So farewell, Ilkay Gundogan.
“(After) what he has done against Aston Villa last season, he can do whatever he wants,” Pep Guardiola said about him, as far back as February. “He has paradise already.”
In that Aston Villa game, on the final day of the 2021-22 Premier League season, the German scored two goals in five minutes late on, either side of Rodri’s 78th-minute equaliser, to deliver Manchester City a second successive title in one of the most dramatic finales ever.
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“I swear you will never see anything like this ever again,” Sky Sports commentator Martin Tyler said famously of Sergio Aguero’s title-winning last kick of the season 10 years earlier. But Gundogan’s heroics that day, as City trailed 2-0 and Liverpool pushed on to beat Wolves 3-1 at Anfield — enough to make them champions if City hadn’t taken maximum points too — came as close as you are ever likely to get.
So imagine coming back for one more glorious season, then scoring twice against both Leeds and Everton on the title run-in as City overhauled Arsenal, and then — perhaps a greater feat than anything else — delivering another pair, in an FA Cup final, against Manchester United, the first after a record-breaking 12 seconds, the second the winner, to keep the treble on track.
And then the very last hurrah, lifting the Champions League trophy, the first in City’s history, as club captain.
Paradise, indeed.
4️⃣ years of @IlkayGuendogan 🔥#OnThisDay in 2016, Ilkay signed for us! 🙌
🔵 #ManCity pic.twitter.com/1UuWCTWouT
— Manchester City (@ManCity) June 2, 2020
Where Gundogan goes from here is not bad, either: two, possibly three years at Barcelona, one of the world’s biggest clubs and a nice sunny climate for the final years of his career.
Where City go post-Gundogan might seem less idyllic.
“Right now, Gundogan is too important for us,” Guardiola told friends the day after his side beat Liverpool 4-1 in April, when they were eight points behind Arsenal. “We can’t afford to let him go.”
He had made those feelings clear to City’s executives and then, a month later, to the public, too: “The club knows my opinion.” He wanted him to stay. City did, too, in fairness, but not at all costs. Ultimately, executives were unwilling to offer a long-term contract to a player who will turn 33 in October, putting a one-year deal, with an option of a second season, on the table.
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It was a rare occasion when the thoughts of Guardiola and sporting director Txiki Begiristain and chief football operations officer Omar Berrada did not line up: all parties appreciate how good a player Gundogan is, but while the manager wanted him to stay no matter what, the decision-makers had business considerations in mind.
Guardiola suspected this outcome before he left Manchester for his summer holidays at the start of June and left those above him with three names: Chelsea midfielder Mateo Kovacic, RB Leipzig defender Josko Gvardiol and, if Gundogan were indeed to leave, West Ham United midfielder and captain Declan Rice.
Football moves quickly and Kovacic is ready to step into the No 8 shirt that has been Gundogan’s since his summer 2016 arrival, having completed a medical on Friday. City will continue to push for Rice, too, and if there is one club accustomed to moving on from legends quickly then it is the treble winners.
But football should not move so quickly that Gundogan’s contributions to City, and his standing in the pantheon of great Premier League midfielders, get overlooked.
“I am someone who tries to reach for the perfect game, even though I know it is not possible,” he once said. “I never want to make a mistake. I never want to mishit a pass. Even a pass that finds my team-mate but finds his wrong foot is, for me, not a good pass.”
It is an impossible standard to live up to, but he gave it one hell of a go.
He was Guardiola’s first signing in Manchester seven years ago and while there are so many modern-day greats to have worn City colours in recent years, there is an argument the German has done as much on the pitch as any of them, even those who now have statues outside the Etihad Stadium.
Aguero, Vincent Kompany and David Silva are the ones to have been immortalised in steel, and there are true greats of the club, like Yaya Toure and Fernandinho, as well as beloved servants who helped deliver the first successes such as Joe Hart and Pablo Zabaleta.
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Those players have departed the club one by one since he and Guardiola came in 2016 and while this may come across as hyperbole in the wake of his own move to Barcelona but, in different ways, Gundogan can be compared to every one of them.
If that Villa win last May was his Aguero moment then the FA Cup final was his Yaya Toure moment. Twelve years previously, City went to Wembley and also beat United, in the semi-finals, Toure scoring the goal that changed everything for the club.
Toure also scored the winner in the final against Stoke City that followed, securing the club’s first silverware in 35 years, and a year later his double in the penultimate league game at Newcastle United set up their first Premier League title. There is also the stunning strike in the League Cup final at Wembley that formed part of an imperious 2013-14 campaign.
The list of decisive contributions is such that Toure might actually be City’s biggest-ever difference-maker, more so than even Aguero, yet in terms of both sustained performance levels and big-game moments, Gundogan is up there, too.
Then there is Silva, for a decade City’s metronome. The ‘pausa’ master, making their team tick long before Guardiola arrived and put all the cogs into place. No matter the manager, City never quite seemed the same without Silva on the pitch but Gundogan is the closest player they have had to the man known as ‘El Mago’ and sets the tempo of a match — from several different areas of the pitch.
When Fernandinho was forced off injured in a big game at Old Trafford on the 2018-19 title run-in, Gundogan dropped back into the midfield holding role and, in the stands, Begiristain leant across to an associate, tapped him on the arm and said, “Watch how the game changes now.” City scored almost immediately and went on to beat United 2-0.
There was nothing wrong with how Fernandinho played the role during his time at City by any means but Gundogan had a different approach, an ability to set the tempo with quick passes and an uncanny ability to wrong-foot onrushing opponents as he received the ball on the edge of his own penalty area.
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It is a large reason why he started the 2021 Champions League final in holding midfield: Fernandinho was flagging at age 36 and Rodri was not yet the player he is now. City’s coaches felt that they would have all the possession against Thomas Tuchel’s Chelsea that night in Porto, so they picked the guy who would do the most with it: Gundogan.
He inherited Fernandinho’s role as leader, too. The Brazilian had always been a big figure in the dressing room but stepped it up several levels when he was named club captain by his team-mates and club staff in 2021, setting the fines, taking players’ concerns to the club and even relaying suggestions about improvements that could be made to the training ground.
Gundogan won that vote last summer and vowed to do the same; he sat in the same seat in the canteen every day, one that meant that he could greet every player as they went past and ask how they were doing.
City fans have been spoiled in recent years, able to enjoy not just serial winners but players they have fallen in love with, the likes of Hart and Zabaleta, and… well, scoring twice in an FA Cup final against a United side determined to end their treble bid has certainly done wonders for Gundogan. Not that he needed it given those goals against Villa a year earlier, after which he sat on the floor of the showers on his own, totally drained.
And if Hart and Zabaleta can say they were there for the first trophies of this City era, laying the foundations for Guardiola’s players to build on, Gundogan has done as much as anybody of the latest generation to break new ground by winning not just the Champions League, but the treble.
And not just that. Five of the past six Premier League titles, four Carabao Cups in a row, an unprecedented domestic treble in 2019 — City have been performing at these heights for years and in each of those seasons there has been a different version of Gundogan.
Quite simply, Guardiola has given him any number of jobs and he has been able to do them all.
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For starters, there are the goals he has scored over the years, ones that have elevated him to higher conversations — team-mate Kyle Walker says he becomes “prime Zidane” during the run-in of a season — and is the area of his game that many fans and pundits will immediately highlight.
“He has an incredible sense for movements to the box, and the finishing as well,” Guardiola says, and the number of goals he’s scored from inside both the six-yard box and ‘the second six-yard box’ demonstrates that beautifully.
But there is so much more to his game than that, and Gundogan himself bristled slightly at the extra praise he received during the 2020-21 season, when he went on a run of 11 goals in 12 games to help take City from ninth shortly before Christmas to seven points clear at the top in February.
He has always done the job asked of him and done it brilliantly, it is just that that particular task involved scoring goals.
This graphic shows how City players contributed to moves leading to a shot in the Premier League last season, and Gundogan is predominantly involved earlier on in the sequence, rather than the one putting the finishing touches on it: they have Erling Haaland for that now, so he can simply go and do something else.
Guardiola says that City’s success in 2018-19, when they won their final 14 league games to hold off Liverpool, who finished a point behind, and also seal that domestic treble, would not have been possible without Gundogan, who filled in when Fernandinho struggled with injuries. Back then, he had only played as a holding midfielder once for City, a defeat at Leicester City on Boxing Day that same season, and yet he excelled when needed most.
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There have been even less glamorous roles than that, too. The season afterwards, when Liverpool won the title, City struggled to control matches and prevent counter-attacks, so Guardiola dropped Gundogan in alongside Rodri to stem the tide. It was not pretty, and indeed many fans hated it, but it was necessary — and it was yet another brief that he fulfilled.
Where Gundogan has operated shows how adaptable he really is. What does he do when he is neither holding in midfield nor on the shoulder of the last defender? It depends.
He can play next to Rodri to help City move the ball up the pitch, but if somebody else — for example, John Stones — is doing that, then he can stay higher. He can do a mixture of the two, or drift out to the left, and he has been Guardiola’s false nine at times. And he can explain the subtle differences in approach that show there is more to it than simply standing somewhere a bit different on the pitch.
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“When you are involved in the build-up play, of course, you have to find the right solution at the right time. But the more you get into the final third of the pitch, the tighter everything becomes,” Gundogan said in 2021. “The more stresses come with finding the right solution and finding it at the right time.
“You also need to get used to the number of passes that you miss. When you are in your own half, involved in your build-up play, out of 100 passes you should make maybe one mistake but no more than that. The amount of mistakes you are able to make is so tiny.”
Given the sheer amount of match-winning moments it is easy to focus on the goals, and even a casual City observer could probably appreciate his adaptability given the different areas he has taken up over the years, from holding midfielder to false nine. There are beautiful turns and perfectly-weighted passes, too… but what about the rest?
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Ilkay Gundogan – where it all began
Gundogan’s tenacity without the ball is just as important as the pirouettes and positional play, particularly in the bigger games. He might just have been City’s best player when it comes to winning second balls; he just seemed to know when and where it was going to drop and would dart in to tidy up.
It is an invaluable trait that helps City dominate matches just as much as the pressing and quick passing, and if there is ever a chance to re-watch crucial big matches against Liverpool, Arsenal, Real Madrid, Manchester United or anybody else, keep an eye on how many times he got stuck in.
That work-rate can go under the radar considering everything else Gundogan does: think about his performance at Everton in May, when he scored two delightful goals — one a unique turn and flick, the other a divine free kick. He also assisted Haaland that day, but only after darting in to mop up a loose ball and driving down the wing.
Even that Wembley goal against United after 12 seconds came from understanding where the second ball would drop.
Quite simply, there is nothing Ilkay Gundogan cannot do. He has been one of the best, most influential midfielders in Premier League history, and one of City’s greatest ever — anywhere on the pitch.
(Top photo: Joe Prior/Visionhaus via Getty Images)