Arsene Wenger plays down Pep Guardiola's impact on the changing face of attacking football before EFL Cup final

Arsene Wenger was surprisingly reluctant to praise the man he will come up against on Sunday when Arsenal play Manchester City at Wembley

Arsene Wenger and Pep Guardiola will go head to head at Wembley (Getty)

Arsene Wenger and Pep Guardiola have plenty in common: an obsession with football, a commitment to attractive, attacking play, a hunger to evolve the game in new ways and an approach to management that is both theoretical and academic but also fiery and emotional.

Guardiola as a player was an admirer of Wenger’s coaching and in 2001, at the age of 30, he wanted to join Arsenal after leaving Barcelona. Wenger was a big fan. “It was the quality of his decision making and the quality of his distribution,” he explained. “And he played a very quick passing game and that is always our DNA.” But Wenger decided that Guardiola was “over the top of his career” and so decided against adding him to a midfield that already included “top-class players”, not least Patrick Vieira. So Guardiola joined Brescia instead, before moving to Roma and finishing his career in Qatar and Mexico.

Since then, Guardiola has become a manager, winning three league titles and two Champions Leagues at Barcelona, three league titles at Bayern Munich, and is on the brink of his first Premier League title at Manchester City. He has done all of this playing a new brand of attacking football, in the best traditions of Wenger’s great teams but setting the bar even higher than they ever could.

So at his press conference at London Colney on Friday morning, Wenger was asked whether Guardiola has changed the top level of football over the last 10 years, setting a new standard for attacking play. He had already confirmed his shared “love for the game” and “positive philosophy” with Guardiola. But Wenger was surprisingly reluctant to praise the man he will come up against. Pointing to Barcelona’s successes since Guardiola resigned in 2012, and the fact that the modern game is more to do with top players than coaches, Wenger demurred.

“No,” Wenger said. “Because you look at Barcelona, they are still the best team in Europe. I think you have to accept that the modern game has changed, because there is a re-groupment of the best players in a small number of clubs. And as managers, we impulse our philosophy. But I think this game belongs to the players, because the importance of the players has become bigger than ever before, because the re-groupment of the best players in very small numbers of teams.”

It was surprising to hear a manager who has achieved so much seemingly diminish the role of the manager in the modern game, arguing that all they could do was “impulse our philosophy” rather than build a team in their own image. Especially when the successes of Guardiola or Antonio Conte in recent years shows what an ambitious manager with a clear idea can still achieve.

Not that Wenger wanted to talk too much about the man he will face across the dug-out on Sunday. As much as Wenger is a guardian of the game, he is also a proud man and manager of Arsenal, desperate to beat City, just as he did in the FA Cup semi-final last year, and win Sunday’s League Cup final, not to talk up his opponent.

“I don’t want to make a press conference about Pep Guardiola,” he said. “I think what is important for us is to focus on our game. He has done very well in his career and he is a good manager, but what is important for us is to focus not on what is going on at Manchester City.”