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Last Tuesday, Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola lost to Real Madrid in a £270 shirt.
The grungy flannel number from the cult Swedish menswear brand Our Legacy was so noteworthy it consumed more post-match oxygen than the news that Manchester City had been dumped out of the Champions League before the quarter-finals. Never mind that Guardiola is beginning to look bereft of ideas for the first time in his career. All anyone cared about was whether he’d hired a stylist.
It’s hard to imagine a footballer’s outfit generating this much attention, but where male managers are concerned, certain rules are still very much in force. This week’s Carabao Cup final against Arsenal at Wembley saw Guardiola wearing a navy turtleneck and brown wool herringbone trousers, an outfit that waged a deliberate campaign of gen X reinvention. Having revolutionised basically every aspect of the English game in his decade at City, it seems his final revolution is changing what it’s possible for a manager to wear on the touchline.
But was Pep’s shirt a sign of a genuine shift? Rather than quiet quit with months of the season still ahead, and speculation growing that it would be his last, was he opting to embrace the din with a knowing smile and air of self-expression? Or had he simply given control of his wardrobe to his gen Z influencer daughter.
Traditionally, aspiring managers have two wardrobe options: the tracksuit and baseball cap of a training-ground drill sergeant, or the dark suit and tie of a man who sees himself at a remove from his players.
This binary began to crumble in the mid-90s with the arrival of Arsène Wenger. The debonair Frenchman married an air of sophistication with a bookish, bespectacled look that quickly earned him the nickname Le Professeur, only to be replaced by an insistence on wearing extremely long sports coats. The Wenger coat became a streetwear staple and, before Pep’s recent intervention, was undoubtedly the most iconic piece of managerial clobber in British sporting history.
Where Wenger’s look said cerebral, José Mourinho’s said something altogether more dangerous. The handsome Portuguese manager arrived at Chelsea in 2004 radiating a kind of louche authority that said: beneath the Armani suits and perfectly tied scarves, I am hard as nails. No wonder women loved him. His teams were ruthless, pragmatic and, in those early years at least, victorious. The sartorial peacocking was an alibi of sorts – a cover for the grim efficiency that characterised the way Chelsea played.
Guardiola has always been fashion aware. He briefly modelled for Catalan designer Antonio Miró, while starring in Barcelona’s midfield. As Barcelona manager, from 2008 to 2012, he wore dark, knife-sharp suits and a shaved head, lending him the look of a sort of footballing monk. At Bayern from 2013 to 2016, he largely disappeared into club kit, his personality subsumed to an extent by one of Germany’s most enduring cultural institutions. His arrival at Manchester City in 2016 brought fashion from Rick Owens, Stone Island and CP company – younger, more culturally fluent, but still utilitarian.
Daniel-Yaw Miller, fashion and sports journalist and founder of the SportsVerse newsletter, agrees the shift in Pep’s wardrobe this season is emblematic of a new phase in the legendary manager’s career. “He’s reached that point when people start thinking about the years beyond management and style is often a tool to communicate that – to signal that they’re ready to have a bit more fun,” he says. “With Pep specifically, it feels like the handbrake has come off. You see it in how he is with his players, in his press conferences, and now in what he’s wearing,” says Miller.
His changing looks are also in stark contrast to the younger managers in the premier league. Mikel Arteta, a former assistant of Guardiola’s at City, has spent his Arsenal tenure aggressively seeking gravitas through quarter-zips and cashmere sweaters. Liam Rosenior has been roundly mocked for his failure to bring coherence to a talented Chelsea side while wearing hoodies under his suit jacket and designer glasses. Brighton’s Fabian Hürzeler’s look is even more extreme. Just 31 and younger than several of his own players, he dresses less like a manager and more like a student swinging by the gym after lectures.
So, the question of whether any of this actually matters remains. “Football managers are the most neurotic, detail-obsessed people – they don’t leave a single thing in their preparation to chance. It would be naive to think what they wear doesn’t fall into that,” says Miller. He draws a parallel with Lewis Hamilton, a man who had a terrible season in Formula One last year but who remained central to the cultural conversation around his sport through savvy dressing at race weekends.
What a manager wears is ultimately a statement about how he sees the game, and his place within it. Wenger saw himself as an intellectual. Mourinho saw himself as a star. The tracksuit managers of yesteryear saw themselves as sergeants. Pep, it turns out, is something else entirely now – a man who has won everything there is to win, and knows that the conversation about what he’s wearing is probably more interesting than whether he’s any good at his job.
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