Pep Guardiola’s demand for perfection at Manchester City will start well before he takes over

When Pep Guardiola was a player at Barcelona, spreading his precise, elegant passes this way and that from central midfield, captain’s armband around his bicep, peripheral vision extending from winger to full-back, left and right, most of his colleagues already saw a coach in the making.

“A leader with his feet, when he’s playing,” noted Jorge Valdano, the erudite former coach of Real Madrid, “and a leader with his mind, when he’s thinking.”

Valdano came up with a quotable description of his style.

His football looked spontaneous, but it wasn’t,” reckoned Valdano, comparing him to a successful public speaker who takes no notes to the lectern and gives the appearance of speaking off the cuff: “It’s the noble fib of spontaneity.

“It looks instinctive, but everything possible has been rehearsed and prepared. Guardiola was the midfielder of his generation,” argued Valdano, most “capable of perfecting the predictable”.

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Guardiola, the coach, seduces owners and presidents of the world’s most ambitious football clubs because of his combination of serial successes.

He has been on top-flight touchlines six-and-half seasons and ended only one of them without the domestic league title – and bewitching, appealing football, with possession of the ball emphasised and clever passing and movement a priority.

His teams may have been platforms for some of the 21st century’s most skilful dribblers to thrive and enhance their reputations – Lionel Messi and Andres Iniesta at Barcelona.

Arjen Robben and lately Douglas Costa at Bayern Munich – but they have won all their medals with a rigorously planned framework. Guardiola’s greatness as a coach is in pulling off ‘the noble fib of spontaneity’.

Manchester City's early announcement of the fact they have Guardiola's agreement that he will start work with them officially in July is in part a consequence of what everybody who has worked with Guardiola also knows.

He plans things in advance, meticulously and, though there is no doubt his commitment to Bayern Munich through his last five months there will be absolute, he will be guiding City in matters of strategy well ahead of his starting date.

Some of his plans may be quite radical.

Recall how he took up his first elite-level management job, having challenged Barcelona, where he was in charge of the junior B team, to promote him, a novice, by saying to then Barca president Joan Laporta: ‘You haven’t balls to do it.”

Laporta did, and then heard Guardiola say he wanted the squad shorn of three superstars who had contributed hugely to winning the Uefa Champions League just two years earlier: Ronaldinho and Deco were not wanted, nor was Samuel Eto’o, who stubbornly stayed put and showed Guardiola, who was open-minded enough to give Eto’o a chance, he could still score goals by the hatful.

Plot his career via the bruises left on the egos of stars, and you might believe Guardiola has a fundamental suspicion of maverick talents: At Barcelona, Zlatan Ibrahimovic disliked working with him, Ronaldinho was waved off before he had the chance. But he cherishes flair players, quite as much as he appreciates the ordered tactical nous of a Xavi Hernandez, a Xabi Alonso, a Philipp Lahm or a Sergio Busquets.

Within City’s squad there will be footballers anticipating fulfilling discussions with Guardiola on how they might discover new peaks, and perhaps fresh possibilities about how they advance. Witness Messi, who under Guardiola’s watch turned from winger to spearhead striker in the brilliant Barcelona of 2009 onwards.

Or Lahm, who at a riper age, discovered under Guardiola at Bayern that, fine right-back and left-back though he was, he could also be an authoritative central midfield player.

There will also be people on Guardiola’s staff wary of his particular, unyielding dogmas and standards.

Bayern’s long-serving medical support team have undergone a significant turnover because of disagreements he had with some of them.

He will be demanding at City, and he will already be quietly letting his next bosses know, every so often, what he expects from them to get as close as he can to the perfect plan.

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