Yaya Toure, a midfielder who played under Pep Guardiola at Barcelona and Manchester City, continues his particular crusade against the Spanish coach (“Guardiola pretends not to have problems with black players”).
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My wife always told me about Guardiola: ‘Devil, he’s not a man, he’s evil’. She considers him a negative person
“I don’t see a man, I see a snake… He treated me like I was dust,” Yaya Toure said of Guardiola in an interview on the YouTube channel ‘Zack’.
Yaya Toure felt marginalised and isolated by Guardiola at Barcelona and Manchester City
The former Ivory Coast international felt marginalised and degraded as a player under Guardiola at both Manchester City and Barcelona.
“At that time Guardiola called me and said: ‘You have to come back, it’s important’. My wife said to me: ‘Do you want to hear this nonsense? He treated you like a rag, and now he wants you to stay, and you want to stay? Let’s go to Manchester!’… The coach didn’t use me all year, but in the end he took me to Barcelona when I shone in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. My wife always told me about him: ‘Devil, he is not a man, he is evil’. She considers him a negative person,” he recalls of Guardiola.
Yaya Toure has not forgotten that in 2010 he was relegated to the Barcelona bench under Guardiola, who opted for Sergio Busquets, and that he only played nine games as a starter in his last season at the Camp Nou before being transferred to Manchester City.
Yaya Toure went to Manchester City to become a ‘citizens’ legend from 2010 to 2018.
The bad relationship between the African footballer and Guardiola continued at City. The Spanish coach arrived in 2016 and relegated Toure in the rotation.
Dimitri Seluk, Yaya Toure’s agent at the time, went so far as to say on ‘BBC World Football’ that “Pep Guardiola only thinks of himself. He already thinks he’s God”.
In May 2018, Yaya Toure left City to play for Olympiacos.
Yaya Toure: “I want the myth of Guardiola to be broken”
“I want the myth of Guardiola to be broken. I have the feeling that he did everything possible to ruin my last season at Manchester City. I tried to understand why I played so little. I even quietly asked the fitness coaches for my statistics. When I realised that they were as good or better, both in training and in games, compared to those who played and were younger than me, I understood that it was not a physical issue,” commented the 42-year-old former footballer in 2018.
“I have come to wonder if all this has been because of the color of my skin and I’m not the only one who has asked this question. Some Barcelona players have wondered. I don’t know why but I have the feeling that he was jealous. He took me as a rival, as if I overshadowed him a little bit,” said Toure
