Manchester City’s Premier League title challenge ended at Bournemouth on Tuesday and the expectation was Pep Guardiola would soon confirm the inevitable, that he will be leaving at the end of the season. Then the days ticked by.Media reports on Monday night had shattered the public illusion that Guardiola was going nowhere — for months he had uttered the words, “I have a contract”, his version of saying he was staying, and on several occasions he talked about plans for next season — but as the days went on, City fans hoped that he would be staying after all, that the stories were false.By Thursday night, Guardiola still had not told his players and staff members of his plans, but everything changed on Friday morning. Official confirmation that his decade in Manchester is coming to an end arrived at the slightly unusual time of 11:10. It took the form of a three-minute video, which he narrated. Talking about subjects from City’s style of play to the Manchester Arena bombing in 2016, he closed with a correction to Tony Walsh’s famous poem, “This is the Place”. ‘I’m sorry Tony,” he said. “This is my place.” He wrote the script himself.Guardiola had shown the video to the players before it was released to the public. He then had lunch with all members of first-team staff. He talked about what Manchester meant to him and there were tears, both from the manager and others.Behind the scenes, he had long planned to leave the club this summer. City had conducted a detailed search for a successor last year and, as revealed by The Athletic this week, the chosen replacement, Enzo Maresca, has already started working with director of football Hugo Viana on plans for the summer and beyond.Guardiola is considered hard to read even by those who know him, and at times it has felt obvious from his public comments that he is leaving, yet at other times he has appeared to speak sincerely about preparing the team for the 2026-27 campaign. In reality, he had planned months ago that this would be his final season at City. “It’s time,” he said in a press conference on Friday. “It’s not wake up and say, ‘Now is the time to leave’ — it is a process that I felt for a while.”In the summer of 2024, he had decided to leave in 2025, alongside director of football Txiki Begiristain. It was a shock, therefore, when he signed a new contract in November 2024, not least because he had not even told his staff he was going to sign it.It was an even bigger shock that he signed a two-year deal, but Guardiola had a strong idea even then that he would in fact only do one, taking him to this summer. In the past couple of months, he decided to stick with that idea.It was always possible Guardiola would change his mind again and City were hopeful the manager would confirm his plans. Sources familiar with the matter — like others referenced in this article speaking anonymously to protect relationships — suggest the pursuit of Maresca accelerated around then.