Pep Guardiola publicly takes one of his stars to task and criticizes him harshly. Now the success coach has apologized for his statements.
The coach Pep Guardiola is known for his temperament. But also for getting his team behind him. The teams that the Catalan coaches are usually a close-knit unit. Talking badly about players is not one of the things that characterizes the 53-year-old successful coach. And yet in December 2022 he made a comment that caused a stir.
“He’s not injured, he arrived here overweight,” Guardiola said of Kalvin Philips at the time. “I don’t know why. But he’s not in the right condition to train.”
The midfielder returned to Manchester City after the World Cup in Qatar and was not taken into account by the coach in the important cup game against Liverpool FC. The comment hit Philipps hard, as he later admitted.
Guardiola admits mistakes
“It was a huge setback for my self-confidence,” Philips recently told the English media. The 28-year-old English international is now wearing the jersey of City’s league rivals West Ham United. He was loaned there by his club until the summer to gain match practice. He recently had a difficult time with England’s reigning champions.
With high hopes, Philips moved from Leeds United to the “Skyblues” in the summer of 2022 for a transfer fee of around 52 million euros, but has only been in the starting line-up six times since then. In the first half of the current season he only made four short appearances in the Premier League.
Now Guardiola apologized to his player. “I’m sorry. I apologized to him, I’m really sorry.” The coach also publicly admitted that his actions were wrong. “I talked about it. I have here [vor den Medien] talked about it, that has never happened to me before without speaking to the player about it first.”
“Won’t accuse him”
Things aren’t going particularly well for Philips at his new club either. In the first games for West Ham, the defensive midfield specialist was involved in several goals conceded. He was also sent off in the game against Nottingham Forest when he received two yellow cards within three minutes. The “Hammers” lost the game 0-2. Philip’s contract with Manchester City runs until 2026.
The fact that Guardiola has apparently learned from the incident is shown by his reaction to the ongoing form crisis of his star striker Erling Haaland. The Norwegian is currently struggling with jamming in front of the goal. “Nine shots is a good statistic,” said the coach at the weekend after his team’s disappointing 1-1 draw in the Premier League against Chelsea.
The former defensive specialist added self-deprecatingly: “I played eleven seasons and scored eleven goals – I’m not the right person to give tips to strikers. He’ll score again in the next game.” Guardiola added that he “will not accuse” Haaland. “This is football, these are people.”