Guardiola transforming Man City

The task set before Pep Guardiola to make Manchester City one of Europe's elite clubs is widely regarded as his biggest challenge to date. While it's wrong to suggest that Guardiola had it easy in making that transformation at previous clubs Barcelona and Bayern Munich, he did start from a much higher base.

They were already fairly close to that marker, while City scraped into fourth place in the Premier League on goal difference last season.

The club has made great strides since the takeover by Sheikh Mansour in 2008. In that first year, Mark Hughes spent Christmas in the relegation zone. They won the league four years later, under his successor Roberto Mancini. The Italian fostered a previously absent winning mentality at Eastlands, and broke the long spell without major success by winning the FA Cup in 2011.

Looking back now, there's the sense that Mancini took the club as far as he could and it was hoped Manuel Pellegrini would add to the progress that was being made. A first domestic double in the Chilean's debut campaign seemed to be the perfect stepping stone, as City won the title and the League Cup in 2014, but two years of stagnation and regression followed.

City wanted Guardiola to come in when they sacked Mancini. The club had been in discussion with the Catalan in 2012, as confirmed by the statement they released when they announced he was to take over from Pellegrini, but they weren't able to secure his services.

That probably adds some mitigating circumstances for Pellegrini -- how could he have radically changed a club that was waiting for someone else to come in and do it? He was keeping the seat warm and keeping things ticking over, meaning his three trophies in three years in charge were more than adequate.

Guardiola is being given complete control. He has to be. There's little point in bringing in the most coveted manager in world football and then tying his hands behind his back with a set of caveats to the job. The manager, along with director of football Txiki Begiristain and chief executive Ferran Sorriano, has the ability to run the club from the top down.

Perhaps the biggest example of that is that Joe Hart is currently on loan with Torino in Italy. Nobody else would have been able to come in to the job at the Etihad and remove a fans' favourite with no questions asked.

One of the tasks facing Guardiola was rebuilding a strong team. It's been hard to shake the feeling that there having been cliques forming in the dressing room over the past three years. On the pitch, City certainly hadn't been performing better than the sum of their parts and the new manager needed to address that with a bit of team bonding.

He began by stopping his players from eating foods that were bad for them and making the team eat together at the Etihad Campus, but step by step the Catalan has been stamping his mark on the club.

Wifi and 3G connections in certain areas of the training ground are the latest to be prohibited in an attempt to get his players to interact with each other more instead of turning straight to their phones and devices. It's a battle that any parent of a teenager might know far too well.

It's a hands-on approach that City haven't seen for a while. Under previous regimes, especially under Pellegrini, the non-footballing coaching felt somewhat laid back and Guardiola has come in like a strict headmaster or army sergeant to get everybody pulling in the same direction.

The style has even filtered down to the academy, where bosses there have reportedly told players they're not allowed to wear multi-coloured boots and must use traditional black ones instead. The aim is to create footballers that are respectful, grounded and understand the game in their formative years, ahead of distractions like sponsorship deals.

Ultimately, these small moves may seem pointless in the grand scheme of things, but together it helps to shape a culture around Manchester City that has previously only been there as a half-hearted gesture. The club wants the best environment for players at all ends of the scale -- from the very top at first team level right down to the youngest junior squads -- to progress and develop.

Guardiola's impact in the short term has been very impressive, as a run of 10 wins in the opening 10 matches of the season has laid down a marker for City to be title favourites very early on.