Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola makes no exceptions.
“Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola has a strict ‘two-kilogram rule,'” Sports Bible reported on June 6 (ET), citing an interview with former City player Gael Clichy.
Since joining City from Arsenal in 2011, Klich has twice won the English Premier League (PL) title. He played under Guardiola in the 2016/17 season. “If I weigh two kilograms more than what Guardiola thinks is the maximum weight, I’m not allowed to train,” he said.
Most teams have internal rules. If you do something that is prohibited by the team, you may be subject to internal discipline, such as being banned from training or playing. However, the team ace is often the exception. As a manager, you don’t want to lose your best player, even if he doesn’t follow the rules.
But Guardiola is different. “In soccer, managers always say, ‘If you’re overweight, we won’t let you train,'” says Klitschko. “In soccer, managers always say, ‘If you’re overweight, we won’t train you,’ and in the end, it gets buried because it’s hard to leave out important players.
“Under Guardiola, if a player weighed more than two kilograms over the standard after hard training and proper nutrition during the preseason, he would not train. There were even players who didn’t train for two weeks,” he recalls.
Sergio Aguero told a similar story. He scored 260 goals and provided 73 assists in 390 games in a City shirt between 2011 and 2021. In 2011/12, he scored a dramatic goal in the league final to help the club win the English Premier League for the first time in its history.
Aguero was a difficult player for Mourinho to get rid of: “The ideal weight is between 79 and 80 kilograms. “If I go over by 100 grams, I get fined and can’t play,” he says, “but it can happen. For example, if you eat a little bit of chicken, you can go over 50 grams.”
“In the first season (under Guardiola), we were between third and fourth place. Guardiola said, ‘This week you’re out because you’ve gained weight’. What can I say? He was right. This happens.”
Another player recently fell foul of Guardiola’s weight standards. It was midfielder Calvin Phillips. Guardiola called him “overweight” after the last FIFA World Cup in Qatar. In fact, he didn’t play a game afterward.
“I wasn’t overweight,” he says, “but Guardiola saw it differently. I accepted it and did my best to get as fit as possible. I was able to sit on the bench immediately afterwards.”