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Having occupied a front-row seat for the final two seasons of Pep Guardiola’s gilded Manchester City tenure, the subject of Amazon’s A Beautiful Obsession, the surprise to me is how unfiltered the four-part series is.
Particularly, the telling of the torrid 2024-25 campaign when the wheels came clattering off in the bleakest of mid-winter plunges that featured nine defeats and one victory in 13 aura-shattering games.
To be shown from Wednesday on Prime, this series controlled and filmed by City is no hagiography of Guardiola or his players that seeks to paper over the great Catalan’s most harrowing season. Neither is the decision to let go of the club’s greatest modern-day player, Kevin De Bruyne, soft-soaped. And the anger of Khaldoon al-Mubarak, the chair, at Guardiola’s odd decision to change 10 players for last season’s 2-0 Champions League loss at home to Bayer Leverkusen is not left on the cutting-room floor.
Instead, the viewer witnesses up close and maybe too personal, when his divorce is cited as motivation, Guardiola flailing for solutions he fails to find. And shown, too, is how the ruthless business of football reduces a peerless manager and De Bruyne to the commodities they are, as City’s “machine built for winning” (Khaldoon’s description) must thresh on.
Guardiola talks about his marriage breaking down after a 2-0 defeat by Juventus in the Champions League on 11 December 2024. It was City’s seventh reverse in 10 games, so to try to rouse the team from their slump a disgusted Guardiola unloads about what went wrong between him and Cristina Serra.
“I’m fucking divorced from the most beautiful woman on your planet,” he says. “I love her unbelievably, but we lost the passion. How do you play football, because you are paid? Or because of something inside? Where is the passion?”
This is an interesting choice. If Guardiola has every right to talk about personal issues, the decision seems counterproductive: a crossing of the professional/private line that could, conversely, make him appear weaker before his team, as normal managerial modes of motivation have lost their power. As he says later regarding what makes a good No 1: “You have to convince your players [that they would] go to the penthouse, the roof and jump down [for you].”
A year later, after the 10 changes against Leverkusen, Guardiola again says: “I leave my life, my divorce and my family is away, and everything for all of you. And what do you give back?”
Manuel Estiarte, in the second episode named The Rebuild, compounds the sense of a man running out of ideas when Guardiola’s close friend, and City’s director of first-team operations, reveals he told the players about the divorce, to let them know this is why “Pep is anxious, sad, different”.
Estiarte continues: “I said to the team: ‘Please, you have to understand, you’re not playing with a coach who can be a bit impulsive, intense, sometimes a bit up and down. You’re seeing a human being. He’s getting a divorce.’ It was necessary for the team not only to visualise Pep as a manager but for the first time as a human being.”
First, you wonder why Guardiola did not impart this sensitive information himself to the players, as this might have aided the intended impact. Then, you ponder if Khaldoon and Ferran Soriano, City’s CEO, discussed whether the manager’s private life might be affecting his ability to do his job.
Interestingly, we cut next to a jovial Guardiola. “In my life I made a lot of changes – I got divorced and I have to settle a bit. But no complaints at all honestly,” he says before, tellingly, insisting he is a happy man – regarding his work. “In my job, yeah,” the manager says.
The theme of interpersonal relations is a leitmotif of the documentary – and so, by extension, Guardiola’s management style (episode three is titled: Love and Hugs).
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In “The Desert”, part one, he is close to tears after Kyle Walker abandons the teetering ship in January 2025, precisely when City need their captain. Walker did not behave like their leader, Guardiola tells the players, before a cutting rhetorical question: as they had voted him as the captain, why did they not pin him to the wall and demand more loyalty, he asks.
The scene that precipitates the defender’s departure is beautifully filmed and comes in the Anfield dressing room after Walker’s error leads to Luis Díaz winning a penalty converted by Mohamed Salah in the 2-0 loss.
Guardiola mentions this, causing Walker to fire back that the finger is being pointed at him “every meeting”. It ends with the manager in tears, delivering a soliloquy about how his signing of a new contract, only 11 days before, in the midst of the disastrous run, was because of a desire to fight. Juxtaposed in the shot, in a moment of cinematic panache, is Walker, now silently reflecting on his role in this. Guardiola says: “If captains first, then the other ones, for example [feel] that there’s a problem, tell me. It’s not going to change the love I have for all of you. I’m sorry.”
More regrets start episode two, after De Bruyne is not offered a new deal, and Soriano stresses to Khaldoon that “Kevin gets the respect he deserves as the greatest player in the modern history of City”. Guardiola reveals ‘Super Kev’ broke down in his office but also that there had to be coldness in the decision to offload him, before the Belgian is shown crying when asked what will be missed most. “My kids don’t want to go,” he says.
Here, the viewer is reminded how those in elite sport can feel emotion, that tapping into passions is vital for success. And that beyond the game-face displayed on the pitch, and in front of the media and fans, are real relationships which bring joy – and hurt.
More admirable honesty is offered up when Guardiola’s 10 changes for that November 2025 defeat to Leverkusen are criticised. “Our attitude with Pep Guardiola should not be too negative. But it shouldn’t be too kind or accommodating either. This is his mistake this time,” says Soriano. To which Khaldoon says: “To pick an entire new [outfield] team in a game this important is probably one of the lowest points we’ve had. I can’t speak to him – I’m so angry.”
Yet, by the end of part four – “Nothing Is Eternal” – all seems comparatively rosy again. The Carabao Cup and FA Cup are claimed to make it 20 trophies (including three Community Shields) in a decade for Guardiola, and City finish second. With his rebuild done he receives a fitting send-off, before the start of the rest of his life. As he says: “Life should not just be about football. It’s too much to be honest.”
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