Pep Guardiola cracks Man City legends joke in response to relegation

Pep Guardiola joked he already has a plan in place should Manchester City be demoted “to League Two or the Conference” – re-sign Mike Summerbee and Paul Dickov to lead the fightback. It was a nice line which brought smiles in the middle of an impassioned response to allegations of financial chicanery which have rocked the club this week.

Yet there was no doubting his seriousness when he insisted that if that were the outcome of the Premier League investigation into the club’s financial affairs he was going nowhere. 

In a barnstorming press conference performance, his first since City were charged on Monday with over 100 alleged breaches of financial rules, Guardiola was defiant, attacking and confident.

He insisted City were innocent and will prove that to be the case however long it takes. And he moved to assure everyone that it had not shaken his desire to lead the fight.

“Hopefully the reason they are going to sack me is the results. It is the reason managers leave their position or stay in the position,” he said when asked whether he was more determined to fight for his club. 

“But I am not moving from this seat. I can assure you, more than ever that I want to stay. Sometimes I have doubts, seven years already is a long time in any country. Now I don’t want to move.

“They (the club) didn’t lie to me. Look what happened with Uefa. I said to them: what happened? They said ‘Pep, we did nothing wrong.’ We proved it. It is the same case. 

“Why should I not trust with my people? Why should I trust the CEOs or the owners of the 19 clubs, the nine clubs like it was with Uefa? No, I trust my people.”

The chance for City to clear their name will not arrive quickly given the massed ranks of expensive lawyers being assembled on either side of the battlefield.

Estimates are that a process that Guardiola admitted he would love to see concluded quickly could take years rather than months to deliver.

But Guardiola maintained there was confidence at the club that having defeated UEFA in the courts against the same charges in 2020 – their appeal against a two year Champions League ban was overturned by Court of Arbitration for Sport and a £26.8million reduced to £8.9m – they will do so again.

City held talks in London with the club hierarchy jetting in from Abu Dhabi to work out their position and Guardiola has spoken to both chief executive Ferran Soriano and chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak.

“I would say they are more confident (of winning), maybe they have more experience and more information. They have a lot of pages that they present to UEFA that they are now introduce against the Premier League,” he said.

“What happened Monday was a lot of words a lot of noise but in the next days I have the feeling that everyone is going to do the job, ourselves on the pitch, the doctors, the physios and our laywers in the court.”

City need to make sure that they kickstart that response with victory over Aston Villa on Sunday and it was not lost on Guardiola that the last time they came to the Etihad his side delivered a fourth title of his reign on the final day of the season.

“We have to beat Aston Villa and we are going to have to do it like always we have done it. After that Arsenal and the Champions League is around the corner. This is the future I would say. 

“What is going to happen we cannot control but what the players have to do is defend this club as well as possible like they have done in the last 10, 12 years.”