Pep Guardiola to leave Manchester City at end of 2025/26 season

Pep Guardiola will leave Manchester City at the end of this season, bringing down the curtain on a historic and record-breaking decade in English football, as per report by the Daily Mail and The Athletic.

Guardiola's most recent contract extension at the Etihad Stadium in November 2025 took him through to June 2027, but he has seemingly decided to step aside when the 2025/26 season concludes at the end of this week.

It is a season that still has an outside chance of ending with a domestic treble, after City beat Chelsea 1-0 in Saturday's FA Cup final to follow up their 2-0 Carabao Cup final win over Arsenal in March.

Arsenal were crowned champions heading into the final matchweek heading into the final week, as a 1-1 draw at Bournemouth ended Guardiola's hopes of a seventh English title in 10 seasons.

Speaking at his media conference after the Bournemouth game, Guardiola said: "Listen, with the club I've always talked - not now, since three or for seasona ago when there was one year [of my contract] left - and the first thing you have to understand is I should talk with my chariman first, right? After that, we'll decide if I have one more year, we'll talk about everything and we'll decide." Guardiola added that he expected to speak to City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak before Sunday's game against Aston Villa. 

Including three successes in the Community Shield, last weekend's FA Cup win took the Catalan's overall trophy haul at City to 20. It is a return that puts him alongside Sir Alex Ferguson in the pantheon of English football greats and he stands alone when set against his other great contemporaries of the Premier League era: Arsene Wenger, Jose Mourinho and Jurgen Klopp.

MORE: Pep Guardiola outlines 'biggest compliment' of Man City career

When is Pep Guardiola's last Man City match?

Guardiola takes City to Champions League-chasing Bournemouth in what looks like a tough final Premier League away day on Tuesday. If Monday's reports prove accurate, his final match in charge will be at home to Aston Villa on Sunday, May 24. It will be his 593 game as City manager, edging him one ahead of Les McDowell in the club's all-time standings.

The following day, a Bank Holiday in the UK, City will stage an end-of-season parade in Manchester's Northern Quarter before an event at the Co-op Live arena to celebrate the achievements of their men's, women's and youth teams this season.

This will now essentially double up as a farewell party for Guardiola.

Pep Guardiola record, trophies won at Man City

The cornerstone of Guardiola's City tenure has been dominance in the Premier League, with six titles in seven seasons between 2017/18 and 2023/24. In his maiden championship success, City racked up a record haul of 100 points. They followed it up with 98 points in 2018/19, pipping Liverpool to the title by a point in a seismic battle.

Klopp's team got the better of Guardiola's men the following year, putting up another gargantuan 99 points. That preceded City setting a new English football record by becoming the only team in history to win four top-flight titles in a row between 2020/21 and 2023/24. That included another incredible final-day joust with Liverpool, where three goals in five minutes and 35 seconds inside the final quarter of an hour against Steven Gerrard's Aston Villa turned a 2-0 deficit into a 3-2 victory that snatched the title.

The Carabao Cup occupies a special place in Guardiola's City history and was the first honour he won in England after a trophyless 2016/17, thanks to a comprehensive 3-0 win over Wenger's Arsenal at Wembley in 2018. That was the first of four successive triumphs in the competition, up to and including a 1-0 win over Tottenham Hotspur in 2021. 

The 2018/19 season saw City become the first and still only team to win English football's domestic treble, crowned by a 6-0 FA Cup final shellacking of Watford. The treble and the season Guardiola will be remembered for at City above all others, though, came in 2022/23.

City came from behind to haul in Arsenal and win the Premier League title with two games remaining, having hit a rich vein of form after the March international break. Liverpool, Bayern Munich, Arsenal and Real Madrid were all hammered in irresistible performances at the Etihad Stadium. The Madrid game — a 4-0 win over Carlo Ancelotti's holders, who had beaten City in heartbreaking fashion in the previous season's Champions League semifinals — stands as the crowning glory of Guardiola's time in Manchester in terms of pure performance. Madrid were dominated and suffocated, and had goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois to thank for not losing by a far bigger margin.

The Champions League had come to feel like the holy grail for Guardiola at City. He did not win Europe's premier competition at Bayern Munich and won the last of his two Champions Leagues at Barcelona back in 2011. A team selection gamble backfired when City lost the 2021 final 1-0 to Chelsea in Porto.

Before turning their attentions towards Istanbul and a Champions League final date with Inter Milan, City faced up to the first ever Manchester derby FA Cup final, where they beat Manchester United 2-1 after captain Ilkay Gundogan volleyed in a stunning goal after just 13 seconds.

Seven days later at the Ataturk Olympic Stadium, Rodri scored the only goal in a 1-0 win that secured City's maiden Champions League crown. That success was followed by successes against Sevilla and Fluminense respectively to lift the UEFA Super Cup and FIFA Club World Cup later in the year.

Pep Guardiola: Trophies won at Manchester City

When is the verdict in the Man City 115 charges case?

Off-field controversy has cast a shadow over the majority of Guardiola's tenure and the case dealing with accusations that City broke multiple Premier League financial rules is almost certain to remain unresolved by the time he leaves. The club denies all allegations of wrongdoing.

The revelations that set the course of this ongoing saga emerged in November 2018 in a series of articles published by German magazine Der Spiegel, which drew upon information obtained by whistleblower Football Leaks. 

The main allegations related to leaked emails that appeared to show City employees colluding to disguise investment from owner Sheikh Mansour as sponsorship revenue. City insisted this amounted to "out of context materials purportedly hacked or stolen", and insisted: "The attempt to damage the club's reputation is organised and clear." UEFA launched an investigation into City and, in February 2020, handed the club a two-year ban from its competitions. However, City successfully appealed this punishment at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in July of that year.

CAS found claims that City disguised owner investment as commercial income from main sponsor Etihad to be unproven. Similar claims surrounding a sponsorship agreement with Abu Dhabi telecommunications company Etisalat fell outside of UEFA's own time-barring rules. City were still handed a significant fine of €10 million for failing to co-operate with UEFA's investigation.

A separate Premier League investigation sparked by Der Spiegel's reporting landed City with a weighty charge sheet in February 2023. The 115 charges — later tallied to be 130 — spanned nine seasons from 2009/10 to 2017/18. They can be broken down into five clear accusations of wrongdoing. The most serious of those are allegations of off-book payments — widely understood to relate to former manager Roberto Mancini and ex-midfielder Yaya Toure — and providing inaccurate financial information to the league. The latter once again concerns the artificially inflated sponsorship claims. If City were to be found guilty of that, then breaches in relation to both UEFA Financial Fair Play rules and Premier League Profit and Sustainability Rules would duly follow. As with UEFA, City are accused of failing to co-operate with the Premier League investigation.

MORE: What Guardiola said about Premier League FFP charges, Paul Dickov, and Julius Caesar

A 12-week hearing before an independent commission, which heard arguments from lawyers representing City and the Premier League, concluded in December 2024. Almost 18 months on, it is yet to return a verdict.

Following the UEFA ban and prior to the successful appeal at CAS, Guardiola said he would leave City if the allegations of wrongdoing were proven. However, when the Premier League charges dropped during City's treble campaign of 2022/23, he was strident in his defence of the club and claimed the ongoing furore had been driven by rival clubs.

"I am not moving from this seat. I can assure you, more than ever that I want to stay," he said. "Sometimes I have doubts; seven years already is a long time in any country. Now, I don't want to move.

"People say 'they lied to you, Pep'. They didn't lie to me. Look what happened with UEFA. I said to them: 'What happened? [They said] Pep, we did nothing wrong'. We proved it. It is the same case. Why should I don't trust with my people?

"Why should I trust the CEOs or the owners of the 19 clubs, the nine clubs like it was with UEFA? No, I trust my people. Between them and my people, I trust my people. Not one second for the other ones."

It undoubtedly feels unsatisfactory for the case to still be ongoing as Guardiola prepares to leave, not to mention unfair on the man himself. Although the most serious allegations relate to the period before he became City manager, doubts persisting over the nature of the finances that have allowed City to spend almost £2 billion ($2.7 billion) on transfer fees during Guardiola's decade allow critics and rivals to easily apply caveats and asterisks to his success.

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How has Pep Guardiola changed English football?

Irrespective of where the 115 case leaves City's sporting legacy, Guardiola's success in implementing and spreading the doctrine of positional play inspired by his Barcelona mentor, Johan Cruyff, is beyond doubt.

English football looks markedly different to when Guardiola ("not the coach for the tackles") arrived in 2016. His innovations, from goalkeepers playing out from the back to inverted full-backs and false nines, have become part of mainstream tactical thought, with his influence felt beyond the Premier League, further down the English football pyramid.

Even the increased focus on physicality, transitions and set-pieces in the Premier League over the past couple of seasons can be attributed to Guardiola, given it has been a direct and sustained response to the pre-eminence of his signature style.

No incoming figure has had a remotely comparable impact on English football since Arsene Wenger took charge of Arsenal in 1996. Guardiola's arrival with a bold tactical template that has forced many coaches in England to re-imagine their national game means his influence outstrips the cultural change Wenger instigated. You sense that this, more than the multiple trophies and records broken, will give Guardiola the most satisfaction once the dust settles on an unprecedented decade of sustained success that has cemented his status as an all-time great.