If you weren’t a seasoned Pep Guardiola observer, you might have assumed Phil Foden’s stunning goal at the Bernabéu on Tuesday night was seriously wrong. Waving his fingers, Guardiola contorted his face in aggression and strode towards the pitch, grabbing Foden’s face with such force that he not only crushed Foden’s cheeks but also flapped his ears. But this is just Guardiola’s show of affection.
Maybe it’s because he sees something of himself in Foden. Johan Cruyff would tell the story of his search for a technically gifted midfielder in the Barcelona reserves in 1990. “They told me this kid was Pep’s best, so I looked for him in the B team but he didn’t play. I looked for him in the infrastructure, but he did not play. I finally 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 up.'” Citing the mantra that if you are good enough, you are big enough, Cruyff recruited Guardiola and brought him into the first team. He is the most important player in the team that won four consecutive La Liga titles and the 1992 European Cup.
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Foden can understand that, according to Mark Allen, who was Manchester City’s academy director during the player’s formative years. “Phil wasn’t the biggest,” Allen said. “There was no way he could compete physically. But he was smart enough to handle it. He was disappointed to see players in his group being promoted to larger groups. Although he had the ability to do so, it was not wise or prudent to push him into the extreme age groups, which were much more physical.” “I talked to him a few times about this.”
He was never an ugly duckling – he was always patronized and won the Golden Ball in England’s Under-17 World Cup-winning team – yet Foden has improved rather than bursting into full-fledged fashion like Wayne Rooney. He’s been slower to get to this point than his rival Jude Bellingham, whom he overshadowed on Tuesday night.
Foden, 23, is the most elite player for the best team in the world. Player of the match against Real Madrid received 7/10 from L’Équipe; It’s a rare honor at the famously parsimonious French newspaper, where scores rarely go above six.
As well as withdrawing when his peers were promoted to older age groups, there was also the issue of whether Guardiola would trust him in a midfield that included David Silva, Kevin De Bruyne and Bernardo Silva. His playing time was initially limited and he looked like a domestic academy player bogged down by expensive imports, but when David Silva left in 2020 his moment had arrived.
A giant step forward was taken during lockdown when Foden, under the guidance of his mentor Owen Brown, began training with Liverpool Harriers athletics coach Tony Clarke, first on the track and then in Foden’s backyard as restrictions tightened. “We were working on his running gait and trying to get him to understand acceleration,” Clarke said. “Usain Bolt does not reach top speed until 40 meters in the race. But a football player does not usually run 40 meters. Sprinting has three phases: acceleration, transition and flight, but football players need to be mostly in the acceleration phase. Phil was going straight into flight mode and overstepping. He skipped acceleration and transition. “So we were working on the first six to eight steps: head down, knee up, moving the hips down, that’s where all the power comes from.”
Sprint training for football players is very different from Bolt’s; it takes into account quick changes of direction and the fact that no 6-foot-1, 13-stone defender is trying to tackle you in the Olympic 100-meter final. By focusing on initial foot stance and change of direction, his range of motion as well as times improved significantly over five metres. He became England’s third fastest player at the World Cup in Qatar, behind Kyle Walker and Marcus Rashford.
As lockdown restrictions eased, Foden and Clarke moved away from the Bernabéu to Macclesfield’s municipal athletics track, an underwhelming venue on the edge of town in terms of grandeur. Here he was introduced to Clarke’s fartlek sessions; the word meant quick play in Swedish; this was a form of running developed in Scandinavia in the 1930s that evolved into modern interval training. A typical session was two x 90 seconds, four x 60 seconds, four x 30 seconds, and four x 15 seconds.
Foden told friends he felt “like a rocket” and was fitter than ever. “The word was coming out of training that he was in incredible form,” said Clarke.
The 4-1 win against Liverpool in February 2021, in which Foden starred as player of the match and scored a stunning goal, had outsiders sitting up and taking note. Barney Ronay wrote in these pages: “Stop looking at Foden’s thrilling, high-skill goal for a moment and focus instead on his soaring run to score this game-breaking goal.” Jamie Carragher, who works in the same circle as Clarke, said at Sky that Foden was working with an athletics coach. Since then, Clarke has been inundated with footballers, working with Tottenham’s Grace Clinton and the Lionesses and Liverpool’s Missy Bo Kearns.
Foden was still a wide attacker rather than reliable to take center stage as he did at the Bernabéu. In May 2022, Guardiola said: “Over time he can play centrally but at the moment he is best suited on the wings. [In the central positions] should be there pause.” Guardiola’s Spanish word conjures up images of David Silva hovering over the ball before providing a superb assist to Sergio Aguero. Lionel Messi was always fast, but he was even better at slowing down quickly enough to leave his defender running aimlessly into the distance. Foden is nicknamed the Stockport Iniesta by City fans, but the Barca midfielder who inspired the name also had the ability to slow down the game; Foden has always been more full throttle.
“Because he’s from Edgeley,” says a friend, referring to the suburb of Stockport 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, as a stunted eight-year-old, he played his childhood games, competing with older cousins and teenagers. They had posts instead of jump posts for the goal posts, but it was still an old-school development scheme that looked more like the 1950s than the 2020s, instilling the aggression needed to play with the bigger boys and the 100 mph style of the box-to-box player. Until recently he still enjoyed entertaining there.
It is difficult to improve an English footballer who is built this way but Guardiola seems to have managed it; The executive functions of Foden’s football brain are increasingly perking up. You can now see how much he enjoys shouldering the goal-scoring responsibilities: his equalizer on Tuesday was his fourth attempted long-range shot in a 15-minute span.
For now, Foden may have been rested against Luton on Saturday, so the England No.10s could be ready to continue their campaign against Bellingham and Real Madrid on Wednesday, but De Bruyne will also be in contention for that role. Until recently, England suffered from a lack of creative and technical players. Now somehow there are too many teams and they all need to squeeze into the top 11 at Euro 2024 this summer. Both Bellingham and Foden have legitimate claims to being the best players in their respective leagues right now.