Micah Richards column: Why Pep Guardiola is the greatest coach of all time

Manchester City were panicking at the moment, but the whole of English football was going to miss Pep Guardiola too.

He’s a true legend of the game, and I’m disappointed he is going – The Premier League won’t be the same without him.

Pep is one of the best managers we have ever seen. The greatest of all time? Well, it’s hard to disrespect Sir Alex Ferguson when you have that conversation, but those were different times – Pep is the greatest manager of the modern era, that’s for sure.

If you look at what they both won – and I know everyone will read this and say City spent more, which I got – then Pep won a treble at Barcelona and a treble with City. That in itself is incredible.

But the biggest difference between the two is ‘Fergie’ was a great manager but Pep is the best coach. He has changed the way football is played in England in a way that no one has done before.

I played against Fergie’s teams and the way he built them was incredible. Facing them was terrifying because you knew something special was going to happen and they were going to fight back and this was coming from someone who played for City. He also did this with different side loads.

But as a pundit I’ve analyzed dozens of Pepe’s games and he’s a genius. It’s as simple as that.

When he replaced Manuel Pellegrini in 2016, City already had a number of good players so he wasn’t starting from scratch, but he not only dominated English football for a decade, he changed it.

Everyone plays the way City play now, passing out from the back. This did not happen before he came.

People copied that, and other things like his false nun, the inverted full-back he invented when Philipp Lahm came in at Bayern Munich, and the same with the ball-playing goalkeeper he used from the start at City.

I was disappointed when he brought on Claudio Bravo for my mate Joe Hart, but if you listen to Joe now he will tell you why that happened because the team was playing a different kind of football.

It didn’t work out with Bravo, but then Ederson came along and he took that part of his position to new heights. Again, that’s all pep. As a player or a pundit, I have never seen any other coach in this country do that.