Bacary Sagna has shared details on what it was like trying to learn how to play under Pep Guardiola at Manchester City.
The final season of Sagna’s three years at the Manchester club was the 52-year-old’s first in charge after being appointed in the summer of 2016.
Having retired from professional football in 2020, the Frenchman is set to feature in a charity game next month to help raise money for Ukraine, which he has recently been promoting on talkSPORT, in addition to speaking about his time at Arsenal and City.
Speaking on talkSPORT, Sagna had this to say about his experience learning from Guardiola and getting to grips with what the Spaniard wanted from him on the pitch.
He said: “At first it’s not easy, especially when you’re always playing in your life like it was my case, I always played when I was at Arsenal and my first season at City was a shock and when Pep Guardiola came I had to learn new tasks, I had to learn a new job because he was asking me different things.
“He was asking me to go in the middle of the park and to be comfortable and I always played down the flanks so I had to start over again.”
The use of inverted full-backs has been something Guardiola has been renowned for, using players such as Philipp Lahm, Joao Cancelo, Kyle Walker and David Alaba in the role where they would occupy space in the middle of the pitch rather than stay out wide in their normal positions.
So, for someone like Sagna, who had played for such as significant amount of time in a traditional full-back role, having to reinvent himself as a different sort of player that Guardiola was looking to have in his team would have undoubtedly been a challenge for him.
Having left City in the summer of 2017 and then seeing the club bring in Walker from Tottenham Hotspur in a deal worth £50m, this suggests that the manager may not have been particularly impressed with Sagna and his efforts throughout the 2016/17 season and recognised the need to have a player like Walker in the squad.
