Does Pep Guardiola have trouble with Champions League away games? Manchester City are about to find out

Guardiola has managed 22 Champions League knockout ties before this one. Of those 22 away legs, his teams have only won four, drawing 10 and losing eight.

Does Guardiola have problems with European away games? (Getty)

It might feel unfair to pick holes in the European record of a man who has won the Champions League twice, but as Pep Guardiola takes his Manchester City team to Basel this week he has more than just the Swiss champions to confront. He has his own history as a coach in these games – away from home, in the knockout phase – which is not as good as it might be. Tuesday night in St Jakob Park will not be walkover.

This is Guardiola’s ninth season as a coach and he has done enough now to draw firm conclusions about his work. He is certainly a master of European football, only ever failing to reach the semi-finals once. But one relevant detail stands out: his teams often struggle when they go away, rarely leaving with a result, and having to rely on their home form instead.

At Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City Guardiola has managed 22 Champions League knockout ties before this one. Of those 22 away legs, his teams have only won four, drawing 10 and losing eight.

Of course, some away legs are effectively irrelevant if the home leg was won easily enough, like when Barcelona could draw 1-1 at Bayern Munich in the 2009 quarter-finals having dismantled Jurgen Klinsmann’s side 4-0 at home. But even in the 17 occasions when – like tomorrow night – the away leg was first, to set up the tie, Guardiola’s teams have struggled to come away with a positive result: with three wins, seven draws and seven defeats. A typical pattern – it happened five times with Barcelona and four times with Bayern – sees Pep’s team fail to win away first up but then record a big home win to go through.

But is it just a coincidence? A natural result of how difficult this high-level football is? Or a function of how Guardiola sends his teams out, almost indistinguishable in away games from how his sides are set up at home. Guardiola is arguably the most proactive manager in football history, a man who only ever thinks of taking the initiative, dominating possession and taking the game to the opponents. No matter who they are or where the game is played.

Speaking in his press conference on Monday evening at St Jakob Park, Guardiola said that is exactly what they will do. “We are going to try. In every single game since we were together for 18 months, we try to impose our game. The Champions League is a completely different competition than the local league, the Premier League. Because the physicality, and the quality of the opponents, individually and collectively, is higher. Hopefully we can control it as good as possible and go through.”

This has always been his way. When Guardiola took his Bayern team to Arsenal in February 2014 for the last-16, he warned the players beforehand that these big away games are “intense, complicated, aggressive and dangerous”. Then he told the players that he wanted them to dominate possession even more than usual, to “kill the game dead”, to dispirit Arsenal, then to win the game from there. It did not work out like that – Arsenal dominated the start then faded – but Bayern still went on to win 2-0.

Or later that season when Bayern went to Real Madrid, the eventual Champions League winners, Guardiola encouraged them to “play like they know how”, passing out from the back, dominating Real Madrid even in the Santiago Bernabeu. The polar opposite plan from Jose Mourinho or Diego Simeone, whose teams sit back and leave the ball to the opposition in the biggest matches.

But as the results show, the Guardiola method’s braveness can be its undoing. Plenty of times his side have gone out, dominated in one of Europe’s hardest grounds, but then been undone on the break. His Barcelona team were brilliant at Chelsea in the 2012 semi, but lost to a Didier Drogba goal on the break. And they lost first legs to counter-attacking play from the hosts at Inter in 2010, and at Arsenal in 2011. Guardiola’s Bayern lost first-leg semis away from home at Real Madrid in 2014 and Atletico Madrid in 2016 in similar circumstances.

In all those games the fundamentals went the way of Guardiola’s team but the details went against them. And playing this aggressively away from home is inherently risky, giving the biggest teams in the world more space to counter-attack into than they would ever normally enjoy in their domestic leagues. For it to work, everything has to go perfectly.

“This competition is so special from my experience,” Guardiola explained at his Swiss press conference on Monday. “The teams are so clinical, and you have to be too. How you control the bad moments over 180 minutes, if you do that you have a big chance to go through.”

Even last March when City beat Monaco 5-3 at home but then melted away at Stade Louis II, lost 3-1 and were knocked out, Guardiola’s response was revealing. He could easily have blamed the defence for conceding three goals in each leg but he said the problem was that his frontline did not press properyl. The problem was not that they were too aggressive, but not aggressive enough.

“The problem was the first half when we were not there,” Guardiola said, after being knocked out of the Champions League before the semi-final for the first time. “Our strikers have to be aggressive and pick the ball up, but we didn't, at this crucial time. That's why we are out. We wanted to show personality, but we forgot to do that.” This is the Guardiola way: taking risks, passing and pressing just as much away as they would at home. Even if it means one awry detail forces them to win the tie in the home leg instead.