Pep Guardiola is preparing to end his decade-long tenure at Manchester City following the club’s final Premier League fixture this Sunday, with Enzo Maresca emerging as the leading internal candidate to inherit the job, sources have told Sky Sports News.
The report, which broke during Monday Night Football and sent shockwaves through English football, has not been formally confirmed by the club. City sources continue to insist Guardiola remains their manager under a contract running through 2027. Guardiola himself has said repeatedly in recent days that he is happy at the club and has a year remaining on his deal.
But the picture inside the organization tells a different story.
Sources indicate City’s football department has already begun contingency planning around the assumption that Guardiola will not continue into next season. Those preparations have advanced far enough that a successor has been identified — a detail that, by itself, suggests the outcome is closer to settled than either the club or its manager has publicly acknowledged.
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Maresca is the name. The 44-year-old Italian served as Guardiola’s assistant during City’s 2022-23 UEFA Champions League-winning campaign and was most recently Chelsea’s head coach before leaving Stamford Bridge in January. Guardiola himself once called Maresca “one of the best managers in the world” — an endorsement that now reads as something close to a passing of the torch.
If Sunday’s game is indeed Guardiola’s last in the City dugout, it will close one of the most decorated managerial runs in the history of the sport.
He arrived at the Etihad in February 2016, a year and a half removed from his time at Bayern Munich, already carrying a reputation as the most tactically sophisticated coach of his generation. What followed reshaped English football in ways that will take years to fully measure. City won 20 trophies across his decade in charge — six Premier League titles, the 2023 Champions League, the FIFA Club World Cup, three FA Cups, four EFL Cups, and three Community Shields.
The Premier League, in particular, was rebuilt around what City became under Guardiola. Ball retention, high defensive lines, positional play drilled to a level of precision that forced every serious club in England to reckon with a new standard. Some adapted. Most chased.
News of his potential departure landed hard among those watching closely from outside the club.
Sky Sports pundit Gary Neville said the timing — breaking on a Monday night, hours before a City match — signaled that whatever is happening at the club had progressed beyond the point of containment. He placed the significance of the moment alongside Kenny Dalglish leaving Liverpool, Sir Alex Ferguson departing Manchester United, and Jurgen Klopp’s exit from Anfield — three of the most consequential managerial departures in Premier League history. Neville added that City would be unhappy the story surfaced the way it did.
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Jamie Carragher, also on the broadcast, offered a more pragmatic read of how the information got out. Once a decision involves a successor, club staff, and weeks of internal planning, secrecy becomes a numbers game. Too many people carrying the same information in a compressed amount of time — it surfaces. He suggested the process has likely been underway for several weeks, possibly longer.
That timeline would align with Guardiola’s public behavior. His answers on his future have been consistent in their phrasing but notably careful in what they don’t say — he has confirmed his happiness at the club and referenced his remaining contract, without once offering a direct statement that he will stay.
The distinction has not gone unnoticed.
City’s end-of-season positioning gives the departure, if confirmed, a complicated backdrop. The club spent much of 2024-25 grinding through injury crises and inconsistent form before steadying this year. A changing of the guard at this particular moment — with Maresca available and already familiar to the club’s culture — is either fortuitous timing or the product of longer-range planning than anyone is currently admitting to.
Guardiola built something at City that no English club had seen before. Whoever replaces him inherits not just the squad and the infrastructure, but the weight of what has already been done there — and the implicit question of whether any of it can be sustained without the man who built it.
Sunday will answer the first question. The rest will take longer.