There's only so much that management can do though, you can't turn tom Cleverley into Sergio busquets, an enormous amount is based on their ability, natural talent. Yes coaching can help, but you're dreaming if you think Messi, xavi, iniesta and Busquets wouldn't have been top tier without pep
Is Pep the greatest manager of all time?
- Thread starter Irrational.
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There's only so much that management can do though, you can't turn tom Cleverley into Sergio busquets, an enormous amount is based on their ability, natural talent. Yes coaching can help, but you're dreaming if you think Messi, xavi, iniesta and Busquets wouldn't have been top tier without pep
Well you can only mention Sergio Busquets now because of what he has been able to achieve but people thought Pep was stupid for reclining Yaya Toure to the background and trusting that “nobody.” Hindsight will always lead you astray. Maybe they would have been top tier or maybe not. You’ll never know and I’ll never know too but it’d be criminal to ignore the meticulous work - both tactical and off the field - carried out in ensuring that these guys ent on to have the careers they had. All of them owe it to Pep not Tito Villanova.
He trusted players that were about to be shipped because they lacked the physicality to play high tempo games and ensuring that they had the right mentorship and tactical lessons to create a system that brought about the most dominant team in this generation. If it was Jose had achieved all these, I would likewise give him the credit. In fact I have argued that a manager’s stock is like shares of a company that reduces and increases in value due to various happenings. It’s not hard for me to admit that there was a time Jose was the number one manager in the world but not anymore.
The players had the natural talent but like it is often said “talent ain’t enough.” See Neymar had dribbling, shooting, heading, free kick, playmaking, passing abilities in elite proportion and I thought he was developing to be a hybrid of Messi and CR7 but he never reached those heights because talent is not enough.
Ironically both the best of modern era did it for the clubs you mentioned.
Yes and if one of them had done at atletico it would have been a much bigger achievement, surely that can't be argued?
Going from treble winner side in the best league in the world to a team finishing 3rd in an inferior league is going down in your career. Managers don't do that unless they themselves are going down in their career too, like Mourinho. Managers at their peak move from top teams to top teams, and don't join a team in downfall to test their abilities in bringing them back to the top, or to prove to internet posters they can do a job at an inferior team. That's kind of a ridiculous logic. No matter how much we talk about it, the fact is Guardiola started the first year of his career by winning a sextuple. He set the standards of his career early, hard to go down from here on.
As for Man City, he needed a year to adjust his style to the league, identify the weak points in his squad and what's needed to be strengthened. While he inherited a great offensive team, City sucked defensively and most of their defenders and full backs were past it and over the hill players, and he can't play his high line pressing and possession based football without a defense capable of protecting such offense or a defense capable of playing a high line.
I don't see the issue here. Managers need players capable of implementing their style of play efficiently, and they themselves need to adjust their style to suit the intensity of the league they're managing in. He needed one year of building the squad to win the league with 100 points and 19 points gap from 2nd spot in his 2nd year. Very short time.
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- City's Academy is so bad that United continue to sign or covet their players
- Eg Sancho, McNeill, Frimpong, Lavia maybe more.
It's strange to compare costs to build a squad when Rio was signed 7 and 9 years prior to the games mentioned. Rooney was signed 5 and 7 years prior etc. I would understand if you listed expensive transfers made in the years leading up to the games though. However, that still doesn't mean much when the criticism of Peps time at Barcelona is that he inherited an immensely talented squad who I remind you had just won the champions league 2 years prior. He had Valdes, Puyol, Abidal, Toure, Xavi, Iniesta, Messi, Henry, Eto'o, with Busquets coming through. He then went to spend 88 million in his first summer gaining Pique, Alves, Hleb, Keita etc which lead them to the champions league, which was not a small amount of money at the time. In my opinion why not compare values of the time, I will go ahead and use transfermarkt which I'm sure you used. For 2009 Barcelona has a value listed as 425.4 million, whereas United has a value of 425 million. However, Barcelona has 27 players to our 36 players listed with transfer values so if you broke it down to average value per player Barcelona is 15.75 million and United's is 11.83 million. The reason why I did this is because if you are going to compare the value of squads, it will be skewed towards the team with more homegrown players, and is not indicative of actual talent levels. If we go to 2011 United has a market value of 388 million from 33 players for an average of 11.75 million while Barcelona has a value of 603 million from 34 players for an average of 17.74 million. The average value per player was never really that close between the two teams even in 2009 where the game was actually pretty close. Now Pep is obviously one of the greatest managers of all time, but it's not unreasonable to talk about the financial advantage he has had at every club he's gone to, none moreso than the one he currently enjoys at City.
How did Martino fail to win a trophy the year after with the same players plus Neymar?
I'm not suggesting martino is a brilliant manager or even vilanova. But Martino did really a CL semi final and lost the league on the last day. He wasn't a million miles off. I really didn't think it was controversial to say that a team featuring xavi, iniesta and Messi at their respective peaks might have been among the favourites in every competition they played even if it is in hindsight
CL quarters.
And they declined significantly under Tata Martino and Messi had his worst season under him since entering his prime.
Some of the arguments people make against Pep are just so stupid. He has holes to pick apart, but people opt for the silliest ones.
The idea that he should demote himself to prove he can hack it with lesser teams is beyond stupid.
When has anyone(at the top of their field) ever done that? Why would someone voluntarily demote themselves?
The idea that he should demote himself to prove he can hack it with lesser teams is beyond stupid.
When has anyone(at the top of their field) ever done that? Why would someone voluntarily demote themselves?
For some reason I'd remembered Barca atletico as the semi finals that year.
Again I'm not saying these managers are as good as pep, but the team was generally capable of going far in the champions league and favourites for la liga no matter who managed them. Let's not pretend pep didn't have massive amounts off luck in 08/09 with the Chelsea tie, and 10/11 I don't think they beat Madrid if pepe doesn't get sent off, maybe they would.
Barcelona at that point had an incredibly talented group of players. It's like us in 06/07. We weren't favourites for the premier league but had people known how talented a settled vidic and evra and a maturing Ronaldo were we absolutely would have been. You can judge things in hindsight even if it wasn't immediately obvious at the time
But one of the main points against Pep is that 'oh anyone could do that job with those players, even I could do it'. But jobs at those sorts of clubs come with serious expectations and pressure. It's often finish 2nd or 3rd and you're out. With those players, I'm sure that any bog standard manager could probably finish 3rd in La Liga in that era, by the players just playing themselves. But you'd be out the door before the season was out because the players wouldn't believe in the manager and the style of football wouldn't be good enough, it would be quickly leaked to the press. A good manager might even win a league. But a great manager would create a team that people consider maybe the greatest club side ever.
It's worth noting that in 15 years of management, Pep has 1) never got close to being sacked 2) never had any revolt from senior players (only the odd individual angry for personal reasons of being marginalised like Ibra, Yaya and Cancelo). The way he coaches instantly demands respect and buy-in from the players. If it was so easy to gain that respect, then there would be managers like Pep. To compare that to Mourinho for example, who has been sacked 5 times and had serious player revolts.
For a new challenge. Nobody actually thinks he should go to a relegation club, that's just silly hyperbole from Pep fanboys. When he left Barca they were pretty much on top of the world, so didn't get technically 'demote' himself?
Maybe you think I'm trying to say he's been shit. I'm absolutely not, he's done a good job at every club, and great jobs at man city and Barcelona, but I don't think he could do what klopp did at dortmund or at Liverpool. I don't think he could do what mourinho did at Porto or inter and I don't thinkhe could do what simeone has done at atletico. Even at city, he took over a team that finished 4th spent 200m and finished 3rd, it wasn't til he spent another 300m that he won the title. When you've got limitless resources or world class players in basically every position then pep is fantastic. But he hasn't ever really shown an ability to play his brand of football without those things, if he did he'd go way up in my estimation. But like I said the change from pellegrini to him at city wasn't that massive even with the 200m spent, it was when it got to 500m spent that it was a big difference, but that feels more like the money than him
Yes completely agree. The year Liverpool won the premier league people questioned his abilities as a manager. I seem to remember him having a bit of a moan, and then magically a 100 million pounds later he’s happy again and winning things.
So leaving Barcelona to Bayern wasn't a new challenge?
Different culture to what he used to his entire life at Barcelona?
Leaving Bayern to City wasn't a new challenge either?
Just because you don't deem it a challenge, doesn't mean that's the case for everyone.
No one has said that team wasn't talented.
But making the argument that Pep achieving what he did with them was a given because of their talent is an argument made only in hindsight.
If you polled people on here if they thought Pep would succeed or not at Barcelona, I'm sure it would have been a majority of no.
And people thinking he would succeed couldn't have predicted success on that level.
I agree but what's wrong with using hindsight? Xavi and inesta had just won the euros anyway, and I think we can all agree Messi was going to be a generational player regardless of what pep did?
Because it's a bias. You can extend this kind of argument for everything.
World class players in every position? We're Delph, Stones, Ortamendi and Walker all considered world class when they got 100 points? Sane? Sterling? They weren’t considered world class. Even look now, Grealish, Ake and Akanji aren't close to world class. The revision is strong here.
It was a pretty massive improvement in performances, though, as seen by the uptick in xP in his first year. It was easy to see that he was on the cusp of something even during his first, underwhelming season. He mainly just needed to sort the goalkeeper issue.
It's also a bit weird to say that it was the money making the improvement, when we've had a number of managers spending insane money without any proper improvement in performances at all during the past 10 years.
SAF is by far the best manager of all time.
IMO its not even close.
IMO its not even close.
You can spend money badly, that doesn't mean that money spent well doesn't make a massive difference
What does this even mean? Yeah, obviously spending well makes a difference. If Pep didn't get a new goalkeeper in his second season his team most certainly wouldn't have hit the heights it did during the second league season. That doesn't mean he wasn't a huge difference maker as well.
If you look at the players City bought in the second season you will see that he they weren't exactly all very much used - Mendy was injured the whole season, Silva and Danilo was sparingly used during the first half of the season. Laporte was bought in January. Only Walker and Ederson were proper first teamers. And they went on to win 19 games on the trot, crushing the previous record. How can you not see that it had a lot to do with Pep?
Don't you give Klopp any credit either? I mean, he needed to buy the most expensive centre half of all time and an incredibly expensive goalkeeper in order to mount a proper challenge. I'll guess we write that off as being the money spent instead of anything Klopp did.
What it means is that saying pep needed to spend an awful lot of money to get his teams to play the way he wanted shouldn't be countered with how much we've spent, because spending money badly when you have Ed Woodward handling negotiating doesn't mean that getting the kind of resources pep has at a well run club isn't a huge advantage
He was on the cusp of a team that had already been champion twice in the years before him. And he splashed more 200 M€ and more 300 M€ until he won. He had already bought a gk, but wasn't good enough so he just bought another one (as well as other players just were showered on him).
Everyone knew City was waiting for him since Txiki was there, players were often bought with the profile that his barça had. And when he finally arrived the core of that team had already won 2 leagues, with more players being added every year.
Pep goes to this perfect storm and spends 200 M€ to win the title, gets 3rd place (which imho it's perfectly fine - it just doesn't support the genius goat level some push). Also remember there was no one that was an obvious steamrolling team - Leicester was the champion when he arrived.
300 M€ on top of that finally did it - am I supposed to find this incredible?
Let's also look at the context:
In the year before we had a title challenge between Leicester and Spurs (lol), utd kept being utter trash (horrendous transfers all the time, terrible squad - money doesn't do it only indeed), liverpool was improving but again didn't win a league in decades and was a fraction of city's squad, then you had chelsea that had a good core team but followed mou's final year collapse, then arsenal being arsenal.
So when Pep arrives the only realistic title contenders in theory would be City, Liverpool and Chelsea (and lolspurs). He ends in 3rd which was the worst case scenario excluding apocalyptic ones and then gets the league by going even more crazy on (good) transfers. He had a starting XI at least as good as the other 2 (better imho) and then got better bench than them both. And wins the league.
This is a mark of a good manager that knows what he is doing and how to achieve success - but don't ask me to say it was incredible and goat level. He had better tools to succeed than the others, he knew how to use them but that doesn't mean the others were worse at using theirs.
I think people would feel better if they just admitted he’s the best around and stopped trying to convince themselves of an alternative truth that doesn’t really exist. It’s desperate and it can’t be healthy.
Well, whomever wanted to upstage him then (or now, there's minimal difference) has a breeze of a job if all that is true. Get appointed as Manchester City manager and just reap the rewards. I wonder why Ancelotti for example didn't already come up with that.
Isn't that literally what Pep did to Heynckes
They just need to buy Arsenal's best players and then win the league, getting to the CL semis will be enough to cement them as GOATs... right?
You're wasting your time. Pep's fans will claim that he made Messi the player he became, he was a genius for winning a CL with Barca(despite having Henry, Messi, Eto'o, Xavi, Iniesta and the single biggest disgrace of a refereeing performance in the history of the competition going for him in 2009's semi final) he's the reason Spain won the World Cup(despite the same side being European Champions before he started managing Barca), he had a massive impact at Bayern(despite managers winning trebles before and after he managed there), that he is the reason City are winning titles (despite Pellegrini and Mancini winning titles having spent less than half the money he's spent and not inheriting squads worth £400 m in the first place as well as the entire Barca set up to make things easier for him).
The only thing he's actually achieved that no other manager has of yet is winning the treble with City and it took him 7 years and over £1 billion. No manager had ever spent as much as that at a single club, not even close.
But he has to deal with the pressure of being expected to win at clubs with massive advantages compared to the rest so it all evens itself out right? Haven't even gone into the refereeing scandal, 115 charges and doping yet.
Great coach sure, not even close to the greatest manager and he literally hasn't achieved a single thing we haven't seen achieved by managers who nobody even really considers close to the greats of the game
Isn't that literally what Pep did to Heynckes
They just need to buy Arsenal's best players and then win the league, getting to the CL semis will be enough to cement them as GOATs... right?
Putting Guardiola and Heynckes in the same sentence is just bonkers, one has spent 15+ years coaching top of the line teams and the other's career highlight is he ended up at Bayern twice during a period spanning almost forty years. There must have been a reason for that I guess.
If you say so. But saying that 'that doesn't mean that money spent well doesn't make a massive difference' is sort of a non argument considering that's true for everyone ever. Obviously Guardiola made signings that helped him get where he wanted. That's also true for Klopp, Conte, Mourinho, Fergie and so on. Should I dismiss all their achievements as 'it was the money spent that made the difference' as well?
You can find whatever you want however you want. My point is merely that there's an undeniable difference to how consistently good City has been since the arrival of Guardiola compared to before. It can't just be credited to the money he's spent considering they spent a good amount of money before his arrival as well.
Just look at performance metrics before and after his arrival - since he has been there, City has won xG, xGA (except his first year) and xP every single year, and often with a good margin. This just wasn't the case before, not at all. So again, how can it all be credited to money when they spent shitload even before him?
Also, I'm not entertaining that he's the greatest at anything. I'm just refuting the idea that he doesn't have a great deal of influence on how his teams perform.
Did any of those managers inherit a team with aguero, David Silva, Kevin de bruyne and fernandinho and then spend over £1billion in 7 years? Because if they did then fair enough, dismiss away
Cool story. And how many of your amazing academy products started the CL final?
But where should we draw the line? If you spend as much as City did? Money spent on players like Mane, Salah, Fabinho, Van Dijk, Alisson and more doesn't matter, because it was not as much as City spent? So the argument isn't that City spent well (because Liverpool certainly done so as well, at the very least up to 2018) but that they spent more?
Mourinho was spending three times more than his counterparts whilst at Chelsea. Conte and Klopp spent much less. In the case of Klopp he had the privilege to have long term planning without fear of a sack - you don’t get that privilege in some other place.
Pep is among the greats, without question, but the truth is Ferguson > Guardiola.
Every manager that has won a champions league medal did it courtesy of at least a few very good players. There have been fluke wins for sure and there have been teams that were better than the rest that year but didn’t follow through in the coming years. Real Madrid have won UCL crowns more than any team in Europe and these have been made possible by the likes of Ronaldo, Modric, Kroos, Benzema to mention but a few. The managers like Zidane that made it happen did so because they played a significant part. If you are going to downplay the role of Pep in that Barca team of 2008-2012 then you have to do likewise across board. For a rookie manager to take a team that just finished 18 points off the top and not only won the league but produced arguably the most dominant team in a generation, it would be criminal to not pay attention. If the talent of some of the youth players was so obvious why didn’t Rijkaard, who was also a good manager, cash in?
Heynkes took Bayern to a treble win but couldn’t as much as deliver a league win two years prior despite being clear in terms of talent. The problem of looking at highlights of a manager’s career is that we tend to forget the not so good times and so our opinions can become biased. My argument has always been that the clubs that he has led are clubs we know today meaning that they are not clubs from outer space. We have managers that have come and gone from those clubs. In fact recently Bayern has sacked coaches multiple times in the last few years including Tuchel and Nagglesman. Why are the names of those managers that have managed where Pep has not being mentioned in the same conversation with Pep since they have also had a taste in the so called “easy jobs” Pep was privy to?
People don’t realize that walking to a Bayern team that had just won the treble implied that anything less than a treble win was going to be seen as a failure even though we have had just a few in relation to the many many years of champions league tournaments. Many managers have achieved the things he has achieved for sure but how many have achieved consistently the way he has? In other words don’t just pick out the highlight of manager A having won XYZ trophy or a treble in the year ABC else you’d fall into the trap of enthroning what I call “flukism.” How has he done through out the length of his career - number one? Number two is how is the manager faring now. That would give you a better picture.
If you are comparing managers at City that spent 3 years in a different time period to one who has been there for 7 years then the result may not tell you much. The reason why employers can trust him with money is because they know he will do a good job. The reason why they do not trust some other manager is because they aren’t so sure. These guys are not emotional lads typing on the internet, they are business men commiting their hard earned money. If they can trust the man with so much, it tells so much about that man. Even when Pep was long gone from Bayern, they called him to help them decide who their manager should be.
No matter what internet posters say, employers who pay the hard cash know what talent Pep has among his contemporaries and I am glad that the great SAF would easily agree with me on this one.
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GOAT Manager? Sir Alex Ferguson. He built not only three great teams on the pitch. He built an empire and the biggest brand in sports off the pitch. Guardiola can only dream of SAF power and influence.
GOAT coach? Guardiola no contest
GOAT coach? Guardiola no contest