Why signing Rayan Cherki could make Manchester City abandon Pep Guardiola's ideas for good

It’s been some years now since Pep Guardiola essentially invented tiki-taka at Barcelona, but ever since he established his blueprint, he’s followed its fundamental principles even as he moved to Bayern Munich and then to Manchester City, and stuck to its foundational concepts even as he adapted and adjusted his tactics to the changing times – but if he signs Rayan Cherki, will it mark the end of a long tactical road for the Spaniard?

According to a number of sources, including the indefatigable Italian transfer aggregator Fabrizio Romano, City have already agreed personal terms ahead of a potential move for the versatile Lyon forward. It would appear to mark another step away from tiki-taka, and away from the ideas that earned Guardiola a reputation as one of Europe’s finest coaches. But is that such a bad thing, and will Cherki change Manchester City for the better?

Why Rayan Cherki would make Manchester City a very different team

The key creative force behind Lyon’s Europa League run and the man responsible for 32 goal contributions across all competitions last season, Cherki is undeniably an immense talent, one earmarked for potential greatness for many years. On paper, however, he is also the antithesis of the idea of a ‘Guardiola Player’.

While the methods used by Manchester City when they won the treble in the 2022/23 season differed in many regards from those practised by the great Barcelona team that Guardiola marshalled between 2008 and 2012, several core principles remained consistent. Pass and move at speed. Position yourself in relation to the player in possession of the ball, not your notional position on the teamsheet or on the pitch. Press hard off the ball. Pass, again, then move again. Repeat until the opposition is dizzy.

The name tiki-taka, which so quickly summons up that image of relentless short passing, was never quite as appropriate of a name for Guardiola’s style and philosophy as the Spanish phrase juego de posición – ‘positional play’. The core concept was that the players would move in packs, designed to create a constant string of overloads on and off the ball all over the pitch. Whenever Barcelona or Bayern or City played, and wherever the ball was, Guardiola’s team aimed to have more players in that area with a better idea of how to earn and retain possession.

It’s a system which requires players who weren’t just technically adroit (as Cherki most assuredly is) but also players who are positionally aware and disciplined, who have a high work rate off the ball, and who are prepared to forego high-risk, high-reward options in favour of recycling possession in less dramatic fashion. That is not a description which appears to fit Cherki.

Cherki’s success this season hasn’t come from efficiency or simple passes or sharp positional play, but from a constant willingness to play a killer final ball, to get the ball down and run past defenders, to try out tricks and flicks and the audacious and improbable.

Cherki beats a man on the run nearly three times per match right now, plays almost nine ‘progressive’ passes per game – more than anyone else in the big five leagues – and is constantly looking for a way to create or get into a dangerous area. He has been startlingly successful, but he has done it on his terms, his impressive numbers of goals and assists a product of his talent, not the tactical system of which he is a part.

He is becoming a superlative creator and an increasingly consistent goalscorer, but is largely ineffective in the high press and arguably disinterested in such mundane grunt work – an argument, at least, that the French media have been all too happy to make.

When one imagines the concept of a ‘Guardiola Player’, they may think of technique or of discipline, but Cherki has routinely been accused of lacking the latter. Granted, such insults are routinely aimed at young players perceived not to be carrying their weight, especially young players of colour, but the stories claiming that the 21-year-old is difficult, hard to get along with, and unwilling to follow instructions or play nicely with team-mates have remarkably persistent. Either there has been some truth to the rumours, or some people in the French media really have it in for him.

Happily, those negative stories have become fewer and further between over the last year, probably a simple response to a season in which Cherki has turned undeniable talent into equally undeniable production – going from three goals in 2023/24 to 12 this past season, and from nine assists to 20.

Most of those numbers have been racked up in a distinctly un-Guardiolalike manner. Cherki is not a man who thrives within a system, but by breaking that of his opponents. He does things his own daredevil way – and as deeply entertaining as it is to watch, it’s perhaps also indicative of a major shift in Guardiola’s priorities and ideas.

Why Pep Guardiola appears to be changing gears at the Etihad

Guardiola has, of course, beaten talented players into the appropriate shape for his system before – with Jack Grealish perhaps the most prominent recent example.

A piratical individualist at Aston Villa, Grealish had his wings clipped once he moved to the Etihad and was transformed from a loose cannon who could tear defences apart on his own into an efficient, mechanistic passer who rarely embarked on the kind of mazy dribbles with which he made his name. But the signs suggest that Guardiola is unlikely to force Cherki to undertake a similar transformation.

Both Savinho and Jérémy Doku are recent additions to City’s attack whose individualistic instincts are not being curbed in the slightest. They have been given the freedom to dribble, to take on their man, and to run with the ball and create space and chances in the way they see fit.

The results have, thus far, been inconsistent, but the concept is clear – with Erling Haaland up front, another player who struggles to fit within the strictures of the Old Guardiola Ways, City are shifting to an attacking methodology more focussed on the talents of the individual player, not on what the team is capable of when acting as a unit.

This may be a philosophical shift which Guardiola believes is necessitated by circumstance. As the organised high press became the default across Europe’s top leagues, defenders became better at handling and exploiting an overly aggressive press, counter-attacks became more effective, and committing large numbers to a single area of the pitch started to look more like a liability than a winning strategy.

If overloads no longer work and instead leave a team vulnerable, with teams now far readier to exploit the space left in other parts of the field, then it makes sense to move on from the concentrated short passing game and instead to rely upon players who can beat defenders by different means. Cherki, in that regard, fits the bill. He can beat defenders with his passing or on the run, with a twist and a turn or a blast of pace. But he’s unlikely to double back and look for a short pass quite as often as Guardiola would once have demanded.

Whether this change of style and system works or not remains to be seen. It isn’t a complete overhaul – after all, the defence and midfield still has plenty of disciplined players who can keep things tight, organised and efficient – but the age of Haaland and Cherki is likely to look very different from that of Sergio Agüero and Kevin de Bruyne, the player Cherki is partly replacing.

Manchester City and Guardiola are moving into a new era. A more chaotic, more roguish and perhaps more entertaining era. It will, however, have a hard time becoming a more successful era, given everything that has come before – and we may soon find out whether Guardiola can continue to look like a world-class coach in the age of the individual.

If he can’t, then there would be some irony, given that so many of the recent tactical trends in football, the shift towards press resistance and ball-carrying defenders and quick counter-attacks, is a direct response to the organised pressing systems that Guardiola developed and largely defined over a decade ago.

And whether this new direction succeeds or fails, Cherki seems set to be one of the faces of it. This is a very different player to De Bruyne, or to Bernardo Silva or any of the Manchester City players that came before him – no less gifted, perhaps, and no less dangerous, but utterly apart in the ways by which he looks to pick defences apart. It will be a fascinating experiment.