Pep Guardiola Documentary: Recap, Where to Watch & Episode Guide

The Pep Guardiola documentary is called A Beautiful Obsession, and all four episodes arrived on Prime Video on 19 August 2026. It covers his last two seasons at Manchester City, ending with him leaving.

It is also the rare access documentary where the access is genuinely startling — dressing-room rows, boardroom arguments, a manager offering to resign — and where it is worth knowing who was in the edit suite.

Mild spoilers below. The season results are public record, but the confrontations described here are new to the series.

What is A Beautiful Obsession?

A four-part docuseries directed by Kevin Macdonald, the Academy and BAFTA-winning filmmaker behind One Day in September and Touching the Void, following Guardiola across two seasons at Manchester City.

Prime Video’s own description calls it “an intimate, raw portrait of Manchester City FC across two era-defining seasons”, following “their worst run in decades and fightback to glory”.

Where can you watch the Pep Guardiola documentary?

On Prime Video, at no extra cost if you already have Prime. All four episodes went up together on 19 August, so there is no weekly release to follow.

If you do not have Prime, the series is not sold separately — it is part of the subscription. There is no free-to-air or Sky route, and Manchester City’s own channels carry only clips and the trailer rather than full episodes.

How many episodes are there, and what is in each one?

Four. These are Prime Video’s own titles and descriptions, in the platform’s order.

Prime Video does not publish per-episode runtimes on the title page.

What does the documentary actually reveal?

Three things are being talked about, and all three are dressing-room or boardroom material rather than match footage.

The Kyle Walker confrontation. After a defeat at Liverpool, Walker — elected captain by his teammates — told Guardiola he was being singled out: “You keep saying my name in every meeting… you’ve somehow brought my name into it.” Walker also said he believed Guardiola had opposed his captaincy. Guardiola’s reply, per ESPN’s account, was “If I am a problem you have to tell me.” Walker left for Burnley before the following season.

Kevin De Bruyne’s contract. The series covers his disappointment at not being offered a renewal. He left for Napoli when it expired, ending City’s first season since 2014–15 without him.

The boardroom. Macdonald was given access to transfer-strategy discussions, which is unusual in a genre that normally stops at the training-ground gate.

Did Guardiola really threaten to resign?

Yes — after a 2–0 Champions League defeat to Bayer Leverkusen in November 2025, in which he had made ten substitutions.

ESPN reports him telling the squad it was “unacceptable, this lack of courage, passion and love and desire to win and do it better”, and then going further: “I work for you. I leave my life, my divorce and my family is away, and everything for all of you.”

That is the “bold rotation backfires, leading to an emotional reaction” in Prime Video’s synopsis for Episode 3, which places it in the run-up to the Carabao Cup Final.

What happened in the two seasons it covers?

A collapse, then a rebuild, then two cups and a lost title race. 2024–25 brought City’s worst stretch under Guardiola; 2025–26 brought the EFL Cup and the FA Cup, a Champions League exit in the last 16, and a title that went to Arsenal. Below is the record, checked against the season itself rather than the trailer.

The collapse ran to one win and nine defeats in thirteen matches in the autumn of 2024. City recovered enough to finish in the Champions League places, and the squad was taken apart the following summer: De Bruyne to Napoli, Kyle Walker to Burnley, Ederson to Fenerbahçe, with Bernardo Silva named captain.

The farewell season, in results:

Episode 4’s “defining win at the Etihad” is the match that put City back in the title race, and its “late slip” is where the race was lost. Guardiola is now global ambassador of the City Football Group, so the farewell was to the job rather than to the organisation.

Who made it, and how independent is it?

This is the part worth pausing on. The director is Kevin Macdonald, whose record is documentary rather than promotional. But he directs alongside John De Caux of City Studios, and City Studios is Manchester City’s own production company, credited as a co-producer with Gavin Johnson and Ged Doherty.

None of that makes the Walker row or the resignation threat less real — they are in the film, and they are not flattering. But a club with a co-producer credit and a co-director is not a neutral party, and the useful way to watch is to ask what a series like this would never show rather than to treat what it does show as the whole picture.

For a very different documentary problem — a subject who controls her own narrative entirely — our piece on Katie Price and self-commodification covers the other end of the same spectrum.

Is the Guardiola documentary available outside the UK?

In some, and not in the United States. Banijay UK’s announcement lists the territories as the UK, Ireland, Benelux, the Nordics and South East Asia — the US is not among them, and no American release date has been announced.

Two further signals point the same way. Amazon promoted the series through its UK newsroom and not its US one, and the series does not appear in Amazon’s US entertainment announcements at all.

If you search for this, you will find a lot of pages explaining how to watch it in America. Almost all of them exist to sell VPN subscriptions, and what they describe is working around Prime Video’s terms of service. This page is not going to tell you how to do that. If you are in the US, the honest position is that the series is not licensed to you yet, and that Manchester City’s own channels are publishing clips in the meantime.

Sources