He definitely is one of the best ever but way below Sir Alex. I’d have him above the likes of Jose for example who is also an all time great. While Jose was a more complete manager who could succeed in various circumstances, Pep has aged better.
Man City's inevitable Treble
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Why is he? He has done nothing to justify the title of one of the best ever
Who according to you are in conversation for Best Ever and why .
I’d say his trophy count puts him at least in the top 10 or whatever. In favourable conditions he’s the ideal coach. But he doesn’t do difficult really, since he isn’t an idealistic manager he just moves wherever he can grow his haul. The likes of SAF and Klopp were part of the fabric of their clubs and would develop and grow the collective even if when weren’t growing their haul (granted SAF has greater resources - his own doing). I don’t think it’s just trophies that matter as context and weightage is key but you can’t ignore how much he’s won already and will continue to do so even if a lot of it has been in extreme comforts and at City, through cheating the system for fun.
He is one of the most successful club managers of all time, this is without doubt.
He could win his 2nd treble this season, no other manager has done that. 6 trophies in a season at Barca, again not done before.
He has dominated 3 top leagues to a level few managers in history have ever done (Carlo for example has never dominated a single league). His Barca is one of the most dominant domestic Spanish team of all time, likewise his Bayern, and likewise his City.
As to "If he is so good why has he struggled to win the Champions League in 12 years"?
The Great Sir Alex only won 2 CLs in 20 years. Is he still not great? Mourinho, 2 in 20. Is he not great. Pep is on 2 in 14, if he wins this year he'll be on 3 in 15, which is more than Sir Alex and Mou in far less years.
Easily the most tactically influential Manager of the last 30 years, his imprint on the game is massive. Who popularised the false 9 craze? Who turned attacking midfielders into proper centre midfielders in the hard fought Prem when most said it wouldn't work (De Bruyne, D Silva, B Silva)? Turning a mediocre C midfielder into a makeshift left back and getting 100 league points? (Delph) Winning back to back Prems without a striker? I remember watching a Barca game where he had just 2 guys at the back (Masche and Puyol) and 8 guys in midfield (2,8,0). The guy is so good he does what he wants, I mean we saw him rock up at the Emirates with B Silva at left back, toying with Rico Lewis as an inverted full back next to Rodri, with Cancelo, Walker, dias and Laporte on the bench.
He is already widely regarded as one of football managers GOATs. By the time he finishes managing, he will be the undisputed greatest.
He is without doubt the most coveted football club manager in history, and with good reason.
if they do it , you just know bluemoon will be full of users explaining why its the greatest treble football has ever seen
That looks like one of those conspiracy theory websites. If anything, they'll be complaining about how all the other teams conspired to deny them the quadruple.
The question is "If he is so good why has he struggled to win the CL in 12 years with teams that were by far the best in their league, so much so that the title was almost assured in most years?"
Very different from winning the CL with fecking Porto and building Utd up to treble winners from pretty much midtable. Plus by your own simplistic years-to-win-x-number of CL arguments, Zidane is well above all of them.
Who said it wouldn't work? Other managers? A source would appreciated.
Sigh!
So your points are that he is the best ever because he dominated a two horse league followed by a one horse league followed by dominating the PL with unlimited money?
He is a cheat, and liar. Accusations of doping have followed him throughout his playing AND managerial career and he has wilfully been a part of City during their 100s of rule breaches relating to ffp.
Yeah he has dominated, but only when the deck is overwhelmingly stacked in his favour. Best ever?
Not even fit to lick the cheese from between SAFs toes.The point still stands regarding Fergie in Europe. The most dominant single league Manager of all time, Sir Alex (a massive 13 Prems), struggled mightily in Europe. How do you have peak Becks, Scholes, Keane, Stam, Cole, Yorke, Giggs, Schmeichel et al and reach a single CL final?
How many CLs did he win after his treble in 99? He won ONE in 14 years. There were many seasons that he walked the league, and fumbled in Europe? Why? Why does he get a pass here but Pep doesn't? He had prime Cristiano, Rio, Vidic, Scholes, V D Saar, Eva, Rooney and won how many CLs?
Winning the CL is not easy. There's a reason only 1 in history has won 4 (Carlo) and only 3 have won 3+.
Pep is being held to different standards to all the managers before him.
And yes, when Pep gets to 3+ CLs, and 14+ league titles, he will have surpassed Sir Alex and will be the best Manager in History.
Carlo (with his dominant 1 league title in 8 years at Milan) who?
We can nitpick all day long but Ferguson always pointed out that league success was a better indicator of consistency and err...success... than a cup competition. It isn't as if Ferguson (or Guardiola) have failed to win the UCL, either. They've both done it multiple times and now we begin considering their impact in how dominant they were wherever they coached.
Ferguson broke the Rangers-Celtic duopoly and then won 13 (!) Top 5 league top flight titles. More impressively, he did it with the same team, rebuilding time and time again when each team reached the end of its cycle.
Guardiola is in the process of getting there (this would be his 11th top 5 league title) but it isn't the same. Staying with the same team and rebuilding is much more difficult than hopping to great European teams and winning (which is no easy feat and which Pep is well within his right to do so as he commands courters among the elite clubs because of his managerial capabilites).
We'll have to wait and see. Obviously a treble here would make it very difficult to make an argument against him and he'll stand out as the greatest of his generation bar perhaps Ancelotti. But that still has to play out. He isn't ahead of Ferguson yet.
Libero_of_Yore said:
Up until the the team of 08 and 09 Sir Alex never really had the squad to compete with the top European sides, he didnt have the luxury of inheriting a world class squad like Pep did at Barca, being able to buy any player he wanted for whatever wages they wanted like Pep was, and didnt have the advantage of being able to rest most of his first team in tbe domestic games before big Champions League games like Pep did.
This is revisionist history. They couldn't get Alexis Sanchez precisely because the City board wasn't willing to pay the wages that the Glazers were (as it turned out, it was the right move for them).
The world class squad he inherited at Barcelona finished 19 points behind the leaders and trophy less. And United definitely had a chance to accomplish more in the early 2000s. We waxed Juventus in Turin in 2003 and beat them the other game, but went out to Madrid after a disastrous first match, while Juve made it to the final and played a 0-0 bore draw against Milan.
We had a very good chance to reaching the 2002 final the year before, but a combination of bad luck and bad finishing meant Leverskuson eliminated us. The 2007 United squad could have also done better but collapsed in the return leg of the semi against Milan at the San Siro (possibly due to fatigue after having played against Everton days earlier while Milan rested their players in their mid-week match).
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Easy to look at the United teams Sir Alex built and say he should of won more in Europe but look at the competition he had. the Italian teams, Bayern Munich, Barcelona were all much better than they are now. City are 1st or 2nd favourites to win the champions league every year and so far Pep has failed to win it, plus he took over a Bayern team that had just won the treble and failed to win it.
Sir Alex never had the luxury of taking over a team that was already winning before he arrived
Well I fully agree SAF is the greatest, Pep could probably never match Fergie legacy as he never ever really manage to build the whole club from scratch to decades of dominance, like Fergie did with us. But in modern day football, other than Fergie, I think Pep is easily the best/greatest manager out there. It’s just I find the whole downplay to his achievement here abit of pathetic.
Can’t blame people like you who just care about the present and even that without any context.But just to let you know SAF has won 16 league titles. His 3 league titles with underdog Aberdeen are far more impressive than Pep‘s with Bayern.
SAF won 11(!) trophies with underdog Aberdeen.
He was already an incredible manager before he even took over United.
Exactly. And at City, Pep took a side that finished 18 points behind the leaders in 19/20 and went on to win the title with them the next year.
He didn't inherit the 2020 City squad. He inherited a team that finished level with United on points in 4th place.
He inherited a team that finished 19 points behind the leaders in 2008 when he took over Barcelona.
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Interesting to note that the two clubs his legacy is largely build around have been charged with cheating. Is his only real success at Bayern?
IF SAF underachieved in Europe, the same can be said about Pep, and Pep is managing teams with more money than United in an era where PL is considered the best and richest league in the world.
90s Premier League wasn't the best league in the world, far from it, in terms of wages, UEFA coefficient, and quality of players it was well behind Serie A and Liga until the mid 2000s.
SAF underachieved between mid 2000s and 2013, as he should have played at least 2 more european finals.
I consider SAF achievement with Aberdeen more impressive than everything Pep did, except his Barca stint of course.
Context should matter.
90s Premier League wasn't the best league in the world, far from it, in terms of wages, UEFA coefficient, and quality of players it was well behind Serie A and Liga until the mid 2000s.
SAF underachieved between mid 2000s and 2013, as he should have played at least 2 more european finals.
I consider SAF achievement with Aberdeen more impressive than everything Pep did, except his Barca stint of course.
Context should matter.
Well, obviously. For me, it's completely clear and out of discussion that both of them have underachieved in Europe considering their pedigree and perhaps their own expectations. Hard to argue against this - I'd think of Pep as an underachiever in Europe even if he manages to finally win it this year, although I still stay positive he'll find another way to feck it up again.
You do know Pep was influenced and heavily based his style of football on Johan Cruyff's coaching style, and Cruyff was influenced and heavily based his style of football on Michels. Pep is just a continuation of a certain style, he hasn't done anything new or revolutionary.
Thanks for making my point.
Pep's handpicked team finished 18 points behind the PL champions. And the same players then went on to win the title the next year.
So, either 20/21 Pep is great and and 19/20 Pep is shite or.... sometimes a world class team can have a mediocre season. So, we should probably stop saying that "he took a struggling Barcelona with Messi, Puyol, Xavi, Iniesta, Eto'o" most of whom were coming off a morale-boosting Euros win and made them into world-beaters.
Of course he's one of the great managers of this generation. But people here are claiming he's the greatest in history and the like. Wtf.
Err, no. I corrected your claim and now i am ridiculing an inane point. Teams are not expected to win 5 consecutive titles. That should be simple to understand. City having an off year in 2020 after winning 2 consecutive titles and a domestic treble the previous year, before promptly winning 2 straight again (possibly a third straight this year) shouldn't be shocking to anyone with a basic understanding of football.
That's different from a Barcelona team that had reached the end if their run and hadn't won a title in the past two years, drifting further and further away from Real Madrid before the new manager showed up and promptly got rid of Ronaldinho and Deco, changed their football philosophy, and lead them to every title on offer.
If you'd like to attribute all that to the players "getting moral boosts" from summer tournaments and act as if it had nothing to do with the manager, feel free to do that
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While he was at Bayern their president was sent to prison for tax evasion
It's not downplaying Fergies legacy, it's using him as a legitimate example of how difficult it is to win in Europe.
People are calling Pep out rightfully for underachieving in Europe, yet aren't applying the same logic to Fergie. Fergie himself would be the first to tell you his teams should have won more.
And let's be honest, 10 more years of Pep managing top clubs will have seen him win enough to be the best domestic manager in history. He already has the best points per game average (managing over 50 games) than anyone that has ever managed the Prem, La liga or the Bundesliga. He literally destroys domestic leagues like never witnessed. People mocked la liga when Barca and Real got 100 points. That would never happen in the Prem they said. Well guess what.
Another 10 years at the helm, he'll be on at least 4 European Cups.
No other top manager in history has dominated 3 top European leagues like has.
Of course he didn't reply to you! That's adexkola's stock in trade
And even then, Bayern winning domestic trophies is as impressive as a fish learning to swim.
It's the first since they started supporting City.
Never go in debate with fanboys.
This is slowly turning in a story how Pep inherited aging and declining teams in City and Barca and did huge rebuilding with unknown players.
"He get rid of Ronaldinho and Deco". Wow, what a rebuilding he did there.
This wasn't a title race. City have second geared it knowing they'd win it. The league is absolutely dreadful tbh
Thats the league title, and i dont fancy our chances with City in this form in UCL, though anything is possible.
I honestly don't know how we will catch City within the next few years. When you watch them play, they're miles better than us. The gulf between them and Arsenal here is obvious, so imagine how far away we are.
It's going to take a serious downturn from City for us or anybody to catch them.
It's going to take a serious downturn from City for us or anybody to catch them.
If real do not stop city, no one can. At this moment they will probably go though against real in the form city are in. Hopefully they falter and real bring in their absolute best cl form.
There's only us but we need Qatar money to do so otherwise they dominate for the next 10 years. People haven't accepted it yet but that's where this league is headed.
Weirdly I think United in the final in a one off game is the best chance. Real got very lucky last year, I don't see the same happening again. But I still feel this is their year. Wonder if the "it doesn't matter because it's city" brigade will still feel the same?
Maybe Milan can fluke it off in a final, history and all that.
Downturn will never happen as they will just buy their way out of it. Only thing that can beat them is the cheating charges now. Or if we get bought out by Qatar and do the exact same thing.
100 percent agree, but also the peak of your teams is important, the obvious example was Peps Barcelona at their peak was amazing. It is possible to do well without reaching that kind of peak.
Some of RMs recent CL, though obviously they were good, were not amazing compared to other eras. They won the CL with old age pensioners.
That is nonsense. If it happens in one game, then yes you can call it lucky. Madrid have a history in overturning big deficits in Europe so its not lucky.