Seeing Pep, Lego Pep, and Spanish Lego Pep all being sent packing in a couple of days was glorious.
Do you find Man City (and other Pep teams) boring?
- Thread starter Tyrion
- Start date
Not being funny, but 6 of those names were into their 30’s mate. One didn’t even wanna be here. One (Sancho) is simply shit.
Maybe
Depends how invested Abu Dhabi are after Pep leaves. He was always the end game for them as per the “copy Barca” mandate. Abu Dhabi might lose some of the cold, ruthless business pragmatism they’ve shown since they took over once the project effectively reaches it’s end.
It's Pep's biggest weakness. Trying to look like a genius by making stupid decisions. Like the final against Chelsea when he played no holding midfielder for the first time all season.
Obviously he is a great manager but Christ his teams are horrible to watch.
Three of them were. Di Maria, Pogba, Sanchez, Sancho, Varane and Casemiro all still in their 20's when we signed them. Rather Sancho was shit or not he was a record signing that was supposedly at Bellingham levels of potential when we'd signed him, and I reckon if he went to City, we'd be possibly seeing a different player right now because of Pep and his coaches.
This is what I'm thinking too.
Sanchez was in his 30th year when we signed him, Zlatan was in his 35th, Ronaldo was 36, Casemiro was 30.
Fair enough on Varane though.
Regardless it doesn’t exactly look a list that screams of players that Madrid would buy, or the Abu Dhabi football project for that matter. Only really Sancho fits that mould and looking at him for England and even back at Dortmund now, it’s clear we all massively overrated him due to his spell in Germany.
But all this aside, our spending as an actual football club rather than oil state, has also meant we kept the following players (thanks @Insanity) on for the book value…
.
All this has effected what we really could do in the market and hence why we tend to spend big & desperate for a couple of Summers before there’s nothing left, we can’t sell anyone and we buy Fred & Dalot, or we loan Weghorst or Amrabat. We also keep on managers far too long as we never quite do the whole “here’s 6 new top players” thing in one Summer, so we instead give them 3 or 4 and pretty much always assume we’ll need to build them a squad over 2-3 years to really judge them.
I mean, look where we were post Ragnick man, with a manager telling us we needed open heart surgery, we bought just 4 first team staters and followed that up the next Summer with the likes of Mount, Højlund & Amrabat.
Can you ever in your wildest dreams imagine the Abu Dhabi project finishing 6th on 58 points and then backing their manager with such underwhelming transfer windows?
Stop making the naive assumption that the Abu Dhabi football project is a football club that faces the same pitfalls, at best they are Madrid-esque, simply far too powerful financially to ever go a prolonged spell without winning. At worst, they are a state oil project with a GDP of 280 billion dollars, fighting out a league where the next best entity has a revenue of just 820 million dollars.
In short, their domination was always inevitable, and whilst they might have a blip or two more post Pep, their financial might ensures no mistake ever needs to be a lasting one, every mistake can be moved on to a sister club, every mistake can be easily replaced the following season.
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For example @Shark, we know already that Abu Dhabi were preparing for Pep with transfers he wanted (Sterling) even before his arrival, but even then his first two windows looked like this…
John Stones, Sane, Zinchenko, Jesus, Gundogan, Bravo, Nolito.
Followed up by:
Laporte, Mendy, Walker, Bernado Silva, Ederson, Danilo, Doug Luiz.
Compare that to ETH and United
They simply don’t have to do things real football clubs do. 14 realistic first team starters in 2 seasons.
John Stones, Sane, Zinchenko, Jesus, Gundogan, Bravo, Nolito.
Followed up by:
Laporte, Mendy, Walker, Bernado Silva, Ederson, Danilo, Doug Luiz.
Compare that to ETH and United
They simply don’t have to do things real football clubs do. 14 realistic first team starters in 2 seasons.
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Their continuation is really the crux of it. Some people like to pretend that Pep is a Sir Alex, Busby, Shankly sort who has built the club. But he’s just a face for a state backed business with political objectives. If Abu Dhabi still care after he’s gone, they’ll stay at the top.
As I see it City is the best team in the world right now, but I only watch them, if they play against a team, where there is a realistic chance of them losing - and against us.
For example @Shark, we know already that Abu Dhabi were preparing for Pep with transfers he wanted (Sterling) even before his arrival, but even then his first two windows looked like this…
John Stones, Sane, Zinchenko, Jesus, Gundogan, Bravo, Nolito.
Followed up by:
Laporte, Mendy, Walker, Bernado Silva, Ederson, Danilo, Doug Luiz.
Compare that to ETH and United
They simply don’t have to do things real football clubs do. 14 realistic first team starters in 2 seasons.
Plus they already had the strongest squad in the team when he arrived.
Aguero, KDB Kompany, D Silva, Toure. Sterling.
Possibly others I'm overlooking.
Whereas Jose found a haphazard squad and had to spent about 180m on Pogba and Lukaku just to give us some kind of answer to KDB and Aguero.
Many do.
There is simply no jeopardy when it comes to City. Great they can exert all this control on opponents and their fans won't care two bit but the reality is TV companies will struggle to sell them in a way they could with other teams.
From a coaching perspective it requires a lot of concentration and discipline (and good scouting to identify players to fit the system) but there is no rawness.
From a coaching perspective it requires a lot of concentration and discipline (and good scouting to identify players to fit the system) but there is no rawness.
They scored 96 goals this season in the league, 94 last season and 99 the year before.
If you're a neutral and fancy tuning into watching a game with some goals - you watch Man City. You're guaranteed goals.
If you're a neutral and fancy tuning into watching a game with some goals - you watch Man City. You're guaranteed goals.
Small club.
That's just not true. Yes, they scored the most, but they only conceded 34, which makes a total of 130 goals in their matches. That's still a lot, but not the most if we compare to the other teams this season:
Arsenal 120, Liverpool 127, Villa 137, Spurs 135, Chelsea 140, Newcastle 147 (!), United 115... Sheffield 139
So a bunch of teams offer the same amount or higher amount of goals in their matches and most of them are much more interesting to watch because you can't be that sure who will score the goals. And if you don't care that much about watching the most goals, watching United as a neutral is much more entertaining this season because it's usually proper end to end stuff and you don't know which side will score. Terrible for the fans to watch, but EtH didn't lie when he said it's one of the most entertaining teams in the PL. It's for the wrong reasons, but it still is.
A bit harsh. He did a very good job at Villareal, Malaga, and Betis.
This reminds me of this evergreen post:
He really was ahead of his time, seeing how Pep acquired turnover Doku 5 years later...