The fawning over this cnut is nauseating. He’s done a good job at Liverpool I’ll give him that and he’ll go down as one of the top 5 managers we’ve seen in the Premier League but he’s certainly not in the top 3.
He's certainly not top 2 because that Sir Alex and Pep locked in.
3 though? That is definitely up for debate. He's the only one of Mourinho, Wenger and Klopp who actually built an English side who became the best in the world. He won the league and the CL with this side, he successfully achieved all his targets that he set out to do. Those are facts.
Context to them is things like "net spend" which applies to him and Wenger to give them an advantage on Mourinho, who had the insane spending and yet never got to a CL final and got sacked 4 times in England. Another context is point totals, where Klopps top 3 are 99, 97 and 92, which is obviously 3 insane seasons. Another context is making 3 CL finals, compared to Wenger's 1 and Mourinho's 0. I just don't see how Mourinho is ahead of him. Wenger has longevity in the league but his side never reached the peak level that Klopps side did, so just going undefeated in one season doesn't put him ahead.
For me, to enter the top tier, you need to have built a side to have won the league and the CL. The only managers in charge of an English club to have done so are:
- Sir Matt Busby
- Bob Paisley
- Joe Fagan (taking over from Paisley's team, so didn't build it)
- Brian Clough
- Sir Alex Ferguson
- Jurgen Klopp
- Pep Guardiola
That is an incredibly elite list of managers. It's an extraordinary achievement, it's managers who have reached the pinnacle of the game with an English club, and they are in a tier of their own. The others didn't manage to do that, so they have to be below for me. That's why Klopp is 3rd, ahead of Mourinho and Wenger.
As for the Sir Alex vs Guardiola discussion... I don't really want to go into it as it's hypotheticals based on feck all. The 2 times they played each other, Peps Barca played us off the park, though it was arguably the best club side of all time with the best player of all time. Pep has dominated the league to an extraordinary level his whole career, with record point totals. Sir Alex dominated the league and kept rebuilding teams to win more, but not quite to the same extent. On the other hand, Pep has infinite resources and is in charge of a side with 115 charges against them and one day could go down for cheating and corruption. That's not Peps fault, he's still an all time great and achieved things with his squad of players that pretty much nobody else could do, but it'd just strike off his City accomplishments from his career IMO.
If Pep, Mourinho, Klopp, Sir Alex and Wenger managed in the league at the same time all at the tops of their game, I'd guess over 10 seasons you'd see something like 5 Pep wins, 3 Sir Alex, 1 Klopp, 1 Mourinho win, 0 Wenger wins. And that's only because you have to consider Pep with the resources he's had his whole career at every club, and you'd assume City would still be cheating cnuts. Can't judge him otherwise.