Dour Chilean Manuel Pellegrini has Manchester City playing stylishly

SIX months into his career in England there is still a temptation to see Manuel Pellegrini as Manchester City's portrait in the attic.

SIX months into his career in English football, there is still a temptation to see Manuel Pellegrini as Manchester City's portrait in the attic.

With every passing week, Yaya Toure, David Silva, Alvaro Negredo and the rest become more swashbuckling, more stylish, more adventurous. They have put four past Manchester United, six past Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal and scored seven against Norwich; Liverpool, just a point ahead of them in the Barclays Premier League, are next on the rack.

And yet with every passing week, as his team grows more beautiful, Pellegrini becomes more and more detached, more and more dour. The Chilean is unfailingly courteous in public, of course, but he seems almost purposefully dour. He speaks in platitudes, brief and bland, with little emotion or elaboration. Those who work with him at City say much the same: nice man, hard to read, doesn't give much away.

He is the polar opposite of the team he is forging at the Etihad Stadium: where he encourages his players to express themselves, to indulge their extrovert side, he is introverted, almost withdrawn. If Roberto Mancini, his predecessor, was all emotion, Pellegrini seems to exist at the other extreme: he is so controlled he borders on monochrome.

That image, though, is incomplete; Pellegrini is a far more complex character than such a picture suggests. He admits, for example, that he struggles to be so far away from his family; his wife, Carmen Gloria Pucci, visits him in Manchester occasionally, but she has remained in Chile with his three adult sons over the past 15 years, while his career has taken him to Ecuador, Argentina and then on to Europe.

"It is very hard," he told La Fabrica, the Chilean television show. "Life is like a building: it is impossible for anyone to achieve anything without a strong foundation, and family is the most important element of that. In this career you see many marriages ruined or separated because the objectives of the couple are different. I am very lucky to have a wife who supports me.

"Being away from my children is difficult, but I took a very hard decision to have a career requiring just as much dedication as raising children. I try to have them as close as possible, and modern communications mean you can be a little bit closer now than before."

That is an added complication, of course. Pellegrini not only chose to go into management, but elected not to bring his family with him as his career led him away from his homeland. "At the time, it would not have been the right thing to do," he said. "My wife would have had to give up her job, one of my sons would have had to leave medical school, the other two leave college."

There is a benefit, though, and one the Chilean acknowledges. "I fill the time with study and preparation," he says. "Being abroad is harder with your family, because you have to dedicate time to them as well. It is better to be alone in this profession, if you are to do as well as you can.

"There is a personal cost, but a professional benefit. If you are to do well in this job, you need to be prepared to dedicate time to it: learning the language, getting to know the players, doing your preparation. If you do not do that, you cannot meet big challenges. There is always a cost."

His first job as a manager, with Universidad de Chile, one of the country's biggest clubs, ended in relegation.

He was dismissed and returned to his day job in architecture.

"I had not been a manager since I was at La U, when Palestino, a small team who had lost all of their games that season, came in and offered me the job."

He said yes, of course -- "I could not fulfil my ability if I had remained an architect" -- but it taught him that football is sacrifice. It is a philosophy he expects his players to share.

"From my very first day at a club, I try to teach my values to my players," he says. "I will not compromise them: respect for the club, the players, the staff, the fans, and belief in a project. There must be belief and sacrifice for a project, whatever the eventual aim of it is."

There is, in other words, always a cost, whether it is family, or keeping your counsel and remaining monochrome, in a world exploding with colour.

THE TIMES