Premier League: From Pellegrini to Pep - Why the Engineer made City the ideal destination for Guardiola

Club statements rarely offer up much of interest to unpack these days, but Manchester City’s media release on the appointment of Pep Guardiola contained several valuable morsels.

It is no accident that City made a point of mentioning the longevity of negotiations with their target, specifically dating discussions back to 2012. Nor was there anything off the cuff about their insistence that Manuel Pellegrini was happy to make the name of his replacement public knowledge, echoing his sentiment that they were “not doing anything behind me” from a press conference earlier in the same day.

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The statement hammered home the idea that bringing in Guardiola has been part of a long-term strategy for the club -- one that Pellegrini was undoubtedly aware of. The Engineer will always have known that Txiki Begiristain’s end game at the Etihad was to reunite with his old Barça colleague. Against that backdrop, the 62-year-old has been a consummate professional. His work has likely contributed towards swaying his successor’s decision in the first place.

They had to wait for their man, but the City that Guardiola will take charge of in 2016 is far closer to his style of coaching than the one Begiristain wanted him to come to in the summer of 2013. Changes in personnel, tactical approach, and gains in experience that have all occurred under Pellegrini’s tenure put the club in a stronger position to adapt to Pep’s patented positional play than any other Premier League side. A perfectionist like the Bayern boss will not have missed those details.

Though by no means a carbon copy of Bayern or Barça, the probing, combination-based football that the English club has implemented under their present manager is far closer to the brand practiced by their next one than the reactive, physical game of Roberto Mancini. A team built for the Italian may have found it jarring to switch to Guardiola -- growing pains can be costly in the hunt for trophies. With a team built for Pellegrini’s style, that will be much less of an issue.

Changes in the make-up of City’s squad over the last few years should ease the transition. In that time period they have offloaded plenty of dead wood that would have been a poor fit for Guardiola had he signed up at the first time of asking. There is no need to discover first hand that a player like Joleon Lescott suffers in a high defensive line, for example, because Pellegrini already dealt with that two years ago. The way that youth is starting to take hold is also telling, particularly in the form of attackers like Raheem Sterling and Kelechi Iheanacho, exactly the kind of young talent that Guardiola enjoys coaching most. He will already know much about their strengths, weaknesses and suitability to his ideas thanks to Pellegrini.

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The Catalan can also thank his colleague for sparing him the labour of dealing with some of the more abrasive characters he so famously struggles to work with, the mutinous factions in the City dressing room from the Mancini era now a thing of the past. When Pellegrini chose not to stand in the way of Carlos Tevez’s departure for Juventus in 2013 he said it was the best decision for the club,and the relative harmony at the Etihad since then seems to support that conclusion. Even the best efforts of Yaya Toure’s vociferous agent to unsettle things have been handled with class. The Chilean’s delicate treatment of the Ivorian should have laid the foundations for as pain-free an exit as possible in the summer.

The Engineer’s final gift for his inheritor comes in the form of the European experience needed to reach the level Guardiola aspires to in club football’s biggest competition. Consistent progression to the knockout stage of the Champions League, and wins over strong Spanish and German opposition mean there is much less work to be done for City to push on in Europe than there was in the days when Mancini failed to make it out of the group stage. A recent 3-1 away win over Sevilla stands out as one of the club’s best performances on the continent to date, boding well for the near future.

As for the short term, City may yet take another step forward before their changing of the guard occurs. There are compelling precedents for that. When Bayern announced that Guardiola would replace Jupp Heynckes at the end of the 2012-13 season, their squad responded by rallying around the outgoing boss, earning him a treble as a parting gift. Could something similar happen in Manchester?

Winning everything on the table seems a stretch, but with an extra dose of motivation City could be a particularly troublesome force in knockout competitions, where team spirit and inspiration are valuable commodities. A trophy would be a fitting send off for Pellegrini, who has done a better job than many give him credit for. Though perhaps not universally appreciated in the present, he has played his part in any success that his inheritor has in the future. History will judge his tenure kindly.

Follow Lee Roden on Twitter: @LeeRoden89