What if their struggles are because of a WOMAN?

Doesn’t take much to reveal the really quite unpleasant nature of a great deal of UK newspaper content. Liverpool title clashes and upcoming North London Derbies simply can’t compete with the biggest story in football as we plough grimly on to day two of Pep Guardiola’s Marriage discourse.

Copypasta

We’ve all seen Pep Guardiola’s undeniably intense embrace with Stefan Ortega at the end of Man City’s latest setback at Brentford. It is in no way the first time Guardiola has been weirdly intense with a player on the pitch straight after a game. It doesn’t always – or even often – have to be one of his own players, either.

But this time it happened JUST DAYS after the news of Guardiola and his wife’s separation, and therefore the two events simply have to be linked, don’t they? Obviously nobody can know or say this for sure, but that doesn’t matter because this is journalism, where you can just heavily imply stuff by talking about them at the same time.

Thus we get this from the Mail.

Emotional Pep Guardiola rages at goalkeeper Stefan Ortega in bizarre embrace after Man City blew a two-goal lead one day after manager’s ‘split with wife’ was revealed

Classic Mail headline in every way, and the copy makes the exact same unsubtle nudge-nudge implications without ever expressly saying what they’re obviously saying.

Pep Guardiola cut a frustrated figure and raged at goalkeeper Stefan Ortega in a bizarre embrace after Manchester City blew a two-goal lead against Brentford. On Monday evening, reports from Spain claimed that Guardiola and his wife Cristina had decided to separate after 30 years together.

But it was the third paragraph that really caught Mediawatch’s eye.

Guardiola, who has three grown-up children with his fashion boss wife, has always stayed at their family home – an £8.4million mansion in Barcelona’s most elite neighbourhood – when he has returned to the Catalan capital from Manchester.

That sounded awful familiar to Mediawatch. There’s no forgetting a phrase so dripping in tabloidese absurdity as ‘fashion boss wife’ is there?

Mediawatch highlighted that exact line from the Daily Mirror’s breathless coverage of what is clearly the biggest story in football yesterday.

But this latest effort in the Mail isn’t written by Gerard Couzens. And nor is it written by Gerard Couzens. (Little joke there that only works if you read yesterday’s Mediawatch, consider it a reward/punishment as appropriate. You really do need to read this every day, yeah? We can’t be explaining everything to a mixed-ability readership, slows everything down.)

But that is not the only striking similarity to yesterday’s Mirror story, just with some Stefan Ortega embrace chat bolted on.

From the Mirror yesterday, for instance:

Guardiola, who has three grown-up children with his fashion boss wife, has always stayed at the family home – an £8.5 million mansion in Barcelona’s most elite neighbourhood – when he has returned to the Catalan capital from Manchester.

Exchange rates are a bugger, eh. Hundred grand down in a day.

But Mediawatch was also tickled by this line from that Couzens & Couzens co-production.

Lorena Vazquez, who forms part of a highly-respected duo of reporters known in Spain as the Mamarazzis, said overnight: “It’s been a carefully-considered decision the couple discussed over several months. They continue to have a cordial and affectionate relationship.”

It made us laugh because we imagined Spanish newspapers writing in such hushed tones about ‘a highly respected duo of reporters known in England as the 3am Girls’.

And today in the Mail:

‘Lorena Vazquez, who forms part of a highly-respected duo of reporters known in Spain as the Mamarazzis, said overnight: ‘It’s been a carefully-considered decision the couple discussed over several months.”’

There’s just something about the combination of grim, tawdry, disingenuous yet gleeful gossip and Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V laziness that has Mediawatch sighing deeply this morning. That they couldn’t even be arsed to update that ‘overnight’ despite 24 hours having passed has annoyed us far more than it should have.

Brown knows

Self-appointed champion of women Oliver Brown has taken a break from writing endless transphobic garbage in the Telegraph to casually insinuate City’s run of bad form might have something do with Guardiola’s wife.

The man can barely contain his glee below a headline – ‘Does Pep Guardiola’s divorce explain Manchester City’s drop in form?’ – for which polite answers range from ‘No, probably not’ to ‘None of your business’.

Mediawatch isn’t going to pull apart the entire column because it’s just too depressing and miserable for words. What we will say is this.

If your (teeth-itchingly pompous) opening line is this…

Tempting as it might be to draw a straight line between Pep Guardiola’s public displays of stress and the reports in Spain of his divorce from wife Cristina, the only people who can illuminate the precise chronology are the couple themselves.

…then it takes some gumption and a staggering lack of self-awareness to proceed to spend the next 900 words pontificating and speculating about it anyway.

I Dreamed A Dream

Two weeks is a long time in Dream XI compiling, it turns out.

In that dim and distant past as 2025 was just beginning and all things seemed possible and it hadn’t even started snowing yet, the Daily Mirror were brave and bold enough to dream big, big, big and deliver Mikel Arteta four – sorry, FOUR – shiny new players over the month to give his Premier League title charge a timely boost. In would come Martin Zubimendi, Nico Williams, Matheus Cunha and Alexander Isak because the fun thing about dreaming is that it’s really, really easy and you can just pull whatever name you like out of whatever orifice you choose.

Mediawatch had its fun with the patently absurd idea that Arsenal could, would or even should bring in an entire new front three in one January transfer window. But you couldn’t deny the dream was large.

Fast-forward two weeks, through a disappointing league draw and a couple of cup defeats, and even in Daily Mirror Dreamland things no longer look so peachy for Mikel and the lads.

Mikel Arteta’s dream Arsenal XI if he lands two priority transfers in January window

Two? That’s half as many as four, isn’t it? It’s not even in CAPS.

The good news, at least, is that Dream Arsenal will still be getting Nico Williams. That’s safe. That’s locked in. But instead of Zubimendi, Isak and Cunha the Arteta dream team now contains merely one Randal Kolo Muani whose imminent move to Juventus presumably isn’t a factor in the dream-based multiverse the Mirror are reporting from. In midfield Arteta is, though, forced to rely on players who actually play for Arsenal on our own drab timeline. Mortifyingly, he can’t even change his entire front three.

By January 31 we fully expect Arsenal’s dream transfer window to involve only selling Martin Odegaard but managing to keep hold of Bukayo Saka.

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