Pep Guardiola sought a challenge at every stop of his managerial career. Whether it was swapping Barcelona B for Barcelona after just one season, moving to Bayern Munich or taking on the Premier League with Manchester City, he has usually come out on top.

On his first day at the Etihad Stadium in 2016, he admitted that, despite trophies in Spain and Germany, the question on everyone’s lips ahead of his arrival in England was: “How good is Pep?” He has already answered it once with 18 trophies in nine years in Manchester.

But amid a swirl of change at City and at the center of English soccer, he’s facing the prospect of having to answer it all over again. In a career full of challenges, this is perhaps one of the biggest yet.

Had things played out differently, Guardiola might already be enjoying his retirement on a beach in the Maldives or a golf course in Portugal. He chose to stay at City, in part, because the beginning of this past season — only the second to end without a trophy during his spell at the Etihad — was so difficult and he didn’t want to leave the club in a mess. It appears he also realized the club would find it far easier to hand over to a new manager in a summer that didn’t include the added complication of a Club World Cup.

Having decided to stay and sign a contract extension until 2027, he has taken on the task of trying to build another title-winning team. It’s just that the landscape now is very different.

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Of the squad he picked for the Champions League final against Inter Milan in Istanbul just two years ago, 15 players — including Kevin De Bruyne, Ederson, Kyle Walker and Ilkay Gündogan — have either left or been moved out to the fringes.

It’s not just the personnel who have changed. At the same time as dealing with huge squad turnover, Guardiola is also trying to adapt to what he views as a shift in the balance of the Premier League.

At one point this past season when discussing the success of teams like Newcastle, Bournemouth and Brighton, he said that “modern football is not positional, you have to ride the rhythm.” It was quite the admission from a coach who has built an empire on a strict framework of positions and movements.

After City’s Champions League defeat to Real Madrid in February, he said his “tactics don’t work like they used to.” Earlier this season he insisted he would “never ever change his beliefs” and still likes his team to make “a thousand, million passes.”

It seems, though, he has reached an acceptance that he has to change with the times.

This season, he’s trying to marry his own desire for control with more high pressing and quicker, more direct attacks to mirror what’s happening elsewhere in the league. It’s one of the reasons he picked Pep Lijnders as his assistant after the Dutchman played such a key role in developing Jürgen Klopp’s “heavy metal” style at Liverpool.

It’s a nice idea, trying to merge elements of two of the most successful teams in the modern Premier League era, but it has come with some teething problems.

After starting with an eye-catching 4-0 win at Wolves to open the 2025-26 season, City lost their next two games. In defeats to Tottenham and Brighton, they conceded almost identical goals when fast breaks exploited gaping holes at the back — gaps made more pronounced by the high defensive line favored by Lijnders.

It’s something Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim will have no doubt noticed ahead of the Manchester derby at the Etihad on Sunday. City will kick off against United one point and four places below their neighbors in the table. They’re already six points behind champions Liverpool, who can now call on new £125 million striker Alexander Isak after the international break.

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No team since Manchester United in 1992-93 has lost two of their first three games and still gone on to win the league. Even at this early stage, there’s a lot of ground to make up if Guardiola wants to regain the trophy he lifted six times in seven years between 2017 and 2024.

But if it’s not going to be this season for City and Guardiola, then when? Guardiola has a contract for the next two years, but staff have given up trying to predict when he might call it quits.

There’s a feeling in some corners of the City Football Academy that this could yet be his last season. There are others who feel that, even though he has admitted he’s approaching the end, the 54-year-old could still be convinced to sign another new contract. That would depend very much on his own energy levels and whether the working relationship with director of football Hugo Viana — who has taken over from Guardiola’s great friend Txiki Begiristain — is running smoothly.

Either way, City bosses decided a long time ago that Guardiola has earned the right to decide how and when he goes. He has accepted that this past season was so bad in terms of City’s specific goals that he might have been axed by any other top club.

At the end of his 26 years at United, Sir Alex Ferguson bowed out as a champion after winning the title in 2013. Guardiola’s achievements deserve the same finale.

To give himself the perfect send-off he’ll need to piece together another great team capable of thriving in a different age of the Premier League. It’s another big challenge to tick off the list.

Christian Pulisic has downplayed the controversy between himself and Mauricio Pochettino, saying his relationship with the United States coach is good.

A star USMNT player, Pulisic decided to skip the Concacaf Gold Cup to rest after two long seasons with AC Milan. He offered to play in a pair of friendlies ahead of the tournament, which Pochettino rejected because he wanted to keep one group together. Pulisic was then criticized by some former American players.

Pulisic returned to the national team this month and started in a pair of friendlies, assisting in the second goal in Tuesday night’s 2-0 win over Japan.

“We have good conversations,” Pulisic told reporters of his relationship with Pochettino. “Honestly. Probably what you guys experience and what the media sees is a bit not exactly what we experience. Things are good. We spoke. We had a normal camp and everything is good between us, good between the team.

“There’s probably not as much drama as you guys think there is.”

The winger, who turns 27 on Sept. 18, made his national team debut in 2016 and has 32 goals in 80 international appearances. He scored the lone U.S. goal at Trinidad on the night the Americans failed to qualify for the 2018 tournament and scored in the 1-0 win over Iran at the 2022 World Cup.

“I love this team. It’s everything to me,” he said. “I’ve been here for quite a long time. I’m getting to see some new guys, getting to bond with some old players. Even seeing [Cristian] Roldan again, it’s so cool for me.

“For me personally, I don’t feel like a step was lost.”

Pulisic had not spoken with reporters since last spring.

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In explaining in June why he wouldn’t accept Pulisic for the friendlies against Turkey and Switzerland, Pochettino said: “I am the head coach. I am not a mannequin.”

“I think it’s behind us, all that happened in summer, and I think now we need to look forward,” Pochettino said last month after announcing his September roster.

“We all made a mistake in some time, because we read the situation in a different way,” Pochettino added last Friday. “The most important is that when you are intelligent people, if we want to move on and do the right things — I want to be intelligent.”

Pochettino had said ahead of camp that he did not speak with Pulisic over the summer.

“Obviously, national team can be tough because you don’t spend day-to-day together,” Pulisic said. “So I think in the camps we’ve come in, got to know each other and starting to just, yeah, learn each other, learn the team, and, yeah, how we can both help each other as best we can to go forward and try to win. So, I’d say it’s good.”