Pep Guardiola's supremacy under assault as Manchester move approaches

Manchester City knew they had signed the most highly-regarded coach in football; now the most highly-regarded coach in football has a reputation to revive.

Pep Guardiola was brought to Bayern Munich to dominate Europe but he will leave the club this summer with a hole in his CV that can never be filled. Three Champions League semi-finals, three defeats to Spanish teams: Real Madrid, Barcelona and now Atletico Madrid. In the three years he has spent as Bayern Munich manager, Guardiola has been unable to live up to his inheritance from treble-winner Jupp Heynckes. In those same three years, Diego Simeone has now reached two Champions League finals.

Is this just bad luck, or does it say something fundamental about the man and his system? That is the question that will be picked at relentlessly as Guardiola heads to Manchester without the final validation he wanted as Bayern Munich boss, no matter how dominant his team have been domestically and no matter how sublime the football has been. “I know where I am,” he said ahead of a match against Arsenal in October. “I know that I won’t meet expectations if we don’t win the Champions League.”

Simeone, by contrast, has exceeded all expectations again this season and it is hard to see how this magnificent Atleti team will be stopped again, two years after losing to Real Madrid in Lisbon, whether they face their city rivals or the team Guardiola will take responsibility for in the summer. Atleti are a mirror of their manager: ferocious, determined and single-minded. They are the best team in Europe without the ball.

Guardiola, though, faces something of a crisis of confidence – not so much within himself but from the point of view of those looking in. He is a perfectionist who has set incredible standards in football. But they appear to be slipping, even just by increments. Guardiola has reached the semi-finals of the Champions League in every season he has been a manager. The man is no fraud. Yet he has been undone three seasons in succession at the penultimate hurdle and that is enough to invite scrutiny when you are held up as a beacon of beautiful football and will be the best paid coach in football.

In Munich, the expected battle unfolded, even if it was more epic than anyone would have dared hope: Bayern attacking, pressing, passing and moving; Atleti defending, clearing, blocking and tackling. Guardiola’s side enjoyed 76% possession in the first half and Philipp Lahm completed 53 passes, just three fewer than the entire Atleti team. It was one of those matches where two footballing cultures are demarcated so distinctly.

But as well as dominating the ball, as they did in the first leg to little effect, Bayern were looking near irresistible going forwards too, escaping the asphyxiating grasp of the Atleti defence to test Jan Oblak time and again. In the space of a 10-minute spell in the first half, Thomas Muller got in behind to lay the ball off to Robert Lewandowski, who saw his shot saved; Oblak dropped a swerving Ribery shot from range, with Lewandowski firing over the bar; Lahm smacked a stunning drive just off target; and we witnessed two crucial moments.

On 31 minutes, a relentless Bayern got their breakthrough. David Alaba was chopped to ground just outside the box and Xabi Alonso’s free-kick took a deflection off Jose Maria Gimenez to fly past Oblak, the keeper conceding his first goal in more than 10 hours. Only two minutes later, Gimenez rugby-tackled Javi Martinez in the box to concede a penalty, but Oblak kept out Muller’s effort with a brilliant save. It was one of 17 shots he faced in a hugely one-sided first half, to Atleti’s two.

This was a different Bayern to the first leg. Reinvigorated, they looked exactly like a team who had swatted aside their past 11 opponents at home in the Champions League with varying degrees of ease. A team built by the man who won the Champions League twice with Barcelona. Douglas Costa and Franck Ribery were looking menacing and, crucially, Jerome Boateng was back in the team, spraying the ball around impressively.

But if the first half acted as a reminder of what makes Bayern Munich so brilliant, and Guardiola such an compelling figure, the second half witnessed a brutal riposte, displaying why Atletico Madrid under Simeone are such a force.

All this frighteningly efficient and ruthless team needs is one chance, and they got it when, after a mistake from Boateng, Fernando Torres poked a pass through for Antoine Griezmann. David Alaba stepped up to try and catch the forward offside but Griezmann was perfectly positioned to exploit Bayern’s high line by haring towards goal and finishing beautifully into the bottom corner.

Cede possession, bide your time and hit your opponents hard with lightning-quick forwards when space opens up. Just 24 hours after Leicester City’s monumental Premier League title win, this was another triumph from the same playbook.

Still, there was some room for chaos amid the theory. Lewandowski brought Bayern back in front with a close-range header after Arturo Vidal had leapt superbly to nod the ball in his direction. Then Atleti had the chance to kill the contest for good when Javi Martinez chopped down Torres a yard outside the box and the striker’s forward momentum deceived referee Cuneyt Cakir, who gave a penalty. Torres took it himself but Neuer pulled off a fine save – almost identical to Oblak’s.

It made for the kind of entertaining spectacle which Atleti are not so readily associated with. But at its heart, and in its crucial moment, coming when Griezmann scored the killer away goal, it was a vindication of Simeone’s body of work

Call it anti-football, call it reductive, call it defensive, call it what you like. But it is an art form in its own right and it could inspire Atleti to the greatest achievement in the club’s history, just as it did Leicester City. These two clubs are thriving in a way which traditional logic and football’s financial hierarchy dictate should be very unlikely.

It leaves a bitter taste in some mouths, though. Just this week, Xavi, a man umbilically linked to Guardiola’s success and style of play, the man who succeeded him as Barcelona’s metronome, spoke rather disparagingly of the Simeone model. It was expected from a man who is not shy to position himself as football’s moral arbiter when it comes to matters of aesthetics.

“A big team like Barcelona should not be playing like Atlético Madrid,” he said in the Spanish press. “Big teams like Barcelona and Madrid should always stick to their own style. You cannot start playing like Atletico”.

But Atletico’s style has now dispatched two of Europe’s three most revered teams in consecutive rounds: Barcelona and Bayern Munich. The two teams built by Guardiola in the past decade. In the Champions League final the third member of the troika, Real Madrid, could be next and Guardiola will be watching on TV again.

Simeone, with his polar opposite conception of football, has occupied the space everyone thought would be Guardiola's when he joined Bayern Munich, and it is inviting reappraisals of City's new boss before his arrival in England.