My twopence worth: Pep has produced a higher level of football than any other City manager in my lifetime, from the start with what was still Pellegrini's team the peaks were higher than anything that had gone before. The quality of pressing and an extra zip to the passing were the first things I noticed that were a conspicuous improvement on Pellegrini and Mancini.
His biggest strength I think is in coaching intelligent positional play to allow both of an effective co-ordinated press to recover the ball and then to retain possession in recycling the ball until an opening appears but for the press to be fully effective you need to be having 60-70% possession because otherwise the players can't keep up the intensity of pressing without enough rest in between.
It's a bit of an all or nothing style which he's very committed too and it does need highly technical players for it to work but when it does it's highly effective and can dominate even very strong teams. His refusal to compromise is a weakness at times and last season I think he did make some selection and tactical errors while adapting to the English game, it's also fair to say if he didn't have the resources he would HAVE to compromise his style. However I think he's definitely heading in the right direction at City, most of his signings are young players and he's already improved the likes of De Bruyne and Sterling and even rejuvenated Silva in a different role. Beating Barcelona in the CL was also an important milestone as City definitely had a bit of fear of them before that.
Everything is in place now for him with the new players so anything less than top 2 and a title fight to the bitter end would rightfully be considered a failure (not that I'd want him sacked, barring some bizarre disaster of a season!)
