scored twice and City won 5–0. My mum and I both cried as names and faces from City’s recent past appeared on the big screen to wish Sergio well in his move to Barcelona. Pep cried to Sky Sports’ cameras as he insisted we couldn’t replace Sergio. I appreciated days like that before I was so ill, but since I began to recover from my eating disorder (and everything that happened) I’ve consciously made a point to ensure my brain and heart store as much of those days as possible.

At full-time, my mum received the call from my dad we’d been dreading about my granddad. He was nearing the end. My mum and I were sobbing buckets for at least three different reasons that afternoon and we still have bittersweet and mixed feelings about the game until this day. He died a few days later, aged 83. It might seem perverse, but I’ve made sure to never forget the moment my mum received that phone call either. I try to treasure the memory just as much. As I returned to see one of my great loves in the flesh for the first time since the beginning of my recovery, another of my great loves slipped away. But I believe those people who say grief and love come from the same place, and that they can co-exist, and that they sort of have to share space with each other if you want your life to have emotional balance. I try to see my tears that day over my granddad as a positive thing, that I loved and cared for him so much. I lived to see City again and I lived to see my granddad go peacefully.

I know the phrase Never Kill Yourself has become a bit of an internet joke, a bit of a meme, but the words have rung through my head on special days like that since 2020. When Ilkay Gundogan completed the 3–2 comeback against Aston Villa 12 months later, to win another Premier League title for Pep and City, I made a conscious decision not to jump around or join in the frantic melee. I stood completely still, put my hands on my head, and made a choice to look around. I just listened to the noise. It was the first time since 2018 that I’d seen a full Etihad Stadium celebrating a Premier League title. It was the first time in eight years that I’d seen us win the Premier League title on the final day. “Watch it, drink it in”. It took an eating disorder and about 10 years from the Agueroooo moment for me to fully understand exactly what Martin Tyler was talking about.

Then came the treble.

The first thing I did when the final whistle went in Istanbul was fall off the sofa at my parents’ flat and onto my knees. City, European Cup winners. I still can’t get my head around that reality now. I bent double from my knees into something like the foetal position and completely emotionally crumpled. After about 30 seconds on the living room rug in floods of tears, I just about mustered the strength to crawl over to my mum who was sitting on the other sofa. She was struggling to console herself as well. Neither of us leapt about the place, we were just blubbering wrecks really. I put my head on her knees as she cradled me. She’s not held me like that since I was old enough to walk to school on my own and she’ll probably never hold me like that again. After the FA Cup final a week before, with the 2–1 win over United, I was stunned into silence initially but gathered myself enough to say “Right, okay, good. Onto next week then!” After Istanbul I was inconsolable. I’m glad I didn’t go to the game itself. I think I would have wilted in the stands and blacked out.

A part of my mum died with her brother and, she tells me, it’s still not come back to this day. It definitely hadn’t come back by 2023, even if she was better prepared for the possibility of us winning the Champions League that year. She’s admitted to me that it took her about a year to get back to normal after both her parents died (her dad in 1994, her mum in 2006), but that the piece of her that’s been missing since her brother’s death has never returned. As I was crying in her arms for the first time in maybe 25 years, the entire City playing and coaching staff streaming onto the Ataturk pitch on the TV behind me, she managed to speak through her own tears and listed the names of the three men who’d shaped her early years as a Blue. She spoke their names aloud one by one and declared that the treble meant Pep had won one trophy for each of them. As she recited their names, I thought back to the worst of my eating disorder in 2019 and how close I’d been to death. How close I’d been to missing that night myself. How close my mum had been to needing to list a fourth name. How my mum might have just stopped going to City altogether if I’d got my wish of four years earlier and had simply wasted away.

After things had calmed down, my dad — a United fan since the late 1960s but a United fan who considers Stockport County and Manchester City to be his second and third teams — sneaked off into my parents’ bedroom and whipped out a bottle of champagne that he’d secretly bought in advance. I sometimes wonder if he’d have chucked it out the window had Inter won the match 1–0 instead. He entered the living room, poured me a glass of fizz, and shook my hand while smiling from ear to ear: “Congratulations”.

Never Kill Yourself.

My eating disorder isn’t gone. It’s still there, lingering somewhere. It’s just quieter now and it doesn’t take up as much of my brain. But one day it may return with a vengeance and take over my life again. When that day comes, though, I won’t want to leave this world of my own accord. I can’t say for certain, but I’m 99% sure that I won’t ever think of willingly wasting away again. I was allowing myself to drift towards death as 2019 became 2020, and then I lived to see the peak of Pep’s City in 2023. Just because I fought for myself a little bit during those three weeks in Salford Royal, with ex-con Steve. This entirely mediocre and, at times, utterly ordinary football club of mine had conquered Europe. A Catalan footballing god had chosen City, probably initially as a favour to someone else or as a chance to experience something new for a brief time. Ickle Citeh got under his skin and into his bloodstream and he ended up winning the biggest prize in the European game. And through some form of mad cosmic circumstance, I was born, grew up a Blue, survived an eating disorder, and lived to see it all happen.

Even my wife was there. As we established many, many paragraphs ago, she doesn’t do football. She still doesn’t understand why we were all so stressed about a little football match and then so emotional after winning a said little football match, but she was there all the same. She’d been crocheting a hat while the game was on, sitting away from the TV that we were all glued to. She put the crochet set down after the full-time whistle and traded it for a glass of champagne. She didn’t understand why we were all on the brink of emotional deterioration, but she did understand that we were and that we must have our reasons. She was there with me on the streets of Manchester days later, getting drenched with the rest of us as the heavens opened on the treble parade. She doesn’t get football but she knows I love City, and that’s all she’ll ever need to understand really. She sat in a Didsbury Wagamama on the day of Pep’s resignation and listened to me ramble on about him — his cultured mind, his decision to go and what’s behind it, his decision to stay here for much longer than he originally intended and what was behind that.

There’s almost too much for me to say.

Ever since that week in 2023, I’ve been absolutely and especially determined to outlive my mum. Of course I was already intending to do that, but years of being malnourished had altered my perspective on how important life actually is — it makes you think there’s no point to anything. But there is a point and there is a meaning. The meaning of life is learning to be okay with death, I think — I can’t speak for anyone else but my experiences have taught me that I can only be okay with death if I think I’ve done enough in my life. When I’ve gone doolally at the end and I’ve lost all but my core memories, it will be my wife, my parents, and City that my ailing mind will retain. And, as a City fan, I know that the next 50 years won’t be anywhere near as good as the 10 years we’ve just had with Pep, so I know it will be Pep’s City that I think of first.

Gabriel Jesus’ Centurions goal, sending me off to hospital in 2019 with a domestic treble, bringing us out of the pandemic with the first of four consecutive Premier League titles, the Dua Lipa ‘Levitating’ meme, the Gundogan Villa game, the ‘Follow You Everywhere’ chant, the European treble, night with us all drinking champagne in my parents’ living room and the laughing we did in the days afterwards, the four-in-a-row, and Pep bringing City back from the difficulties of the 24/25 season by securing a cup double as his final gift to us all. So many special days and memorable nights, given to me by Pep Guardiola. Somehow, sort of miraculously when I think about it, I lived to see it all. I wish I could explain how I (mostly) overcame the worst effects of my eating disorder but beyond saying that lockdown in 2020 finally gave me enough space to breathe and focus on myself, I’m not sure I have the secret formula.

Through it all, though, there has been one constant. Pep Guardiola. From me finishing university, to splitting up with my ex-girlfriend, to meeting my new girlfriend on Tinder, to landing my first job, to leaving Manchester and moving back to Stockport, to spending weeks on end in hospital beds, to having a feeding tube inserted and then removed 15 months later, to my girlfriend moving her entire life to Stockport and eventually becoming my fiancée and my wife, to my immediate family suffering immense losses in the shape of my granddad and my mum’s brother, to my slow but sure recovery, to my wife and I buying our first house together, to me learning how to drive, to the day my wife and I tied the knot after eight years together, and now to the point in my life when the milestones and expectations you have bred into you from birth (finish school, finish higher education, learn to drive, get a job, find a girl, settle down, buy a house, get married) are settled and passed. Pep’s just been there. From start to finish — sometimes sitting but often standing — in the Manchester City dugout. Nostalgia often lies to us, but it won’t lie about Pep’s City.

And I think what makes Pep’s decision so much harder to process for me is that his departure has occurred against a backdrop of that third-of-life crisis finally arriving. I’m married, I own a house with my wife, I drive now, my friends are losing their parents and my parents are losing their friends. I can no longer claim to be a young adult and I no longer feel as though my young adulthood is close by. The anniversary of the Agueroooo goal against QPR from 2012 came around recently and it hit me that this particular anniversary, the 14th, is the first one that’s made it all seem like the distant past now. I think that’s what Pep’s departure has hammered home, that so many core memories from my 20s are now considered part of the past. My three-week stay in Salford Royal at the start of 2020 does feel like a memory now, as opposed to something I recently got over. With Pep in the City dugout there was a key link to everything that happened to me while he was here, but now one of those key links is gone.

I’ve been left with this strange feeling that I can’t quite reconcile — I desperately want to hold off the future right now and re-live the glory days of Pep’s City forever, but so many of those glory days are filled with such complicated and difficult memories. That’s what happens, I suppose, when someone appears in your life and becomes a fixture of it for 10 years. Whether he knows it or not, Pep has been there for so much good and so much bad in all of our lives — to the point where I began to believe he’d be there for all the good and bad that’s yet to come. Knowing that he won’t be is what’s hurting the most. It’s silly and irrational to view football through such a lens, but football is silly and it is irrational and there’s no escape from that truth for those of us who follow the game closely. From a purely ruthless footballing perspective, and from listening to him talk after announcing his departure, Pep leaving now appears to be the best decision for all parties. But I’ve allowed sentimentality to cloud my reaction to all of this and it has become a grueling task to simply imagine my weekends and weeknights without him there. I almost wish I’d grown to hate Pep so that it would be easier to say goodbye.

I have cried since the news broke. I lasted the entire day of the announcement without doing so, feeling reflective but not too sad. It is the right time after all. And how fortunate we’ve been not just to have witnessed what we’ve witnessed as City fans over the last 10 years, but to have a manager worth crying over. The house grew quiet after my wife went to bed tonight, and a couple of Pep YouTube tributes later I had to take myself off to the empty kitchen to silently weep. Through so much turmoil, transformation, and triumph in my personal life, City have been steady as a rock. Pep has made it so easy to be a football fan for an entire third of my life. While my health was falling apart, and then while the world fell apart, it was as though Pep had taken it upon himself to steer the City ship through calm waters, collecting trophies as he sailed. As though Pep had said to me (presumably at some point during the 20/21 season) “Don’t worry, Rob, you focus on your health. City are fine in my hands. We’ll be there for you when you’re better”. And they were. And he was. And now he isn’t anymore. And I don’t know how I’m supposed to move on.

Bé, suposo que això és madurar…

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