by Unless you were a seasoned Pep Guardiola watcher, you might have assumed there was something seriously wrong with Phil Foden’s stunning goal at the Bernabéu on Tuesday night. finger jabbing, face creased with violence, Guardiola went on to the field to hit Foden’s face with such strong energy that he not only pressed Foden’s cheeks but made his ears flap. But that’s just Guardiola showing affection.
Maybe it’s because he sees something of himself in Foden. Johan Cruyff would tell the story when he was looking for a technically skilled midfielder in Barcelona’s reserves in 1990. “They told me this boy Pep was the best, so I looked at him in the B team but he didn’t play. I watched him in the youth team but he didn’t play. Eventually I found him in the third team. I said to the coaches: ‘You said he was the best?!’ And they said: ‘Yes, but physically…’ And I said: ‘He’ll grow.'” Quoting the mantra, if you’re good enough, you’re big enough, Cruyff brought Guardiola into the first team and he got the better of him. central player of the team that won four La Liga titles in a row and the 1992 European Cup.
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Foden can say, according to Mark Allen, who was the director of Manchester City’s academy during the player’s formative years. “Phil wasn’t the greatest,” Allen said. “Physically there was no way he could compete. But he was smart enough to work around that. His frustrations came when he saw players in his group being promoted to older groups. Although he was capable of doing so, it was neither wise nor prudent to push him into over-age groups where he was much more physical. I had several conversations with him about that.”
Never the ugly duckling – he was always a hurler and won the Golden Ball in England’s Under-17 World Cup-winning team – yet Foden has evolved rather than bursting onto the scene, like by Wayne Rooney. He has been slower to get to this point than his opponent on Tuesday night, Jude Bellingham, who he has put in his shadow.
Foden at 23 is the best player in the best team in the world. Player of the match against Real Madrid, he received 7/10 from L’Équipe, a rare honor that marks in the famous French newspaper rarely get above six.
Rather than being held back when peers were promoted to older age groups, the whole question was whether Guardiola would ever trust him in a midfield that included David Silva, Kevin De Bruyne and Bernardo Silva. Game time was limited at first and it looked like the homegrown academy player might be beaten by expensive imports but, with the departure of David Silva in 2020, his moment had come.
There was a huge leap during the lockdown when Foden, guided by his adviser Owen Brown, began working with Liverpool Harriers athletics coach Tony Clarke, first on the road and then, as restrictions tightened, in Foden’s back garden. “We’ve been working on his running gait and getting him to understand acceleration,” Clarke said. “Usain Bolt doesn’t reach top speed until 40m into the race. But it’s not often that a footballer runs 40m. Sprinting has three phases: acceleration, transition and flight but footballers should be mostly in the acceleration phase. Phil was going straight into flight mode and passing out. It made the acceleration and shifting quick. So we were working on the first six and eight steps: head down, knees up, hip drive down, and that’s where all the power comes from.”
But sprint training for footballers is very different to what it would be for Bolt, which involves quick changes of direction and no 6ft 2in, 13 stone defender wants to take you out in the final Olympic 100m. By focusing on his front foot plant and change of direction, his time over five meters improved significantly, as did his range of motion. At the World Cup in Qatar, he was England’s third fastest player, behind only Kyle Walker and Marcus Rashford.
As lockdown restrictions eased, Foden and Clarke moved to Macclesfield’s city athletics track, an unexpected place on the outskirts of town, in terms of glamor far from the Bernabéu. Here he was introduced to Clarke’s fartlek sessions, the word meaning speed-play in Swedish, a type of running that was developed in Scandinavia in the 1930s and evolved into modern interval training. A typical session was two x 90sec, four x 60sec, four x 30sec and four x 15sec.
Foden told friends he felt “like a rocket” and was as fit as ever. “Word was coming back from training that he was in incredible shape,” Clarke said.
A 4-1 win against Liverpool in February 2021, in which Foden starred as man of the match and scored a stunning goal, made outsiders sit up and take notice. Barney Ronay wrote in these pages: “Stop looking at Foden’s exciting goal for a moment and focus instead on his blistering run to open the game.” Jamie Carragher, who moves in the same circles as Clarke, mentioned on Sky that Foden was working with an athletics coach. Since then Clarke has been inundated with footballers and has worked with Grace Clinton from Tottenham and the Lionesses and Missy Bo Kearns from Liverpool.
Foden was still the wide attacking player rather than trusting, as he was at the Bernabéu, to be in the middle. In May 2022 Guardiola said: “In time he can play centrally but at the moment, he is best suited on the wings. [In the central positions] must have the pause.” Guardiola’s Spanish word invokes the image of David Silva hovering over the ball before sliding in a perfect assist for Sergio Agüero. Lionel Messi was always quick but he was even better at slowing down so quickly that a defender would be left running aimlessly into the distance. Foden is known as the Stockport Iniesta by City fans but the Barça midfielder who inspired that monitor had the ability to slow the game down; Foden was always more full throttle.
“He’s from Edgeley,” says a friend, referring to the Stockport suburb where Foden grew up. “Although he is a product of the academy, he is also the last of the street footballers.” Foden will show you the concrete playground next to the bookies where he played his childhood games, battling cousins and older teenagers as an underdeveloped eight-year-old. Goalposts were mules rather than jerseys, but nevertheless an old-school development plan that looked more like the 1950s than the 2020s, hinting at the aggression needed to play with older boys and the 100mph style of a box-go player -box. Until recently he enjoyed kickabouts there.
It is difficult to refine an English footballer who was brought up in this way but Guardiola seems to have succeeded, the executive functions of Foden’s football brain fading more and more into life. You can also see how much he now relishes the goal-scoring responsibilities off his shoulders: the strike he equalized on Tuesday was the fourth time he’s attempted that long-range shot in 15 minutes.
Foden may be rested for now against Luton on Saturday so he will be ready to battle the English No. 10 against Bellingham and Real Madrid resume on Wednesday, although De Bruyne will also claim the role. It wasn’t long ago that England would be complaining about the lack of creative, technical players. Now somehow there are too many of them, and they all have to be squeezed into the starting XI at Euro 2024 this summer. And both Bellingham and Foden have legitimate claims to be the best players in their respective leagues right now.
