Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City documentary offers an unexpected Arsenal lesson as Gabriel Martinelli’s future brings a difficult question into sharper focus.
With a bit of time on my hands over the last couple of days, travelling to and from Leeds overnight, I watched the entirety of the Pep Guardiola documentary, A Beautiful Obsession.
“Wait a moment, isn’t this an Arsenal website?” I hear you cry.
Yes, yes, it is. No, you haven’t accidentally found yourself on Blue Moon FC, or anything like that. It’s just that this has been my primary football input over the last few days, and there were things about the documentary I found interesting in their own right, especially when viewed through a red and white lens.
The most obvious one was just how tired Guardiola became as manager of Manchester City, something he made ever more clear to his players as his last two Premier League seasons ended in failure.
You see, I had a theory last year that, as much as the red cards and injuries Arsenal had to deal with mattered, there was something else going on too.
My belief was that the stress of having to win every week at the back end of the 2023-24 season, as a reminder, City dropped only six points from their final 17 matches, with Arsenal dropping five but crucially already three points behind, basically killed both teams for the following season.
Before any Liverpool fans start, I’m not saying you didn’t deserve to win the league, I wouldn’t be so classless, you absolutely did.
Anyone who finishes top after 38 games deserves to, amirite??
But it seemed clear to me that the run City went on at the end of the 2023-24 season was Guardiola extracting every last drop of juice he could out of the likes of Kevin De Bruyne, Bernardo Silva et al.
In Arsenal’s case, the squad was young enough to come again.
More importantly, perhaps, Mikel Arteta was young enough to come again, driven enough to come again.
Guardiola, it seems, had run out of juice.
I remember watching, stunned, funnily enough, I was in Leeds at the time, as Viktor Gyokeres (whatever happened to him?) and Sporting Lisbon absolutely ran through an abject City side in the autumn of 2024.
On one of the goals Sporting scored on the break, I remember De Bruyne losing the ball on the edge of the Sporting box. As they went up the other end and put it away, I saw De Bruyne finally ambling back into the frame and it became clear to me that the great Belgian’s legs had gone.
And I wondered how Guardiola could tolerate that.
Clearly, he couldn’t, as City arrived at the difficult decision to part ways with De Bruyne. It is clear from the documentary that he didn’t want to go. More than that, neither did his family.
But there’s no escaping Father Time. As De Bruyne was presented to the Etihad Stadium one last time, Guardiola was visibly and understandably in bits.
The player who encapsulated all that was good about Guardiola’s City was no more.
I think it was probably the right call. The difficulty City have had is replacing him with someone, anyone, who can find the consistent magic the Belgian did.
But I was watching all of this and finding it very difficult not to think about Gabriel Martinelli.
I’ve had conflicting thoughts about the Brazilian. The headline being that if we were going to sell him for sixty million notes and then replace him with £100 million Pedro Neto, I’d rather keep him, thank you very much.
However, I also feel, and have felt for a long time now, that much as I love this guy who joined us for £7 million as an 18-year-old, it’s not going to get any better than what we’ve already seen.
I love the work rate, I love how much he loves playing for Arsenal, but Aaron Ramsdale and Emile Smith Rowe clearly loved playing for Arsenal. It didn’t save them when the level needed to go up.
As the team has evolved, Martinelli hasn’t and, if £60 million is on offer, then Arsenal have to take it.
Especially if we are to change the perception of the club as bad sellers.
The chat around Martinelli and how he has been treated is quite interesting to me.
I spent a year in Bilbao as part of my degree course in 1998-99 and, reading the sports pages, the quickest way for a boy like me to immerse myself in a language, I quickly became familiar with a phrase, “el entrenador no cuenta con el”, which means “the coach is not counting on him”.
And, of course, it referred to a player Athletic Club, Real Madrid or Barcelona were trying to sell.
At that time, I wasn’t used to seeing something like that stated so baldly in our sports pages. It still doesn’t seem that common, but I think this is exactly where Arteta has got to with Martinelli.
Perhaps there has been a delay in communicating this to him and I feel bad for him if this is the case, but I think it clarifies why he has not featured in either of the first two matchday squads of the season.
As a symbol of the rebirth of Arsenal, it’s sad to see him go, of course it is, but what memories, stranger-hugging memories, he leaves us with.
For his part, he gets to leave with a Premier League winners’ medal wrapped around his neck. And having played a small, but very important, part in winning that medal.
Arsenal, perhaps surprisingly, don’t feature too much in A Beautiful Obsession.
The 5-1 hammering dished out to them last season perhaps one indignity too far in a season full of them for the outgoing champions.
Likewise, there is no mention of Martinelli’s last-minute equaliser which, even so early in last season, may have changed the course of it for both teams.
If you were to thank Martinelli for nothing else, you would always have to thank him for that.
Of course, Arsenal do feature rather heavily towards the end. Not only have we somehow, by City’s own data, overtaken them as the team most likely to win the league, but the denouement to the season featured not one, but two clashes which were supposed to be season-defining.
Yet, as the music swells along with the two apparently massive psychological blows City managed to land on us, I sit there with a huge smile on my face knowing that, for Guardiola and City, there is no Hollywood ending coming.
Watching the City players celebrate following the league game, I feel a bit like I do whenever I watch Brad Pitt‘s Detective Mills taunting John Doe as the police car rolls towards its terrible final destination in the film, Seven.
You do not know what’s coming, you’re not going to like it.
I think there might be a warning in this documentary for Arsenal about going too far down the “win now” road with their player profiles, but that’s not for this article.
In the end, the only reference to Arsenal winning the league comes as the players watch Eberechi Eze‘s magnificent strike against Newcastle United and then in Guardiola’s words as he consoles the dressing room after Bournemouth.
The shattered faces there a stark contrast to the jubilation we were all living through in the very same moment.
It’s a jubilation we continue to live through now.
I’m not going to talk about the game last week as it’s old news now. I will say it was great to watch us play with such verve and aggression, dare I say swagger, as to render the second 45 minutes a bit pointless, well, for Coventry City, anyway.
It was the first time I’ve ever been to our first home game as defending champions and it felt a bit new. I guess the feeling was shared across the ground as we turned the “second again” taunts back on Coventry and the rest of the footballing world, “Champions Again!”
In the second half, it was like someone in the Clock End remembered what we’d done last season and the chant “3-0 to the Champions” went up for the first time.
I’m sure it won’t be the last.
- A Beautiful Obsession: What Arsenal can learn from Pep Guardiola documentaryPep Guardiola’s Manchester City documentary offers an unexpected Arsenal lesson as Gabriel Martinelli’s future brings a difficult question into sharper focus. With a bit of time on my hands over the last couple of days, travelling to and from Leeds overnight, I watched the entirety of the Pep Guardiola documentary, A Beautiful Obsession. “Wait a…
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