To this day, quite how Bernardo Silva was not named 2018-19 PFA Player of the Year still confounds Pep Guardiola.
The award instead went to Virgil van Dijk, whose Liverpool side had been pipped to the Premier League post by Manchester City. Vincent Kompany had an interesting take on why his former team-mate is perpetually overlooked for the biggest individual awards, not least the Ballon d’Or.
“The problem for Bernardo is he’s so humble,” Kompany said in a book documenting City’s 2022-23 Treble success. “He’ll always drop a couple of places in the contenders’ list just because of that. There will always be guys that are better at self-promotion and have better PR machines around them.”
The announcement this week that Bernardo will leave the Etihad Stadium at the end of this season was confirmation of what many had known for months. But that did not make it any easier to swallow.
Plenty of City greats have come and gone over the past eight years but there is a strong case to say Bernardo will be the hardest of all to replace.
Kompany himself was succeeded by Rúben Dias, Rodri replaced Fernandinho, Sergio Agüero’s goals are synonymous with City’s modern history but Erling Haaland has since taken on that scoring mantle. Phil Foden followed in David Silva’s footsteps and the likes of Rayan Cherki and Antoine Semenyo have done a decent job filling the considerable void left by Kevin De Bruyne, arguably the greatest of all City’s Abu Dhabi-era signings.
Whereas most of those players tended to excel in one position, the difference with Bernardo is his extraordinary versatility. It is a word often associated with utility players but not in the case of the Portuguese, who has played in near enough eight positions during his nine years at City and – for the most part – looked like a specialist in each.
That, admittedly, was not quite the case when Guardiola deployed him as a left-back against Arsenal in February 2023. The experiment was abandoned after an hour, with Bernardo shifted to more familiar settings on the right wing from which he helped win City the game, and eventually the title.
It seems safe to assume Guardiola will not be repeating that tactic against Arsenal at the Etihad on Sunday, when victory would move them to within three points of the Premier League leaders with a game in hand, and turn the title race on its head.
But there is every chance Bernardo – Guardiola’s Swiss Army Knife of a footballer – will be the first name on his team-sheet.
Guardiola’s ‘weakness’
These days he operates as a hybrid No 6/8 alongside Rodri although, as ever with Bernardo, it feels wrong to pigeonhole him because he is so unique.
Guardiola calls him “my weakness”, which hints at a kind of indulgence but should not be read as anything more than deep affection for one of the smartest footballers of the past decade.
City’s captain has always been chosen by dressing-room committee but Guardiola departed from convention last summer to ensure Bernardo was given the armband and he ranks it as his best decision of the season.
He is the man who invariably knows just what a game needs at just the right moment almost all of the time, a master in the tight spaces and a player, even with his 32nd birthday looming this summer, who still runs harder and further than most.
Which is all the more remarkable in the Premier League’s ultra-physical landscape. Surveying this small, slight individual from close quarters you would think, if you did not know better, he could be blown over by a gentle breeze.
Guardiola has had various assistants during his 10-year City reign and all have arrived at the same conclusion about Bernardo: that he is the glue that binds the team together. Not bad for a player who ridicules how “useless” his right foot is. But it is not just on the pitch that he will be sorely missed.
There is arguably no one more beloved in the squad. Even as captain and after nine years and 451 appearances for City (plenty more than any other player under Guardiola), Bernardo still cops merciless ribbing in the dressing room, usually over his dress sense.
Going back to what Kompany said, that probably has had much to do with his humility and, in this age of endlessly choreographed public images, his everyman appeal.
“He wears ordinary clothes, lives in an ordinary apartment and drives an ordinary car and is perfectly happy to shop at his local supermarket,” Marc Boixasa, City’s former project manager who was in charge of first-team operations, said of Bernardo in the book Pep’s City. “It’s just that when he pulls on his football boots something magical happens.”
Too right. Good luck replacing him.