Xavi, Arteta, Kompany – all Pep Guardiola’s disciples, and all top of the league

It's a happy scene. Mums and dads, boys and girls, wait on the thin, potholed lane leading to the training ground. Every so often, an expensive car pulls up. A window winds down and the children swarm in to get their autographs and see, close up, which of their heroes is behind the smoked glass.

Welcome to the warm afterglow of promotion at a football club where, judging by what happened with the previous manager, it cannot be long before one of the local pubs offers to change its name in honour of Vincent Kompany.

In the Premier League, it is Mikel Arteta who is trying to break Manchester City's vice-like grip on the championship trophy and do something with Arsenal that would have seemed almost implausible at the start of the season.

In Spain, Xavi has taken Barcelona 11 points clear of Real Madrid, the champions, in his first full season since returning to the club where, as a player, he won 25 trophies in 17 years.

Barcelona have romped towards the title in La Liga under Xavi (Photo: Angel Martinez/Getty Images)

All three have learned their trade, to varying degrees, from Pep Guardiola. All of them preach what can loosely be described as 'Pep's philosophy' at a time when more and more teams, at all sorts of levels, are aligning themselves with Guardiola's style of play.

Kompany will point out that he, Xavi and Arteta have not just learned exclusively from Guardiola. All three, he says, have had a lifetime of other experiences. And he's right: it would be pretty insulting to characterise any of them as a Pep clone. Each has his own personality. Nobody wants to be depicted as Guardiola-lite.

Yet it is difficult to overstate one man's impact on all three and Kompany, a former Manchester City captain with his statue outside their stadium, accepts that point when it is put to him that it is surely more than just coincidence.

“I've been lucky to work with so many good coaches,” he says. “I've taken influences from all the coaches I've played for, and all the places I've been at. Mikel has had a lot of good coaches in his career. Xavi has had a lot of top coaches, and so have I.

“But what I can say is that it's no surprise if we have learned from somebody like Pep because, among all those coaches, you would put him in a category of his own.”

When the same question is put to Xavi, he answers in a way that might be expected given that he is one of the ex-Barcelona players who will always see Guardiola as the doyen of his profession.

“I considered him the best coach in the world, even when he had not won any titles,” Xavi says of the man who put together the most beautifully assembled Barca side there may ever have been. “For me, he is still number one. All the players who pass through his hands are captivated.

“I don't want to compare myself to him — he has had an incredible career and I am just starting out. I just hope I can finish with his record — not for me, but for the club. That is what I work for.”

Xavi's coaching career began at Al Sadd in Qatar, where he told the players to think of the ball as their friend and it quickly became apparent he was not exaggerating when he described himself as “obsessed with possession”.

“He always shows us the possession stats, and it's never enough,” Santi Cazorla, the former Arsenal midfielder now at Al Sadd, told Cadena Ser radio. “His ideas are very clear — always have been. He wants the ball for us, and the opponents not to touch it.”

Xavi (right) impressed Santi Cazorla during their time together at Al Sadd in Qatar (Photo: Karim Jaafar/AFP via Getty Images)

This is the message Xavi has preached to the players at Camp Nou since he replaced Ronald Koeman in November 2021. “The ball is not a bomb — it's a treasure,” is one line, and you can imagine Guardiola nodding with approval.

Arteta is different, in one sense, because he worked alongside Guardiola as a coach rather than a player. They had three years together at City before Arteta's switch to Arsenal and, on the other side of Manchester, there is one man in particular who can testify how valuable it is to have that time, close-up, with Guardiola.

Erik ten Hag, the manager of Manchester United, collaborated with him for two years at Bayern Munich.

“I was able to experience his approach up close, and I learned a lot from that,” says Ten Hag, manager of Bayern's reserve team from 2013 to 2015. “Football in Germany has been different since Pep. The whole league changed because of his way of football. I watched almost every training (session). I learned a lot from his methods, how he transferred his philosophy to the pitch.”

Not just tactics, either. One of Ten Hag's observations was that Guardiola was so enthusiastic with his instructions that, after five minutes of listening to him, the players trained with remarkable intensity. Guardiola, he concluded, had an uncommon strength of personality.

Ten Hag saw for the first time a manager who was prepared to abandon convention and use David Alaba and Philipp Lahm as inverted full-backs. It is a tactic Arteta applies at Arsenal, predominantly through Oleksandr Zinchenko but also with Ainsley Maitland-Niles in his early days as Arsenal manager. Kompany does the same to enable Burnley to switch, in possession, to a 3-2-5 system, with Connor Roberts taking on the role that is these days occupied by John Stones at City.

At Bayern, Guardiola sometimes used his wide attackers, Franck Ribery and Arjen Robben, in central roles. Not many managers would have dared even to try it. Guardiola did — and Ten Hag loved his bravery, his willingness to experiment and, in turn, the trust he had from his players.

Erik ten Hag learned a lot from Pep Guardiola during their time at Bayern Munich (Photo: Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)

He saw how the manager would completely shut himself off from the outside world when he had a big game coming up. Guardiola would sit in his office, playing the game in his head, and everyone knew not to disturb him. Then, gradually, the ideas and tactics would form.

Maarten Meijer, the Dutch writer, spoke to Ten Hag about it in further detail for his 2022 biography about the man who won three Eredivisie championships with Ajax.

One passage details how Guardiola had marked Bayern's training pitches with extra lines to create “half-spaces”, vertical strips between the centre of the pitch and the wings. It was to help the players understand their positions and, Pep being Pep, it was about repeating, repeating and repeating his training drills until it became second nature.

“It's like being behind the wheel,” writes Meijer. “You don't think about the traffic rules, shifting the gears or pressing the brake on time; it happens automatically. The car becomes an extension of the driver. Everything that once was learned is now instinct. It's part of permanent memory, the hard drive.”

Ten Hag, in his Bayern years, was so meticulous in his work that people started calling him “Mini Pep”. The nickname did not last beyond Germany and it would be stretching the truth to think the two men had spent their days brainstorming. In reality, the first and second teams at Bayern are largely separate worlds.

Yet Ten Hag adopted the “half-spaces” idea and noted at Euro 2020 that Germany, under Joachim Low, seemed to have done the same.

Ten Hag had been brought up on the Dutch philosophy that possession is sacred. But Guardiola, he noted, had a follow-up rule. If the ball was lost, it had to be recaptured within seconds. “He is uncompromising in that,” Ten Hag says in a chapter named 'In Germany with Pep'. “His will is really the law. Sometimes that leads to clashes with players, but Guardiola has only grown in authority over the years.”

The lesson of history shows that is true in many ways. One of Guardiola's first acts at City was to move out Joe Hart, an England international. He also marginalised Yaya Toure and publicly criticised Sergio Aguero for not playing the way he wanted.

At Barcelona, he went even further, announcing his exit plan for Ronaldinho, Deco and Samuel Eto'o on his first day in the job. “These three are not in my mind for the future,” Guardiola said. “In fact, we will be going onwards without them. It's time for a restart.” Eto'o did help Guardiola win the Champions League that season, but left the following summer.

From left: Samuel Eto'o, Ronaldinho and Deco all failed to make it into Pep Guardiola's long-term plans at Barcelona (Photo: Lluis Gene/AFP via Getty Images)

Nobody could ever say Guardiola lacks guts — and, again, there is clear evidence that it has rubbed off on the two managers who are now trying to deprive him of the Premier League and FA Cup.

Arteta made it very clear he was the boss, and that his word was final, when he decided Arsenal ought to sever ties with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. Or just consider the way Ten Hag, in his getting-to-know-you phase at Old Trafford, dealt with Cristiano Ronaldo and all the issues surrounding the five-time Ballon d'Or winner.

They got their way because, as Guardiola can testify, there is no other option for an elite manager.

“Of course, I regularly talked with him,” Ten Hag says of Guardiola. “But most of all, I watched very carefully. I have written things down. I have adopted certain things and I implement them in my own way.”

Taylor Harwood-Bellis has thought about this topic a few times. The 21-year-old centre-half has been in City's system since the age of six and made his first-team debut under Guardiola in 2019.

He has since been on loan to Anderlecht, where Kompany had his first taste of management, before rejoining him at Burnley in a season-long arrangement. Harwood-Bellis, in other words, is well-placed to discuss the similarities between the two managers.

“The biggest is their mentality,” says the England Under-21 international. “How hard they work, their determination to be the best and, when they get there, to stay there.

“Pep's one of the best, if not the best, managers ever. But if you really want to understand it, you have to put in a lot of time off the pitch. You have to ask questions, do your own digging to understand his principles and what exactly he wants.”

Kompany, he says, is that man: always inquisitive, always wanting more. One story is of him losing his temper at half-time in Burnley's first match since promotion was secured. They were drawing 0-0 with second-placed Sheffield United, who had lost a player to a red card, and Kompany did not like what he had seen. “If you slack off, he'll notice within minutes,” says Harwood-Bellis. Full-time: Burnley 2-0 Sheffield United.

Burnley's players are encouraged to keep the ball, pin their opponents back and be patient if the breakthrough does not come early. The emphasis is on attacking, controlling games, moving and wearing down the opposition. They have scored 81 times in the Championship this season; to put that into context, their combined total from the previous two years in the Premier League was 67. Burnley had surpassed that total before the end of February.

“The first thing you need is top-quality players,” says Kompany, whose future appointment as City manager was predicted by Guardiola earlier this season. “Then it's about the style you give them and, for me, this is what I know. What I'm teaching my players is what I understand.”

Kompany studied and took notes from Guardiola and Arteta while he was injured for long spells at City. He would speak to them about why they deployed certain systems and tactics. Plus they all share the traits of being workaholics, almost obsessed with what they do. Kompany regularly puts in 14-hour days and is described by one colleague, in the best possible sense, as “the most intense man you will ever meet”. Which, funnily enough, is exactly how City's staff talk about Guardiola.

Ask Kompany, though, and he will say his influences come from as far and wide as Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool and Diego Simeone's Atletico Madrid. Manuel Pellegrini, the former City manager, gets a mention, as does Roberto Mancini, another of Guardiola's predecessors, for his “absolute dedication to the details of defending”.

“What you get with Pep is absolute control of the game and dominance; that's the key component of everything he does,” says Kompany. “If you compare Xavi's style of play with Pep's, Mikel with Pep and myself with Pep, I can understand why you would draw links. But you would see some differences because we have all been influenced by different coaches.”

Vincent Kompany cites Pep Guardiola (right) as a key figure in his managerial career – but not his only influence (Photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)

What he is saying, in other words, is that it is just not a case of Guardiola sprinkling his magic over the people around him. Arteta, for example, credits Johan Cruyff for the way he sees football. Kompany, named on Sunday as the Championship's manager of the season, says the same after being encouraged to study Cruyff, as does his assistant, Craig Bellamy. So does Guardiola and so does Txiki Begiristain, City's director of football, who keeps a Cruyff book (and another of Brian Clough) in his office.

Arteta can also draw on five years as a player under Arsene Wenger. Yet it is one of the oddities of Wenger's career how few of the players associated with his Arsenal teams have become high-end managers. Sir Alex Ferguson, too, if we are talking about a level in England where trophies are won and championships chased.

As for Jose Mourinho, one line in Ten Hag's biography jumps off the page. Ten Hag is using a chess reference to explain why so many coaches want to take on Guardiola's ideas. “When it comes to tactics,” says the United manager, “we don't talk about Jose Mourinho, who always plays with black.”

Guardiola, in turn, will say he has learned just as much from working with Arteta as the other way around. They meet again at the Etihad Stadium on Wednesday. It is the game that could decide this season's title race and, if it all goes Arsenal's way, there is some irony that the man Arteta, Xavi and Kompany all regard as their biggest influence will be the odd one out when it comes to lifting the championship trophies.