Manchester was at its bleakest on Tuesday – an unremitting drizzle casting a veil over the soulless City Suites skyscraper apartment complex which Pep Guardiola calls home. ‘I have to live somewhere,’ he said when he bought it eight years ago, which pretty much sums the place up.
Guardiola was away in London with Manchester City, who drew 2-2 with Brentford on a night which ended with him publicly remonstrating with his goalkeeper Stefan Ortega on the pitch, but a passer-by near the grey tower he would be heading back to, Marjorie Earlam, declared while making her way to nearby Manchester Victoria railway station that ‘it seems a strange kind of home for a family man.’
In the block’s bland Embankment Cafe – which makes highly questionable claims to sell the ‘best coffee in Manchester’ – no one seemed to have met him. Mark Attwell, one of a group gathered there, observed that the apartments, vast but characterless, were ‘more of a bachelor place’.
The Manchester City manager may feel that more acutely now, given it emerged this week that he and his partner of 30 years, Cristina Serra, 52, whom he married at a civil ceremony in 2014, are to divorce.
It is a development which has surprised very few in Manchester – in part, because Senora Serra moved back to Barcelona five years ago. It was said at the time that the arrangement would be for ‘a few months’, allowing her time at the family’s fashion business, Serra Claret. It didn’t turn out that way.
Manchester initially seemed to have held attractions for ‘Cris’, as her husband knows her. Meals at Salvi’s trattoria in the old Corn Exchange, one of her husband’s favourites, and ‘Tast’, the tapas restaurant he invested in, opposite the Grade II listed medieval style timbers of Boodles jewellers on central King Street.
But she was never as much of a public presence here as in Munich – a city where she seemed to live and breathe every game at times, during his three years managing Bayern Munich. She embraced the German cultural life, attending Oktoberfest with her husband, both of them dressed in Bavarian lederhosen.
Their time together in New York, during her husband’s one-year sabbatical there from 2012, also seemed more of an adventure, after she had set aside the doubts which Guardiola’s biographer Marti Perarnau suggests she had about the quality of her English.
The couple have never disclosed whether a frightening near-miss while Senora Serra was with their daughters Maria and Valentina at the Ariana Grande concert on the night of the Manchester Arena bombing, in 2017, had any impact on her wish to return home two years later.
Guardiola and their son Marius were waiting for the three to return that evening, so they could have a late dinner together, when they felt the explosion rattle the apartment. Guardiola, immediately fearing a terror attack, raced down 10 flights of internal stairs and was heading off in the direction of Manchester Cathedral when Cristina called him to say they were safe.
They had decided to leave early, as Valentina, the younger girl, was tired. The following day, the couple discreetly joined the crowds in Albert Square, as the blast’s victims were mourned.
Senora Serra certainly seems to have acted as a sounding board and stabilising influence, at each staging post of Guardiola’s career, needing no explanation when he would shut himself in his hideaway at the home in Munich.
They played golf together. She pulled him through an anabolic steroid controversy, which saw him receive a seven-month jail sentence, later overturned, while at Brescia in 2001. She inputted to his contract discussions. She has provided emotional and intellectual clarity for the man who has bathed in international acclaim.
She was present at the dinner at Salvi’s in 2017, during Guardiola’s profoundly difficult early days at City, which, as Perarnau tells it, brought a moment of enlightenment. A discussion of the conducting styles of Herbert von Karajan and Leornard Bernstein – of whom the Guardiolas, not being classical music afficionados, knew little – became the focus of theorising on coaches’ relationships with players.
The more remote Karajan put up a ‘wall’ between himself and his orchestras. Bernstein built a bridge to connect himself to them. Guardiola loved that. He wanted to become more of a Bernstein.
She also found the answer during a dinner with chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and his wife Daria Tarasova, to whom the Guardiolas had been introduced in New York in 2012. Kasparov said he had abandoned all hope of beating a 22-year-old Norwegian challenger, concluding that he would never win.
Guardiola was fascinated, feeling there might be an understanding here of his own sense of professional fatigue at that time, but it was his wife who cut through the theorising. ‘Perhaps it’s an issue of concentration,’ she said.
She has always been the more worldly and smart of the two – cut out as a fashion buyer for the family fashion business when Guardiola, a bricklayer’s son from Santpedor in central Catalonia, showed up there as a 23-year-old Barcelona player to model clothes for Spanish fashion designer Antonio Miro.
Perarnau’s trilogy of books about Guardiola offer profound insight, but she told the writer she had misgivings about them. ‘I think Pep shares too much with you,’ she told him after the first was published. ‘Too much tactical information. He’s very open about these things in his press conferences too. Other coaches don’t do that.’
She has been a pragmatic foil to the idealism of Guardiola, who has always felt he should share his philosophy regardless of the consequences.
The precise reasons for the split are unknown. The podcasters Laura Fa and Lorenza Vazquez, who broke the news on Monday in their show for El Periodico, said on Wednesday that Guardiola’s decision to sign a new contract, after months of his typical indecision, was the factor in his wife deciding she’d had enough of separate lives.
Several sources in Catalonia suggest that there have been thoughts of Guardiola at least temporarily stepping away from football and moving with Cristina to Abu Dhabi, where their son Marius is based. The split appears to have been agreed in December, a month after he committed to City until 2027.
It is claimed that there is no third-party cause to the break-up and that Guardiola has had no extra-marital affairs.
The separation does attest to the way that the self-absorption and stresses that come attached to a Premier League manager’s life can take its toll on a marriage. Wives frequently crop up as voices of sense and perspective in the best written depiction of the manager’s life – Michael Calvin’s book Living on the Volcano.
‘You are going to have to get back to being who you were. The person who got you to where you are,’ Karl Robinson’s wife tells him when he is excelling at MK Dons and, as Robinson, now managing Salford City, admits, ‘getting carried away with myself’.
But these women are background figures. After a dinner at Manchester Wings restaurant, a Chinese place Guardiola likes, he peels off to enact an animated tactical manoeuvre for Perarnau, beside the statue of Abraham Lincoln in Brazennose Street.
It’s an amusing anecdote but a measure of the way that football could take over. ‘By the expression on her face, Cristina is already resigned to the fact that their ‘romantic dinner’ has now become a ‘football dinner,’ Perarnau observes, before they eat.
There is, of course, no link between City’s struggles and the marital difficulties. Senora Serra had precisely no contribution to the complacency which has reduced the club to a shadow of itself.
She would not have suggested that City’s struggles in periods without Rodri last season – so blindingly obvious that they feature in City’s lavish in-house promotion film about the fourth successive title – telegraphed the need to find a back-up option for the player, now lost for the rest of the season.
She would not have pointed out that City started the season with the third oldest squad in the Premier League, including 12 players aged 29 or over.
But the presence of Guardiola’s wife would, in subtle and unassuming ways, surely have helped in his unprecedented struggles of recent months. His public displays of stress – clawing his nose until it bled during City’s collapse against Feyenoord in November and launching into a tirade against autograph hunters who had waited for him near the Embankment Kitchen restaurant at City Suites – speak to the need for the sanity his wife has provided. A sanity he has known is becoming even more removed from him.
Her presence might also have had some bearing on some surprising actions away from football. Guardiola’s decision to provide a character witness for Benjamin Mendy at his rape trial, at the player’s request, was astonishing, given how the case had lifted the lid on a seedy underworld of parties inhabited by a breed of footballers where money is no object and attractive young women are targeted for sex. Some of those parties took place just down the street from Guardiola’s own apartment.
Guardiola, who has generally seemed reluctant to publicly censure his players for their off-field conduct, appeared on a video-link to tell the criminal trial jury that Mendy was ‘a good boy’ and that he was unaware of the player’s activity away from the training ground because he was ‘not his father’.
Extraordinary that he, a family man with two daughters, 24-year-old Maria and Valentina, 17, would have validated Mendy, after all that the uncontested detail that the trial threw up.
During a subsequent employment tribunal at which Mendy sued City for £10milion in earnings lost while on bail and awaiting trial, the player identified Riyad Mahrez, Jack Grealish and Kyle Walker as players who had been to the parties. He told a tribunal: ‘We all had casual relations with women.’ Guardiola has seemed more laissez-faire than other managers might have been.
His family unit has become more fractured since his wife left for Barcelona. For a time, they would still be together at every City home match, though Cristina, Valentina and Maria would be away home the following day. Maria, a fashion influencer, is based in London. Valentina, still a student, is in Barcelona with her mother.
Reunions, Perarnau writes in Pep’s Revolution, would come four times a year during international breaks when the family would generally take holidays, or at some European matches. But there is no disguising the couple have lived apart. Some say Senora Serra has been in Manchester noticeably less since September. Many parents know that a marriage can lose purpose when the children grow up and leave.
Research on ‘serial winners’ in sport by Professor Sergio Lara-Bercial of Leeds Beckett University found that 94 per cent had been married for 20 or 30 years, had children and relatively normal lives.
Though Premier League football is not normal. Guardiola’s confidante at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and City, Manel Estiarte, speaks of the ‘law of 32 minutes’ with Guardiola – the approximate period of time for which he can be distracted from football before his mind is wandering back into it again.
In Manchester, he has found another sounding board: the clique of Spanish/Catalan staff recruited by City’s Abu Dhabi owners to run the team. They have been director of football Txiki Begiristain, Domenec Torrent, who left City in 2018, and Estiarte. There was a time, before the move to City Suites, when members of that group lived cheek by jowl in the No 1 Deansgate apartment block.
Begiristain – once a member of the same Johan Cruyff team as Guardiola at Barcelona and now his ‘big brother’ figure – was in apartment 11, Torrent in 10, assistant coach Mikel Arteta in 8 and Guardiola in 9. It’s still sometimes Torrent – ‘Dome’ as he knows him – with whom Guardiola will open a bottle of red and put the world to rights. All football people with the same football outlook. No depth of perspective.
There is some suggestion from Catalonia that this might not be ‘a definitive end’ for the Guardiolas and evidence that the split is not rancorous. The couple, who last appeared together formally as a married couple at Wimbledon last July and watched the basketball’s NBA Finals, kitted out in Boston Celtics colours the previous month, were pictured with one of their children at a Barcelona theatre over Christmas.
Vasquez, one of the podcasters, said: ‘The couple’s close circle are talking about the possibility of a reconciliation some time in the future, although it’s Cristina that left Manchester and has taken this decision.
‘We can’t say for sure that there is no-one else but what is true is that people close to them say there’s been no infidelities and there are no third parties.’
‘It is impossible to strictly separate work and family,’ Guardiola explained in an interview with Audi in 2014 during his time at Bayern. ‘Whoever says that has no credibility. But at home, I am neither a technician nor a manager. My wife and I decide together. Harmony is very important. That’s something I learned very early.’
When all was said and done, the relentless sweep of football, and all that comes attached to it, made that lesson impossible to adhere to.
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