Kyle Walker targeted amid Pep Guardiola divorce from ‘most beautiful woman in your planet’
It’s the end of 2024 and the entire football world is rubbernecking at Manchester City.
After almost a decade of trophy-guzzling under Pep Guardiola, City are in the kind of form that made you suspect the Catalan’s reign had been a hallucinogenic dream and Stuart Pearce was still in charge.
It didn’t take a degree in emotional intelligence to suspect Guardiola was going through something and it soon emerged he was divorcing his wife. But we all underestimate just how much he was aching.
“Guys, I want to confess something,” Guardiola says in a scene from Manchester City’s new documentary, A Beautiful Obsession, after a Champions League loss at Juventus.
“I am f***ing divorced from the most beautiful woman in your planet, my wife, my ex-wife. I love her unbelievably but we lost the passion. I love her? Yeah, absolutely. She loves me? Yeah, but we lost the passion.
“How do you play football? Because you play, or for something inside?
“In your lives, whatever you are going to do, do it with passion. I don’t want good players, I want players with passion.”
Firstly, the use of ‘your planet’ is sensational. It confirms our long-held suspicion that Guardiola inhabits his own wibbly-wobbly world of inverted full-backs, expensive knitwear and cigars.
Equally, there is acknowledgement that Guardiola – for all his extra-terrestrial tactical knowledge – is human. Fumbling a beautiful woman and having your mind scrambled is a rite of passage for any straight man.
But the clip also muddies the water slightly; as happens so often, the object of your obsession worms their way implicitly into your unrequested life advice.
And Guardiola was going through a second divorce at the time, hurtling towards the point of annulling his union with Kyle Walker.
Walker was firmly in his Gary Neville At The Hawthorns era, an accumulation of physical decline suddenly manifesting itself in your Marcus Taverniers giving him the run-around.
The full-back was City’s captain, thrashing about in deepening waters as his manager refused to chuck him a lifeboat.
It all came to a head in a miserable loss at Liverpool, one of those matches where the scoreline reads 2-0 but spiritually could have been about six without complaint.
In the dressing room afterwards, Guardiola named individuals who should have done better at certain moments and addressed how Walker lost possession.
“You keep saying my name in every meeting and every f***ing thing,” the player answered back. “Every f***ing meeting, it’s my name.”
This happens towards the end of any relationship; all pretence of keeping the peace is sacrificed on the altar of speaking your truth.
Guardiola responded with: “Maybe because you’re a captain.”
“You didn’t want me to be a captain,” Walker replied. “I’ve reacted to someone else, I lost the ball, you somehow bring my name into it.”
To say things were strained to breaking point would be an understatement. Working under Guardiola’s particular brand of intensity would erode the staunchest player’s reservoir of resilience, especially one sensing the end like Walker.
Equally, Guardiola will have been looking for his senior players to carry the weight of responsibility during his own personal burden.
All of this could’ve been shouldered during happier times, but that would be to underestimate the power of accumulation. The dripping tap that gradually drives you insane, with both parties neither right nor wrong.
Walker only lasted three more games at City, leaving for a loan spell at AC Milan in January 2025 and permanently to Burnley six months later.
His removal from the team signified the end of an era, City spending £200million that winter to stop the rot. Gradually, other treble-winners left the club and Guardiola would follow in May 2026.
Statistically, the chances of you or I going through a divorce are as high as ever. But vanishingly few of us will go through two simultaneously; no wonder Guardiola was visibly aching.
