From Palestine to Catalonia, Guardiola believed in more than just football

Pep Guardiola departs Manchester City with a legacy that stretches well beyond the 17 trophies he won in 10 years. Pep Guardiola is more than a football manager, using his high-profile platform to highlight causes close to his heart. Legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly may have believed football was “much, much more important” than life or death, but for Guardiola, several things outside the “beautiful game” matter almost as much. The 55-year-old Spaniard will step away from the Manchester City dugout on Sunday after winning 20 trophies in 10 years. From Palestinian children to Catalan independence and homelessness in the United Kingdom, Guardiola has strayed outside the borders of his job to bang the drum for a diverse range of causes during that time. He has made no bones about using his position as a podium to “speak up to be a better society”. Guardiola’s most recent foray into sensitive political territory has been his passionate embrace of the predicament of the Palestinian children in Gaza during the two-year war with Israel and their suffering in the aftermath. The war, which began after Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, has killed at least 72,568 people in Gaza. Victims included children from toddlers to late teens. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people still live in tents, and conditions remain dire despite a ceasefire that came into effect in October. The devastation is acutely felt by the youngest in society, a topic Guardiola felt sufficiently important to miss a pre-match news conference and attend a charity event, Act x Palestine, in Barcelona in January this year. With a Palestinian keffiyeh draped around his neck, he went on the offensive. “I think what we think when I see a child in these past two years with these images on social media, on television, recording himself, pleading ‘where is my mother?’ among the rubble, and he still doesn’t know it,” he said. “And I always think: what must they be thinking? And I think we have left them alone, abandoned.” While widely lauded, his forays into the delicate issue also met with opprobrium, not least from the representatives of Manchester’s Jewish community. Remarks that he made last year prompted the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester and Region to write a letter to the Manchester City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak, warning his comments put the lives of Jews living in Manchester “in danger”. Guardiola, though, was unbowed – just as he was when he was fined 20,000 pound ($27,000) by the Football Association in 2018 for wearing a yellow ribbon to support imprisoned politicians in his native Catalonia. It is not just the suffering of Palestinian children that prompted him to lend his voice. He spoke out at a news conference in February to deplore not only the violence in the Middle East but also Ukraine, Sudan and the deaths of two people in the United States at the hands of ICE agents. “When you have an idea, and you need to defend [it], and you have to kill thousands, thousands of people – I’m sorry, I will stand up,” he said. “Always, I will be there. Always.” However, with anti-Semitism on the rise, the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester and Region was angered that he made no reference to a terror attack on a synagogue in the city last October, which resulted in two deaths. “It’s especially galling given his total failure to use his significant platform to display any solidarity with the Jewish community subjected to a terrorist attack a few miles from the Etihad Stadium,” they said in a statement in February. Guardiola has also paid attention to those who suffer closer to home. For several years, his Guardiola Sala Foundation has supported the Salvation Army’s Partnership Trophy, a five-a-side football tournament in Manchester, which raised awareness of homelessness in the United Kingdom. “It’s so encouraging to witness how football can bring people together and help them overcome really tough personal challenges,” he said.