It’s hard not to see Pep Guardiola as the ultimate modern football manager.
He spearheaded a revolution at Barcelona, changed how the world saw the game, and gave rise not just to a new method of playing attacking football, but also – indirectly – to defensive mechanisms to stop it.
It’s more than that, though. Because even if you do see Guardiola as the ultimate innovator, that’s not his most accurate reflection of the modern game.
Football threatens to become more than just something that happens in the evenings and at weekends. With social media and 24 hour news, the game now leaves nothing to the imagination – there’s simply no time to imagine it. The kinds of people who spent their childhoods thinking about formations, best starting XIs and the players their team should sign in the summer are also the kinds of people who, nowadays, stay abreast of their club’s news constantly on Twitter. That’s to be expected. After all, they always thirsted for news, it’s just that these days they can get it on demand, without having to wait until Football Focus comes on TV.
But one of the unforeseen consequences of the internet era – it seems – is the idea that everything is black and white. It is precisely because we don’t have time to sit back and think about the game and its nuances that we don’t see any nuances at all. And this is Guardiola’s best reflection on modern life.
On one hand, you have the Guardiola fanboys: those who think he can do no wrong and that his system, once fully in place, will blow away all opposition, just as it did at Barcelona and – until the semi-finals of the Champions League, at least – at Bayern Munich.
On the other hand, you have the Fraudiola bunch: those who not only view such worship of an individual as suspect, but also mock the Catalan manager’s failures. Presumably, they think that – if he is the world’s best manager – he should be winning every trophy every year. And what’s more, to their eternal glee, they think that Guardiola has been ‘found out’ in the English league – a league they find more physical and competitive.
Charting a course between extremes is the modern way. This season at Manchester City, Guardiola has seen the two warring factions take aim at each other through the guises of think pieces and social media rants, but the middle voices – the ones who haven’t yet made up their minds whether or not Guardiola will be a success or failure at Manchester City, or whether he will be something in between – are squeezed out.
This season, while it’s fair to say that City have performed below expectations, it’s also fair to say he was dealt a tough hand. Without a good chunk of the types of players he usually likes to have at his disposal in order to play football in a certain way (pacey, athletic full-backs, midfielders who can control the game, attackers who can press high up the pitch, a goalkeeper who can both save shots and play out with his feet) Guardiola has had to make do and mend, and yet he also probably took too long to adapt the team’s style of play to the players he had in his squad.
But all of those thing can be true at the same time. Guardiola can’t be both a success and a failure at the same time, but he can be bits of one and bits of the other.
What’s also true is that Guardiola can be judged more diligently after this summer, and after a year assessing the strengths and weaknesses of his squad.
Still, the same old problem will be there: after a year in the job and presumably even more money spent this summer, it is unclear just what Guardiola will be expected to deliver. Will it be the league title? What about the Champions League? What happens if he misses out narrowly again: is it a sign of abject failure to come second in the league or get knocked out in a Champions League semi-final?
Once again, we come back to all or nothing, where inches are the difference between redemptive glory and abject failure. But the problem is, it was Guardiola’s success that made him divide the entire footballing world in such a way, just like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Guardiola gave rise to modern football, but that modern way is what piles pressure on him this summer.
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