Guardiola confesses to his single biggest regret while at Manchester City: “never my intention”
The Catalan manager spoke ahead of his final game as Man City manager, revealing the one player he feels he was perhaps unfair to.
The exit is confirmed, and now he can tell everyone everything. Pep Guardiola is leaving Manchester City and despite the heartbreak, the pain, and the deep feeling of ‘what now?’, there will also be relief. A sense of relaxation that comes as the equal and opposite reaction to having the weight of one of the most successful clubs of the century removed from your shoulders.
And it appears as though Guardiola is indeed sloshing around in that unique cocktail of brain chemicals. He is both unnervingly on edge and deeply relaxed, a juxtaposition only found in nature’s deepest depths and the secretest of laboratories.
In this position, both ephemeral yet utterly intriguing, Guardiola has let us into his mind and revealed one of his biggest regrets as Manchester City manager.
Pep Guardiola reveals his one regret during his time as Manchester City boss 👀 pic.twitter.com/GwJqURG7oO
— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) May 22, 2026
“One regret that I have deep inside for many years"
“But there is one regret that I have deep inside for many years, that I didn’t give a chance to Joe Hart to be with me to prove himself how good a keeper he was,” Guardiola revealed ahead of his final game as City manager, against Aston Villa.
“I should have done, not because... all respect for Claudio, all respect for Ederson who came in, they were important, but in that moment, I could have said, ‘Okay Joe, let’s try to do it together. If it doesn’t work, okay, we’ll change it’.
“But it happened. Life is sometimes... I have to take decisions and sometimes I’m not fair enough. Maybe with time then and learning... But I regret it from that time," he explained.
Joe Hart was dropped by new manager Pep Guardiola for the first match of the 2016–17 Premier League season, before being sent out on loan to Torino in Italy. A year later, he signed for West Ham United and would never play again for Manchester City.
“In that moment, I said, ‘I believe in that’. Always I am stubborn in my decisions, when I believe in that. When I have doubts, I talk with people, but when I’m completely sure, 100 per cent, I say, ‘Guys, we have to do it in that way’, and I have been at a club that has supported me absolutely in everything with that.”
“If in that I failed, I do apologise, but it never, never was my intention or the intention of the club,” Guardiola concluded.
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