Pep Dreams: Manchester City's Pursuit of the Ultimate in Exclusivity

For all the excitement that rumours of Pep Guardiola's arrival might cause among their fans, Man City must be careful what they wish for. I mean, let's not be too dramatic: they must be as careful as you ever need to when life has not so much given you lemons as a gigantic steaming pool of oil. Which – via the immutable laws of physics that state as rule one that nothing is free in this world, including money – they have not made the best of. The world doesn't quite make sense to them; they don't get its nuances.

If you could inject an Abu Dhabi Sheikh full of truth serum and get some real talk out of him, beneath the Citizens and Blue Moon Rising blandishments, he'd tell you that when he sees the words 'Mes que un club', they appear among a selection of items: the prancing horse of Ferrari, the interlocked Chanel Cs, and a gold crown atop the word Rolex.

So what do you do? You buy mes que un club. Whatever the personal aims of the Abu Dhabi ownership, they seem to have been more genuinely beneficial to their team than any of the other nouveau riche benefactors. I can't take the Etihad Campus entirely on trust, but the £1 billion development includes 5.5 acres intended for community usage. If kids who live in scuzzy areas get to play in the floodlit serenity of its new facilities, the world wins.

But what does Mr. Abu Dhabi really, truly want? An undisputed number one. In a world where everyone around you has access to a lot of free money, that is an almost priceless asset. And you know his eye would have been drawn to only one place in the last 10 years or so.

And if that means transplanting Barcelona wholesale, great. Thus far their former Chief Exec and Director of Football – Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain respectively – have been secured. So has one-time Technical Director Rodolfo Borrell, while a La Masia-style campus has been unveiled.

But this is where it gets tricky. Soriano and Begiristain haven't done very well away from Barça. Yes, they won the league last year, but while I hold no candle for Roberto Mancini it was with his team. These two were both at the Barça helm when the club were developing a squad worth about a billion for the cost of food and electricity at La Masia. Recruitment done the City way clearly doesn't play to their strengths, as Begiristain's presence in the gargantuan misfit transfer of Zlatan can attest. At City their record is pitiful: a £67.5 million spend on six players in 2012, of which only Fernandinho remains; £68 million in 2013 for the class of Navas, Negredo and Jovetic; and £81million in 2014 for Mangala, Fernando and Bony. That's a lot to splash out for not a lot.

Meanwhile, they wait for the final piece, the one to make City 'more than a club'. He's bald, impeccably turned out, and he'll give them what they dream of: the total 360-degree from-all-angles brand experience.

But I'm going to stick my neck out (not particularly far) and say that Guardiola isn't a great manager. He was a great Barça manager; he lived and breathed to make that club work, until by his own admission he was dying on the job. It was the perfect fit for the kind of manager he is – one who famously deplores confrontation, to the point that as their Barça careers waned, Zlatan and Thierry Henry would play a game comparing which of them Pep was most keenly avoiding eye-contact with. You sense that, at Barcelona, the players genuinely do believe there's something bigger than them going on.

At Man City, to put it plainly, there is Yaya Toure, there is Sergio Aguero, and Samir Nasri probably believes there's him. And there are the owners, of course. I'd be fascinated to learn the full inner-workings of one of these 'bought up' clubs, but I'm pretty sure that anywhere that has at its heart 'cash-over-substance', you get a corresponding ego-inflation amongst the players that will lead to exactly the type of relations Guardiola tries so hard to avoid.

That's before you even get to the actual football. No one could say that Bayern Munich have been improved by him. To have made that team better would be the mark of the greatest manager of all time. Instead he took an enhanced team, personnel-wise, and by enforcing his style turned a Champions League semi-final 7-0 aggregate win over Barça into a 5-0 defeat at the hands of Real Madrid. Where they were coming first or second, now they're coming third or fourth. They walked the Bundesliga again, but having poached their only genuine rivals' best players what is that really worth? Some German teams play them like they're already beaten. Although, interestingly, that has been less true this season. Wolfsburg truly went for the jugular of discomfort that pulses inside Guardiola's over-schooled Bayern; the weekend I write this, after the drawn out internet death of Jerome Boateng, Augsburg beat them 1-0.

English teams don't play on auto-beat. Whatever the Premier League's beautiful flaws – indiscipline, for one – no club employs the 'stand-and-gaze' strategy seemingly used by many of Barça and Bayern's opponents. The inferiority complex that currently mars English teams in Europe is reversed; at the Etihad, Guardiola's team would have to convince themselves they were taking the right approach. It would drive the owners absolutely batshit. And all these poor guys want is to be able to stand with their friends in front of a gigantic television, miming taking Barça roughly from behind as their team goes 3-0 up at the Camp Nou. Is that too much to ask?

And perhaps Pep isn't even the true final piece. Wouldn't you love it if all of this – the £1 billion development and Soriano and Txiki and the nudges and winks and denials in all the papers about Guardiola cravings – were just a hopeful welcoming party? For that one thing the gazillionaire most needs: exclusivity. The ability to say, "I have Messi. What have you got?"