The 2025-26 season marked Pep Guardiola's final year in charge of Manchester City, closing out one of the most decorated managerial spells English football has ever seen, and one that reshaped itself specifically around Erling Haaland for its final four seasons.
It wasn't the most dominant of Guardiola's nine years at the club. City had already slipped to third in the league the previous season and suffered their earliest Champions League exit in over a decade. This year brought a partial recovery: City won the EFL Cup and added another FA Cup to the trophy cabinet, while Haaland picked up his third Premier League Golden Boot with 27 league goals in 2025-26, on top of a Champions League campaign where he continued scoring at a rate that helped push him to a record-breaking 50 goals in just 49 matches.
Haaland's arrival in the summer of 2022 gave Guardiola something he'd never really had before at City: a true penalty-box striker whose entire game is built around getting on the end of chances rather than dropping deep to help build attacks. The treble-winning debut season in 2022-23 proved the fit worked immediately, and Haaland's Golden Boots in three of his four seasons at the club show it never really stopped working, even in years when the team results were less spectacular.
What comes next is the more interesting question. Haaland signed a contract extension in January 2025 that's reported to keep him at City until 2034, the longest deal in Premier League history, so there's no suggestion of him leaving. But adapting to a new manager after four years of a system built specifically around his strengths is a different kind of challenge than anything he's faced at club level since arriving in England. How City's next head coach chooses to use him, and whether the service he's relied on from midfield stays the same, will shape the next chapter of his career as much as anything happening at this summer's World Cup.