Hi bro, nice post.

One thing I try to do is make sure I listen to these guys in addition to watching what they do.

Now firstly, people usually forget that you don't score against that Pep Barca easily at all. People think it's just because they possess the ball, they forget how 3 players will immediately swoop on you to recover the ball, once that Barca team looses the ball. That's defence from all over the pitch(especially from the front), but their attractive passing-game lured a lot of people into overlooking the fact that Pep was actually very good defensively at Barca and Bayern.

Now on listening to Pep himself. I personally listened to Pep explain his English experience. He discovered:

1. The physicality was a shock and something he had never experienced before.

2. The game play in England kept frustrating his style. He said the number of times the ball is hoofed into the air was alarming to him and there was a danger of teams scoring you with those long balls.

So that's it, both points pointed to the need for physicality. He didn't need that kind of physicality before England, so when he came to England in the beginning he had no qualms benching the exquisite physical specimen of a player– Yaya Toure.

But England taught him a lesson and he had to go for physicality, not that his system had a fault per se. BTW these were the things fans kept telling Wenger at a time, they will say this team is beautiful, but too soft, buy physical players.

Well Pep didn't waste time to adapt and he therefore changed and intentionally began recruitmenting more physical players especially around the defensive areas(midfield or defence). That's the City you now have.