Are Man City really going to replace Pep Guardiola with a Liverpool reject?

Manchester City have made a bold move - and it points to a very interesting Pep Guardiola successor who Liverpool know well.

Manchester City moved to replace outgoing sporting director Txiki Begiristain last week. Begiristain is leaving after 12 years at City, overseeing their rise to the pinnacle of football.

The Spaniard joined them from Barcelona, where he had been a sporting director from 2008 to 2010. That will rightly click with a few people that he must have appointed Pep Guardiola as manager there in 2008.

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And Bergiristain did just that - he was absolutely vital in giving the former Barcelona captain his big break in management. And so when he went to City in 2012, it was seen at the time as a move to eventually get Guardiola.

Jason Humphreys, writing for the Guardian in 2015, pointed this out while discussing whether Guardiola should head to the Etihad after Bayern Munich.

"Of course, there is also his relationship with City executives Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain, who seem to have been employed with the sole purpose of bringing Guardiola to the club," he wrote.

City first moved to install an environment that Guardiola would want to work in, appointing a sporting director who he not only knew but knew he worked well with.

And we can't help but wonder if they're doing the same thing right now.

Manchester City's Pep Guardiola successor

Guardiola's contract expires at the end of the season. Now, he might sign a new one - he has arguably the easiest job in football, after all, and is paid incredibly well to do it. It's a team that works wonderfully well and boasts an incredible amount of money to improve whatever needs improving. Few half measures, if any. What more could he want?

A break from it all, perhaps. City will be preparing for a time after Guardiola, and their first move in that direction is to appoint Sporting CP sporting director Hugo Viana to replace Bergirisatain.

Viana has been a brilliant asset for Sporting, working wonderfully with manager Ruben Amorim. That's a very, very familiar name to Liverpool fans as Amorim was high on the Reds' shortlist to replace Jurgen Klopp this summer.

But things collapsed. Amorim didn't have the job in the bag when he took an ill-advised trip to London to meet with West Ham United. This was seen by most as an attempt to pressure Liverpool into a decision - and to be fair, it worked.

Only, it worked in the opposite direction. Liverpool rejected the idea of hiring Amorim and went with Arne Slot instead.

Amorim remains at Sporting, and if City are looking for a new manager in 2025, he will certainly be high on the list of candidates. After all, they're going to look at a list of bosses that is largely identical to the one Liverpool spent months analysing.

The appointment of Viana feels very much like the appointment of Bergiristain. Even if it's not next summer, it was surely done with the idea of hiring Amorim down the line and setting up an environment for him to thrive.

And if that is what's to come, the Slot vs Amorim rivalry could be one for the ages. The Liverpool boss vs the one they ultimately rejected.