Tempting as it might be to draw a straight line between Pep Guardiola’s public displays of stress and the reports in Spain of his divorce from wife Cristina, the only people who can illuminate the precise chronology are the couple themselves. All we can say with certainty is that the role of a serially trophy-hunting manager brings a singular strain, so acute that it can fray the fabric of marital life. When the LifeStyled Club – a first online hub exploring the pressures that the game exerted on the family unit – was launched in 2015 by the wives of two former Peterborough United players, it highlighted a startling statistic: “Forty per cent of marriages end in divorce. Yet in football it’s more like 70 per cent.”

Guardiola is hardly the first Premier League luminary to form part of this bleak reality. Arsène Wenger split from his wife Annie in 2015 after 20 years together, while Thomas Tuchel’s 13-year marriage to Sissi came to an end in 2022. Comparisons of personal circumstances are often invidious, but if there is one common denominator connecting these three managers, it is that they are all helpless obsessives. Guardiola has been seen meticulously straightening reporters’ dictaphones at the start of press conferences. Wenger’s idea of decompressing on a Saturday night was to watch Match of the Day with the sound turned down. Tuchel was once so smitten with a training pitch in Austria that he measured the height of the grass and had the groundsman transferred to Mainz, his first top-fight club.

Perfectionism is a prerequisite for success in elite sport, but the self-absorption it breeds is anything but normal. Guardiola and Tuchel would famously bond over dinners in Munich by moving salt and pepper mills across the tablecloth to demonstrate their latest tactical ruses. It must have made quite the sight for their fellow diners, asked to provide condiment shakers as extra props, but it begged the question of when they could ever switch off.

Wenger, asked once what Annie felt about him watching matches from all over the world as soon as he returned from an Arsenal training session, replied, revealingly: “She does not have much choice. In my job I travel, but the problem is not so much the quantity of time you spend with your family, it is the quality. That is where this job is more damaging.”

Of late, Guardiola has furnished enough material on this extreme mentality for an entire conference. Most alarming was the sight of him giving interviews, straight after Manchester City’s late collapse against Feyenoord in November, with his nose cut and his head covered in scratches. “I want to harm myself,” he said, with such apparent flippancy that he issued a clarifying statement the next morning, including a link to the Samaritans hotline. His furious altercation the next month with a Liverpool fan who had accused him of refusing an autograph “just because you lost” also conveyed much about his state of mind. “Do you know what is lost?” he screamed, multiple times, before being led away by two security guards. His shoving match with goalkeeper Stefan Ortega after the latest City unravelling against Brentford – one that he characterised as affectionate but looked anything but – only added to the sense of volatility.

For all that marital issues will now be cited retrospectively as a factor in this behaviour, it is wise to be cautious with any conclusions. After all, Guardiola and his wife have been living apart for long periods for almost five years, with Cristina leaving Manchester for Barcelona in 2019 to oversee Serra Claret, her family’s fashion house. Long-distance relationships are by no means particular to football, but they are frequently a product of the peripatetic nature of management. Look at how José Mourinho was billeted, during his Manchester United years, at the Lowry in Salford while his wife, Matilde, remained in London. It might have seemed luxurious, this life in a palatial hotel suite with no need even to cook a meal. But it also illustrated the oddities of two people circling in separate orbits, where one stayed with the children and the other navigated his goldfish-bowl existence.

In the United States, the divorce rate among NFL coaches has been estimated at 70 per cent, again far higher than the national average of 42 per cent. The reason most commonly identified for this disparity is the coaches’ workaholic streak. Cindy Gruden, wife of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ former head coach Jon Gruden, explained: “We just don’t see each other a lot, but you sort of get used to it. I knew that getting into the whole thing. I’m not really needy. I’ve met a lot of coaching wives, and they are the same way. They are extremely independent. You have to be, because you spend a lot of time without your husband.”

Wenger was extraordinarily protective of his privacy, but he was perhaps the most open in acknowledging the inherent selfishness of his vocation. He said he had promised his wife in 2008, after 12 years at Arsenal, that he would serve another five at most. A decade on, he was still there. For him, and for the equally insatiable Guardiola, the quest for glory is an addiction that can never be kicked. It is the one trait that unites the greats – and yet it can come at a heartbreaking cost.