Cheeky Cherki proves Guardiola still knows how to have a bit of fun

Just for once, Rayan Cherki appeared to have pushed his luck. With Manchester City beating Arsenal 2-0 in the Carabao Cup final last month, the Frenchman found himself all alone in the wide open spaces of Wembley, the ball tracing a path through the air towards him, and an opportunity to have a little bit of fun.

Not even watching as he did so, the 22-year-old controlled the pass with his chest. As it dropped to his feet, he started to juggle it: once, twice, three times. The whole incident lasted no more than a couple of seconds, but it attracted attention. Ben White, the Arsenal defender, would duly clatter into Cherki not long after, retribution for something many professionals regard as disrespectful.

Far more importantly, on the touchline, Pep Guardiola was shaking his head. When City agreed to pay Lyon £34m to sign Cherki last summer, quite how that relationship would play out was the one caveat to what otherwise appeared an astonishingly cheap deal.

Nobody doubted Cherki’s promise. He had made his debut for Lyon, his home-town team, just a couple of months after his 16th birthday. He had been heralded as French football’s great shooting star ever since, a talisman for Lyon in an otherwise bleak period in the club’s history. He was clearly talented enough to play for City, to play for Guardiola. The question was whether he was sufficiently disciplined.

There has always been a slight contrast in our perceptions of Guardiola. On one hand, he is modern football’s great aesthete, the true apostle of Johan Cruyff, arbiter of the game’s beauty and guardian of its romance. On the other, the allegation that he does not particularly wish to indulge the spontaneous, the maverick, the unpredictable has chased him since the start of his managerial career.

That charge was captured most famously by Zlatan Ibrahimović, who suggested – without so much as a hint of his characteristic hyperbole – that the glittering stars of his wonderful Barcelona side were “like schoolboys. The best footballers in the world stood there with their heads bowed. Everyone did what they were told. I didn’t fit in, not at all.”

Over the course of Guardiola’s ­decade at City, there has been at least a dim echo of that. Within a few weeks of arriving, he had called Samir Nasri “overweight” and sent him on loan to Sevilla, although not before (according to Nasri) instructing his players that all of their sexual activity must take place before midnight.

More famous and more recent was the case of Jack Grealish, the most expensive player in English ­history when he arrived in 2021 and a central figure in City’s remarkable treble-winning campaign in 2023. And yet throughout his time at the Etihad Stadium, Grealish seemed to be caught between his own instincts and Guardiola’s requirements.

The risk for Cherki was that he would fall into the same trap: the talent that had caught City’s eye extinguished by the needs of the system, a virtuoso diminished by taking a seat in the orchestra. Guardiola’s style of play has over the years become ever more focused on control, both of the ball and of the pitch. The sort of self-expression that Cherki holds dear – he regards football as “like art, like music, like drawing” – was very much not the priority.

Late last year, when his manager gently chided him for playing a rabona, rather than a straightforward cross, during a 3-0 win against Sunderland, it read as a warning: Guardiola does not tolerate self-indulgence. And yet four months on it is striking how little Cherki has changed. He has not dispensed with the feints and the flourishes. He has instead come to symbolise something of a shift within Guardiola himself; in order to reel in Arsenal, he seems to have decided that his team need to embrace the impromptu a little more.

This iteration of his City team remains recognisably his, but it seems to have more room for the individual within the collectivist ethos. Gianluigi Donnarumma is just the best goalkeeper City could have; that his style does not fit naturally does not matter. The same is true of Erling Haaland. And is especially true of Cherki, a “free soul”, as Guardiola put it, in a way that did not sound like a criticism.

That does not mean he should push it, of course. The juggling in the eyes of his manager clearly crossed a line. But Guardiola was willing to forgive. When he removed Cherki a few minutes later, the pair shared a delirious embrace on the touchline. Cherki was allowed to have his fun. Perhaps, as he gets close to the end of his time at City, Guardiola has decided he should have his, too.

Photograph by Gareth Copley/Getty Images