Former Manchester City star Gael Clichy has revealed the brutal message Pep Guardiola gave his Manchester City squad during his first-ever team meeting at the club.
Guardiola joined City in 2016 from Bayern Munich, and after a relatively slow first season in charge, the Spaniard has taken a stranglehold on English football and revolutionised how the game is played.
City won their first Premier League title under Guardiola in emphatic fashion, becoming the first team in history to reach the three-figure mark.
Since then the club have gone on to win four of the next five league titles, with Liverpool's victory in 2020 the only break in Guardiola's dominance.
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Guardiola could be set to make more history this season if his side beat Arsenal to the title, as he will become the first manager in history to win four Premier League titles in a row, surpassing Sir Alex Ferguson.
You don't get a sniff of those types of records without extreme attention to detail, and former City defender Gael Clichy has opened up on the lengths Guardiola would go to.
Clichy made 25 appearances in Guardiola's first season, which is some achievement given the standards set by the manager.
The Frenchman recently revealed via the ZACK YouTube channel what Guardiola said in his very first meeting with the squad in 2016.
“I’ve known that I’ve been coming here for a year now and I’ve been watching you, you’re a team full of fat players. I want my players like this (stick thin). I'm going to organise a working weight for each of you. It's not you that's going to decide that working weight. It's me that will decide at the end of five weeks of pre season. More than two kilos (overweight), you turn [do laps of the pitch]," Clichy explained.
He later adds: "We came back from pre-season. Two players were overweight. I'm not talking about players from the academy. Two senior players are overweight. For ten days he's making them do laps of the pitch."
Clichy left City the following summer to join Turkish side, Istanbul Basaksehiir.
Topics: Manchester City, Pep Guardiola, Premier League, Sir Alex Ferguson, Liverpool, Bayern Munich
Tom Jenkins