Pep Guardiola is the managerial Galactico - and he's Manchester City's

One of the world’s most coveted managers announced his availability last April. The message from Manchester City was clear. They were not interested in Jurgen Klopp.

The only living manager to win the Champions League three times came onto the market in May. City’s stance was the same. They did not want Carlo Ancelotti either.

City only really wanted one manager. And, three years later and at the second time of asking, they got him.

[FULL REPORT: Pep Guardiola taking over at Manchester City as Manuel Pellegrini announces exit]

Pep Guardiola’s arrival this summer may have been an open secret, but confirmation represents a coup anyway. It could be seen as the moment when City, a club who have never reached the quarter-finals of the Champions League, announced their entry into the ranks of the European superpowers.

They have had money in abundance since Sheikh Mansour’s 2008 takeover. Now they have combined it with credibility. Luring Guardiola to the Etihad Stadium represents the culmination of long-term thinking. It is easy to talk of emulating Barcelona, and altogether harder to do it.

City brought in chief executive Ferran Soriano and director of football Txiki Begiristain from the Nou Camp. Their employment – Begiristain’s in particular – seemed predicated on the belief they could bring Guardiola to Manchester, and not the half of it with the greater trophy-gathering history, the larger worldwide fanbase and the bigger transfer budget.

Begiristain tended to speak to his former Barcelona team-mate once a week. A hefty phone bill amounts to money well spent; now there will be fewer complaints that he seems to overpay on virtually every transfer. Guardiola is not merely City’s dream manager. He is Roman Abramovich’s. He is almost certainly Manchester United’s too, but they had long since resigned themselves to seeing Guardiola materialise at the ground Sir Alex Ferguson used to deride as “the Temple of Doom”.

Who, City are entitled to ask, is feeling gloomy now?

Guardiola has the capacity to make grown men feel giddy. He is a stylist and a success story, a tactics nerd with populist appeal. He is a revolutionary who is nonetheless part of a tradition forged at the Nou Camp. He outfoxed City and illustrated his brilliance in their presence. His Bayern team have outplayed City twice, even when one ended in defeat. The Barcelona side he bequeathed to Tito Vilanova, Tata Martino and Luis Enrique have done the same on an annual basis. Guardiola has left a legacy.

The difference is that he inherited a Barcelona side who had won the Champions League two years earlier and a Bayern team who had just conquered Europe. They were the aristocrats. City are still the arrivistes. Guardiola could catapult them to another level.

If there was an inevitability to the 45-year-old coming to England at some stage, the significance is that he chose City. They have shown they are serious, whereas the trigger-happy Abramovich and the scattergun spenders at Old Trafford have not convinced him.

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City have demonstrated they have allied ambition with strategic planning. They have the global group of clubs and, quietly, they are accumulating the resources to give them staying power. They declared a first profit under the current regime last year. Their overall income and commercial revenue were both bigger than Chelsea’s.

That capacity to generate funds permitted last summer’s £160 million spending spree. That it included Kevin de Bruyne, the Bundesliga’s reigning player of the year and one who attracted Bayern’s interest, has an added significance.

So, too, the fact that City are monitoring Schalke’s Leroy Sane, a player Guardiola has praised in the past. They sold Edin Dzeko, scarcely a Guardiola-style player, and shifted from 4-4-2 to 4-2-3-1.

They have set the scene. What they wanted was football’s equivalent of an Oscar-winning director to arrive and make the picture all the brighter.

In admitting they wanted Guardiola in 2012, City made public the reality that Manuel Pellegrini was their second choice. It is the Chilean’s destiny to be obscured by others and, within a few minutes of him announcing his departure, City had ratified the announcement of his successor. Poor Pellegrini was relegated to a footnote again.

He deserves praise, for changing City’s image so they had an added attraction to Guardiola, and for producing a team that scored 156 goals in a season; though partly because of their spending and partly because of his low-profile approach, he has received comparatively little credit for it.

Guardiola has a greater magnetism. The superlatives tend to flow in his direction. There is a fascination with him that will propel City to greater prominence, just as his record of reaching at least the Champions League semi-finals should take the team to greater heights.

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Because, despite the accumulation of trophies and the acquisition of high-class players, City have tended to be slightly overlooked amid the obsessive interest in United. One national newspaper rarely attended Pellegrini’s press conferences, because they were deemed too boring.

Those days are over; life out of the limelight ended on 1 February 2016. City’s website promptly crashed under the weight of those trying to read about the incoming manager’s appointment.

They better get used to the extra attention. It is a guarantee with Guardiola. He is the managerial Galactico - and he is City’s.