Guardiola's experiments in decisive Champions League matches were already famous.
In May 2011, his Barcelona had beaten Manchester United at Wembley, with Sir Alex Ferguson's helpless trembling on the touchline showing just how terrifying that team had been.
But in the eight years that followed, Guardiola had not lifted the Champions League again.
Bad luck had played its part, but his habit of overthinking the biggest nights had become one of football's most discussed patterns.
The examples were well known.
In 2011-12, Barcelona reached the semi-finals against Chelsea. After losing 1-0 away in the first leg, Guardiola used a 3-3-1-3 in the second leg.
At first, it seemed to work, with Barcelona going 2-0 up, but Ramires and Torres struck on the counter, and Chelsea advanced.
In 2013-14, Guardiola's Bayern Munich won four trophies domestically but were destroyed by Real Madrid in the Champions League semi-finals.
After losing 1-0 in the first leg, Guardiola chose an aggressive 4-2-4 for the return leg, only for Bayern to concede three goals in the first thirty-four minutes.
In 2014-15, Bayern again reached the semi-finals, this time facing Barcelona. Guardiola switched to a 3-5-2 at the Camp Nou, pairing Lewandowski and Müller up front.
Messi scored twice in four minutes, Neymar added another late on, and Bayern left the first leg with a 3-0 defeat.
They won the return leg 3-2 after going back to a back four, but by then, the damage was done.
Tonight, once again, Guardiola had chosen to gamble.
The 3-2-2-3 made sense in theory.
City wanted to dominate midfield, trap United inside their own half, and use Stones as an extra controller when they had the ball.
But still...
John Stones as a defensive midfielder?
Was Guardiola trying to create a centre-back-midfielder hybrid?
The funny thing was that the casual question hit close to the truth.
Most fans watching might not fully understand it yet, but Ling knew what Guardiola was attempting.
A defensive midfielder-centre-back hybrid.
He had originally thought this idea would appear later, perhaps next season, because the current City squad and Stones's individual qualities did not seem fully ready for it.
But it appeared Manchester United had placed so much pressure on Guardiola that he had brought the idea forward.
'My future father-in-law really is something.'
Ling felt a quiet sense of admiration.
But would the tactic actually work?
He was not convinced.
It had not been tested properly across enough matches.
Training alone could not expose every issue, and in a football match, especially a final, stability mattered more than almost anything.
Guardiola understood that better than most. After all, he had coached the great Barcelona side that maintained stability through absurdly high levels of possession.
But this was who he was.
Call it arrogance. Call it self-doubt. Call it obsession.
None of those words truly changed the man.
"If you defend against two forwards with four defenders, then you only have six players in midfield while the opponent has eight. You cannot win the midfield that way. So you need to push one defender forward."
Guardiola murmured the Cruyff-inspired idea to himself.
Football followed the law of survival as much as anything else. Those who adapted lived. Those who stood still eventually became history.
And Guardiola hated standing still, even when standing still might have brought him trophies.
"The most beautiful thing about football is not the trophy or even the victory," Guardiola thought, eyes fixed almost obsessively on the pitch. "It is the geometric beauty created by twenty-two moving points."
When the camera found him, Peter's voice softened slightly.
"There he is, Pep Guardiola, restless as ever. A stubborn explorer, a perfectionist, a man who sees football not simply as a contest, but as a set of moving shapes waiting to be perfected."
Jim added, "And that's why this is so intriguing. His ideas push the game forward, but finals punish mistakes quickly. If this works, people will call it genius. If it doesn't, they'll call it overthinking."
Beep!
The referee blew the whistle.
The Champions League final began.
Manchester City had possession first.
Agüero passed the ball back to Gündoğan, and City began their slow, probing advance.
"Don't drop too deep!" Ling shouted, then charged forward as the first presser.
City's 3-2-2-3 was designed to dominate the centre and slowly suffocate space.
If United allowed them to settle fully into that rhythm, conceding would only be a matter of time.
Besides, City had four midfielders in the central zone.
United had five nearby.
On paper, they had the numbers to compete.
But reality was harsher.
They could not compete at all.
City's forwards took turns dropping deep, creating passing angles for their teammates before darting forward again.
Their movements were quick, agile, and clever, and the constant shifting placed enormous pressure on United's midfield.
Everyone began to miss Kanté.
After all, as the joke went, the biggest flaw in Kanté's game was the gap between his teeth.
In the ninth minute, after establishing their rhythm in midfield, City suddenly shifted gears.
Gündoğan switched play toward the left.
Leroy Sané, perhaps fuelled by the intensity of the occasion, drove forward with reckless force.
He pushed through a challenge despite the risk of being clipped, stumbled, recovered, and somehow broke past his marker.
Wan-Bissaka moved quickly to close the inside lane.
But Sané had already delivered the cross.
The ball flew in at waist height, skidding toward Agüero at the near post.
Agüero tried to improvise, throwing himself downward in a Van Persie-like motion to meet it.
He did get a touch, but David Luiz was there in front of goal, blocking the attempt before it could trouble De Gea.
The Brazilian immediately hammered the ball clear toward the centre circle.
Ling rushed toward the dropping ball, then glanced back and nearly jumped.
Laporte, Otamendi, and Stones had formed a bowl-like shape around him, closing the space from every side.
Unless Ling suddenly decided to recreate Maradona's Hand of God, there was no way he was winning that duel.
And that was exactly how it played out.
Otamendi rose first and headed the ball back into United's half. Within seconds, the game had returned to its original pattern.
When City attacked, Stones pushed forward.
Not quite as a traditional defensive midfielder, not quite as a centre-back either, but something in between.
Top managers watching from the stands and on television began to notice the subtlety of the tactic.
City's passing had become smoother.
Their possession had more control.
At the heart of it was Stones's movement.
Whenever City's attacking players were marked, Stones became the temporary organiser, stepping into midfield and advancing the play through short passes.
He had always believed his understanding of football was good.
But after working under Guardiola, he felt as if his entire perception of the game had been overturned.
A month earlier, Guardiola had told him something that stayed in his mind.
"When your team has possession, your position is not fixed. You must decide where to stand based on the situation. Once you find the right place, you will realise the game becomes simple instead of complicated."
During the weeks of careful study that followed, combined with his previous experience in midfield, Stones had slowly begun to understand what this hybrid role truly required.
And tonight, in the Champions League final, Guardiola had trusted him to play it.
...
In the twenty-third minute of the first half, İlkay Gündoğan looked up and shaped a diagonal pass toward Sergio Agüero, who had drifted into the left channel.
Pogba read it early.
He stepped in halfway, cut off the passing lane, and brought the ball under control.
'City's new shape still isn't mature,' Ling thought as he slipped behind Otamendi. 'There are problems in the way they connect midfield to the front line.'
Pogba raised his head and shaped as if he were about to release the ball immediately.
The movement drew three Manchester City players toward him at once, their defensive line reacting to the possibility of an early pass.
But Pogba did not pass, he cut inside instead.
For a brief moment, Manchester United's attacking rhythm seemed to stall.
But slowing the move did not mean killing it.
In fact, it disrupted City's own rhythm even more. Guardiola's side had been preparing to press the moment possession changed hands, yet Pogba's feint had forced their whole shape to hesitate and drop half a step backward.
In that instant, the spaces on both flanks opened.
Smack!
Pogba finally lifted his foot and released the pass, finding Mahrez with ease.
The "King of Dribbling" received it cleanly, nudged the ball forward in the same motion, and drove straight at the exposed channel.
"That is clever from Pogba," Jim noted. "He delays it just long enough to pull City inward, and once that happens, the wide space is there for Mahrez."
Peter added, "Manchester City's 3-2-2-3 gives them control through the centre, but there is a price to pay. If the wingers cannot recover quickly enough, those flanks become open roads."
"And United have spotted it very quickly," Jim said. "Ling's movement through the middle is important too. He's occupying the centre-backs, making it harder for City to slide across and protect Laporte."
In the blink of an eye, Mahrez cut inside from the flank and entered the penalty area.
He shifted his weight with a Matthews-style feint, then used his left foot to push the ball beyond Aymeric Laporte.
Fernandinho tried to recover from behind, but Mahrez was already setting himself.
He opened his body and whipped a fierce left-footed shot toward the far side.
The ball rose from the turf, spinning beautifully, drawing a sharp arc toward the top-left corner.
Ederson reacted.
But the shot was already beyond his reach.
Unfortunately, Mahrez had aimed for perfection. The ball kissed the outside of the post and flashed out of play.
Manchester United had missed the chance to take the lead!
"How did that not go in?"
Mahrez clutched his head in frustration.
He knew it himself — just a little less power, just a touch more control, and the ball might have curled inside the post instead of grazing past it.
"Good, good," Ling said, giving him his first thumbs-up of the match. "It just a little off."
After more than twenty minutes, Ling had begun to understand the flaws in City's setup.
The key was the central area.
Of the two holding players, Fernandinho and John Stones, one would push forward whenever City attacked.
That meant if United won the ball in their own half and delivered it to Ling quickly enough, he could create a brief one-on-one situation before City's structure recovered.
Fernandinho was old and Ling was confident he could beat him.
And after that?
On paper, Manchester City had three centre-backs.
In reality, the left and right centre-backs would instinctively drift toward the flanks, because United had repeatedly attacked the wide areas.
As long as Ling could get past Fernandinho, only Otamendi would remain in front of him.
Another one-on-one.
When he had first joined Manchester United's first team, Ling had developed a habit of thinking from the defender's perspective, breaking down the opponent's defensive logic in reverse.
He still did that now, but his understanding had gone deeper.
Instead of thinking of a dribble as one long, impossible run through several defenders, he broke it down into separate duels.
One opponent at a time.
One decision at a time.
That was how you simplified a complex problem.
That was playing with intelligence, blindly charging forward was the inferior method.
Of course, understanding the idea was one thing. Executing it in a Champions League final was another.
Ling could only say he had found a possible route. He briefly explained it to his teammates, then continued running toward the front line.
As time passed, Manchester City gradually took greater control of the match's rhythm.
But just as Ling had predicted, their new tactical structure had been used for too little time and had not gone through enough real match testing. Mistakes still appeared, small ones, but in elite European football, even the smallest error could lead to disaster.
David Silva received the ball and turned, intending to play a simple square pass to Gündoğan.
But Gündoğan had already started moving forward.
The pass rolled straight toward Ander Herrera.
Gündoğan immediately turned back and pressed, trying to recover the mistake, but Herrera did not hold on to the ball.
He shifted it sideways at once to Nemanja Matic.
"Matic Forward."
There were no wrong nicknames, only names that had temporarily faded from use.
With so many attacking players at United, Matic did not need to join attacks too often anymore, and the old nickname had gradually slipped from public memory.
But that did not mean he had lost the ability.
Smack!
Matic struck a sudden, piercing through ball that split Manchester City's hastily reorganised midfield line.
The pass went straight toward Pogba.
John Stones glanced over his shoulder.
At first, he did not realise what was happening.
Then the sight made his heart jump.
Pogba shaped as if he were about to receive the pass, but at the last moment, he let the ball roll through.
A dummy.
It deceived Fernandinho, and it also fooled City's centre-backs, who instinctively shifted toward the flanks.
After all, Ashley Young and Wan-Bissaka were both making high-speed overlapping runs.
"Don't let him turn!" Stones shouted, sensing the danger.
A split second later, feeling that was not enough, he yelled again.
"Foul him! Foul—"
Before he could finish, Ling received the ball with his back to goal, dragged it lightly under his foot, and flicked it away.
The ball slipped straight through Fernandinho's legs.
Fernandinho, with all his experience, immediately reached for Ling's shirt.
But Ling swung his arm backward.
It was a practical trick he had learned after countless physical battles in professional matches.
Smack!
He slapped Fernandinho's hand away, then exploded forward at full speed.
Fernandinho had already been fooled by Pogba's dummy and was more than a body length behind.
Now, after missing the grab, he had no way back into the duel.
All he could do was look desperately toward his teammates.
But Otamendi was panicking too.
In truth, Otamendi's one-on-one defending was not bad.
He even had a particular strength: he was good against smaller, agile players like Messi because his footwork was quicker than people expected.
The problem was that Ling did not bother with anything fancy.
He shifted his weight sharply to the left, pulled it back almost instantly, then drove the ball to the right with full force and sprinted.
One step.
Manchester United's number 7 needed only one step to get past Otamendi.
Otamendi still tried to use his body to stop him. He had trained in boxing as a child, and his explosiveness, agility, and upper-body strength were all impressive.
Thud!
Muscle crashed into muscle, producing a heavy sound that made the duel feel almost painful to watch.
Otamendi felt as if he had slammed into a wall.
'Is he even human?'
He had already lost the positional advantage, and now he had run into Ling's unreasonable physical power as well.
There was nothing he could do except tumble awkwardly onto the turf and watch as Ling staggered, fought for balance, recovered, and drove toward goal.
Laporte rushed across from the side and slid in.
Ederson came off his line at the same time, throwing himself low to block the finish.
Together, they seemed to form an impossible barrier.
Ling abandoned balance entirely.
He threw his body forward and, at the last possible moment, gently hooked the ball with the tip of his boot.
Under the eyes of tens of thousands inside the Wanda Metropolitano, the ball slipped beneath Ederson's armpit and rolled slowly, almost lazily, toward Manchester City's goal.
Otamendi was still on the ground, unable to react.
Kyle Walker burst back with everything he had, sprinting toward the line and trying to clear the ball before it crossed.
He reached it.
He touched it.
He even managed to hook it away.
But the referee's watch buzzed.
The green screen flashed again and again, showing one familiar word.
Goal!
Twenty-third minute.
Manchester United led the Champions League final!