Why Pep Guardiola coup shows Manchester City are the best club in Europe

Signing players in the January transfer window: how old fashioned. Manchester City showed themselves to be masters of the modern way of football by announcing, just as the window closed, far more compelling news: they had signed a new coach.

Not any old coach, either. The finest in the world, the man most coveted in the game, the one everyone else wanted will be arriving in the summer. Into the job that once accommodated Mel Machin, Jimmy Frizzell and Brian Horton comes Pep Guardiola. Nothing tells us more about the changing status of City than that.

Because what Guardiola’s arrival in the summer demonstrates is not simply that City have more money than anyone else (though obviously they weren’t going to land a man of Guardiola’s status unless they could afford to pay him £15 million a year and promise him prodigious backing in the transfer market).

What is more telling is that this is a club that plans, that this is an operation with a clear and positive route map for the future. And it is that which really scares the fans of other clubs: this lot aren’t just loaded, they seem to know precisely what to do with all that cash. Which, in football, is something of a first.

A trip to the Etihad gives physical demonstration of the plan. The new stand – built with breathtaking speed and efficiency – towers over the magnificent spread of the new training complex. Here, from the manicured lawns to the state-of-the-art ice baths, every centimetre oozes quality. This is not just the best there is, but the best it can possibly be. Not a corner has been cut, not a penny sheared from the budget.

The purpose of the training facility is two-fold. Clearly it is designed like that to give the players the best possible platform for performance. With nothing left to chance there can be no caviling. This is the Roy Keane approach: remove the possibility of excuse making. But there is another reason. This is a place that makes a statement. Whoever you are, from the Chinese president to an eight-year-old potential academy starlet, it is impossible to walk round the campus and not find your jaw agape. It is impossible not to think you have arrived at the very apex of sporting preparation.

Thus it was that when Guardiola was considering his next move after Bayern Munich, one look at what was going on in East Manchester would have been enough to convince him that everything the club’s representatives said about their ambition was accurate. This is a place that means business.

Everything the club does is inter-connected. For three years they had been pursuing Guardiola. From the moment Txiki Begiristain and Ferran Soriano, two former Barcelona executives and old Guardiola allies, were brought into the club, that had been the plan.

To become the best club in Europe, they needed everything to be better than what existed elsewhere. They have a stadium, they have a training complex, now they have the coach they believe can best deliver on all that humungous investment. Never mind that it took three years and £250m of building work to secure his appointment, they have done what they set out to do.

The contrast with the ownership down the road has never been more stark. However much United fans might baulk at the idea that anything their neighbours do should impinge on their own activity, the signing of Guardiola by City has cast a searing light on their own club’s current limitations.

While at the Eithad the owners invest and plan, at Old Trafford the same vision is conspicuously lacking. The Glazers have not added a single piece of infrastructural development to the operation since they took over. Across the last decade, their priority has seemingly been to grow the commercial operation and sweat the asset to increase their dividend. Blessed for the first few years of their tenure by the excellence of Sir Alex Ferguson, their lack of proper stewardship has been horribly exposed since he retired. Never mind a plan, when it comes to football the Glazers haven’t a clue.

Maybe that should be no surprise: they are American mall owners after all. But what is even more telling is they have not recruited proper executives to help them. The Abu Dhabi royal family clearly are no football experts. But what they have done at City is to delegate the operation to people who are. People like the Barca boys and the brilliant head of communications Vicky Kloss. At United, commerce is all that matters. They have good salesmen, hard-headed wheeler-dealers who can sign up the next Far Eastern pot noodle partner. But not good football people.

Ed Woodward has been an unmitigated disaster since he became executive chairman, failing miserably in the transfer market, unable to recruit a single world class player, instead frequently allowing United’s interest to be used as leverage by the cunning to extract bigger salaries from their clubs. And now comes the most telling critique of his regime: while the two best young coaches in Europe have been recruited by his closest rivals, he is left with a tired old dinosaur in charge, with a rookie who has never managed a club before waiting in the wings. Will Ryan Giggs be any good as a manager? No-one knows. Least of all Woodward. While City plan and invest, he firefights.

Of course the City owners are not doing all this for altruistic reasons. They have their own agenda. They bought into English football not to improve it, but to promote the interests of their country on a world stage. The happy coincidence for City followers is that they have recognised the surest way of fulfilling that ambition is by making their property demonstrably the finest in the world. At United meanwhile the owners have a less elevated purpose: they want to get richer. Not tomorrow, but today. And the surest way of doing that is to up the profits, not invest for the long term.

This is what the signing of Guardiola told us about Manchester’s two giants: one has a set of owners determined to rule the game into the foreseeable future. The other has a set of owners focused on the bottom line. You suspect of those two philosophies there can only be one winner on the pitch.