How Pep Guardiola shaped new Brighton manager Roberto De Zerbi

A few weeks ago, Brighton’s new head coach flew to Manchester for a meeting with the architect of, in his words, “the strongest team of the last 40 years”. Roberto De Zerbi is a fascinating coach with a curious mind and there is one manager he evidently rates above all others: Pep Guardiola.

De Zerbi, who this weekend was formally confirmed as the replacement for Graham Potter at the Amex Stadium, has never worked with Guardiola in a professional capacity, but he has been watching and studying the Manchester City manager for years. It is Guardiola’s Barcelona team that De Zerbi describes as the best of the past four decades, and it is clearly Guardiola’s style that shapes the Italian’s own approach.

Their dinner in Manchester was not their first meeting. They also spent time together during Guardiola’s spell at Bayern Munich, when De Zerbi was beginning his coaching career in the fourth tier of Italian football. As De Zerbi has risen in the game, going on to thrive at Sassuolo in particular, Guardiola has taken note. Last year, the City manager namechecked him when discussing exciting Italian managers.

“Guardiola’s football, I think it is unreachable,” said De Zerbi at his unveiling in Brighton on Tuesday. But that does not mean he will not try, and the 43-year-old has certainly come closer than most other managers in his attempts to impose a similarly dominant style of play on his teams, most recently at Shakhtar Donetsk.

Asked to explain his approach, De Zerbi said: “Don’t throw away the ball, that is something very clear. [I want] to attack, to make the game... to attack in the right way and, when we do not have the ball, to take it back as fast as we can.”

The connection between the two managers is strengthened by the presence of Enzo Maresca, a childhood friend of De Zerbi, on Guardiola’s coaching staff. Before accepting the Brighton job, De Zerbi spoke to Maresca. On Sunday evening, after his appointment was confirmed, he spoke to Guardiola.

“I called a couple of people in order to get the right information to come to the Premier League,” said De Zerbi. “I have known Maresca for 30 years because we played together when we were 13 years old. He told me the truth, for sure.”

With an extreme dedication to possession-based football, De Zerbi is among the most obvious acolytes of Guardiola. He is far from alone, though, and European football appears to be gradually entering a new phase, in which a collection of Guardiola-inspired coaches is beginning to hoover up the top jobs in the top leagues.

The Manchester City manager is now 51, and into his 15th season of coaching. He has proven to be an inspirational figure for many young managers and, with each passing season, the list of top-level coaches he has influenced is growing.

De Zerbi’s arrival in the Premier League means that a quarter of the division’s managers have been significantly influenced by Guardiola, either directly or indirectly, and this trickle-down effect should only accelerate in the coming years.

In the Premier League, the most obvious disciple of Guardiola is Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta, who spent three years as an assistant coach at City. Manchester United’s Erik ten Hag, meanwhile, was the coach of Bayern Munich’s reserve team while Guardiola led the senior side, and has said he “learned a lot” from the Catalan.

Then there is Crystal Palace’s Patrick Vieira, who spent time with Guardiola at Bayern while he was completing his coaching badges. Vieira was also part of the City Football Group, as manager of New York City FC, during the first few years of Guardiola’s City tenure.

Potter, now of Chelsea, has said that he would watch Guardiola’s famous Barcelona team as a little-known young coach, and added that Guardiola’s managerial path has been “influential”. Brentford’s Thomas Frank, too, studied that Barcelona side while he was forming his own managerial ideas in his native Denmark. Frank has described Guardiola as “the greatest manager of the modern era”.

Burnley’s Vincent Kompany, the former City captain, has said that Guardiola “triggered me wanting to become a manager”. Over in Spain, Xavi Hernandez – a key member of Guardiola’s Barcelona team – is doing an impressive job in charge of the Catalan giants.

There is also Rafael Marquez, another of Guardiola’s former Barcelona players, who this summer was appointed the manager of Barcelona’s B team. Thierry Henry, the former Monaco coach and current assistant at Belgium, has said Guardiola was the “reference” for him, while another ex-Barcelona player, Gabriel Milito, is presently the head coach of Argentine side Argentinos Juniors.

This is not to say that all of these coaches are attempting to imitate Guardiola’s style of play at their own clubs. Nor is it to suggest that all of Guardiola’s philosophies and principles are entirely of his own making – much as he has influenced a new wave of coaches, so was he shaped by the work of figures such as Johan Cruyff and Juanma Lillo.

But it is clear that Guardiola has taken those ideas to a new level, and that a generation of developing coaches have been shaped by his success. De Zerbi is among those devotees and, as he looks to build on the impressive progress made by Potter at Brighton, he will hope to prove himself to be among the best of them.