I get the impression that Guardiola was too thick to understand City's status in the hierarchy of English football when he accepted the job. People outside England are normally insulated from perceptions in England and he probably thought City won't have a problem being venerated as the biggest team in England as soon as the trophies started to pile up. I doubt his legacy would take a massive battering as a consequence of him having managed City, but it'll still be tainted a bit. City are too synthetic for this success to matter.
That’s not right, he was definitely aware of it and in fact in a way that was the appeal for him - there are quotes from him on taking the job where he talks of City as a club with no history, as a blank slate for him to do his thing. It isn’t true but you can see how it looks like it from his perspective so let’s go with it.
Where he’ll be confused - and to be fair I’m also surprised by this - is that this is still where they are, after four titles and a load of cups. This isn’t how Chelsea got treated, and there’s very little difference between them. Chelsea were a joke minnow club when they reached the cup final in 1994 yet they got treated as a legitimate big club as soon as they won the league.
Here are a few suggestions why:
a. Chelsea are in London, so the media didn’t ignore them;
b. Chelsea play in an original, albeit totally rebuilt, stadium;
c. Chelsea’s run-up felt longer, and even those few years pissing about Europe with Dennis Wise and Franck LeBoeuf have somehow mutated into an impression of history; City’s equivalent is losing 8-1 to Middlesbrough and Stuart Pearce bringing on David James upfront;
d. even City’s first title still felt like a joke, whereas Chelsea stormed to theirs;
e. Chelsea’s football/personnel translated as culturally English; definitely not the case with City;
f. City are boring in almost every way; Chelsea had the good luck to look like pantomime villains once Mourinho took over; the papers love a panto villain;
g. to an extent Chelsea were expanding, alongside the premiership, into
terra incognita; City aren’t, they’re muscling out and diminishing existing forces; in other words Chelsea did to us roughly what City are doing to United, but we were still hitting back and growing too, whereas that might not be the case for Utd; or to put it another way, it was all new money then, whereas for some reason now we believe the status quo in 2006 was the natural order of things;
h. Chelsea did it first and people got suckered in by it; ignoring City is a subconscious way of making amends.
My guess is that e. is the key point, but I dunno really, maybe there are things I’m missing. I never really understood why nobody ever talks about Jaws II either.
