Former Manchester City defender Gael Clichy has shared how Pep Guardiola changed his understanding of football.
Clichy spent six seasons at City between 2011 and 2017, helping the club to win two Premier League titles and two League Cups.
The French left-back played under three different managers during his time at City: Roberto Mancini, Manuel Pellegrini and Guardiola.
Clichy only worked with Pep for one season before he left the club when his contract expired in the summer of 2017.
Clichy, 38, has all but officially retired from playing after spending two-and-a-half years at Swiss side Servette.
Guardiola inspired Clichy
He’s now pursuing a coaching career, something he has admitted he hadn’t planned on until he met Guardiola.
“The year I met Pep, his first year at City, it changed my mind,” Clichy told The Telegraph in a wide-ranging exclusive interview.
“He took my football world and he just turned it upside down. Now, when I watch football, I cannot distance myself from his philosophy. It is so intense and so clear that I cannot see anything else. It was beautiful for me to experience that
“I was getting older [when Guardiola joined City in 2016] and I knew that I could not compete on a certain level. I was really looking at what Pep was doing, how he was connecting with players, how he was behaving with his staff. He showed me a lot of examples of what it means to be a leader.”
Clichy said he put some of what he learned from Guardiola into coaching sessions he led at Servette.
“I was able to change the structure of the team and see that my ideas were working, with less quality than you have in the Premier League,” he said.
“I had the chance to change the way we played and to train the players to produce what I needed from them. I realised that I love it [coaching].”
