Sergio Aguero has jovially admitted that Pep Guardiola has turned him away from becoming a manager… because of his baldness.
The 34-year-old was forced to retire in 2021 through health concerns within months of leaving Manchester City to join Barcelona, where he made five appearances.
It came after a decade at the Etihad where he finished his time at the club as their highest-ever goalscorer with 260 strikes in 390 matches.
Five of those years came under the management of Pep Guardiola, where they won four Premier League titles and had a rollercoaster of a relationship.
And that appears to have affected the Argentine’s decision on whether or not to get into coaching after admitting that Guardiola’s hair situation might have put him off.
Joking on Twitch in a statement that has went viral, Aguero joked: “It’s not easy to be a coach… Look at Pep, he went bald from thinking so much.”
Despite the savage remark, Aguero and Guardiola got on well together at City where the striker scored 124 times in 182 outings under the Catalan coach’s tenure.
At the time, there were question marks over how Aguero would fit into Guardiola’s tiki-taka style of play, but that was put to bed.
However, it was not all rosy between the two when the City boss dropped the forward from the team after turning up to training overweight.
Aguero revealed last year: “If your ideal weight is 79-80kg and you were 80 kilos and 100 grams you would be fined and you don’t play.
“But it can happen! You come across a little bit of chicken for example, then you are going to be 50 grams over!
“Well the first season we were between fourth and third and he said I left you out because you turned up fat this week.
“And what was I going to say? He was right… these things happen. He said it in a good way. And at this time I didn’t really have his confidence.”
There was also tension after Guardiola’s appointment in training, as Aguero confessed: “There was a moment, right in the first year, when Pep arrived at Manchester City, when he said to me: ‘You can’t train like that’.
“I replied: ‘But I train like this, I train in my own way. If you tell me to run to the corner flag and back, I’ll go and run, but I run my own way. We had a lot of problems because of that.
“Sometimes he didn’t like it, which is why I ended up playing very little when he arrived.
“But then it was only a matter of time before Pep adapted to the way he trained.”