Before the second leg of Bayern Munich’s tie against Atletico Madrid last week, Pep Guardiola reflected on his time at the club.
He was halfway through his seventh successive Champions League semi-final as a coach, but Pep knew that it could be seen only one way if Bayern didn’t make it, and he expanded on what he had done at the club.
“Culturally I wanted to introduce something,” he explained. “I have tried to introduce a different playing style. It was a hard fight sometimes, but the way I have been treated is really lovely and it will help my future. I think I have really improved myself here as a head coach.”
By the end of the week, before Bayern secured their fourth title in a row on Saturday, Pep was talking about a mole, insisting it was the club’s problem, not his.
He took on the medical department again, querying why his players took so long to return to injury and, as he prepared to depart, he sounded a little like Jose Mourinho, suggesting that sometimes men can be driven apart by the narcissism of major differences.
He leaves Bayern for fresh challenges with people unsure just exactly how he did in his last challenge, while some wonder if the football Pep demands works any more.
Giovanni Trapattoni has been critical of a new trend. Trap didn’t name any club in particular, but it wasn’t hard to figure it out who he might be talking about.
“There are some teams which play the ball around for half an hour without a single shot on goal … that sends me to sleep,” Trap said recently.
Trap said he preferred Diego Simeone’s style, “a thousand times. He always promises a thrilling spectacle with his intensity.”
Trap, of course, was unlikely to find common ground with Guardiola.
Guardiola believes that everything can be achieved with possession of the ball, while Trap, certainly late Trap, believed that life as we know it was in jeopardy with possession of the ball.
Last December, Ottmar Hitzfeld said Pep was “a tactics freak” and made the seemingly obvious point that, at this moment, Jupp Heynckes had been more successful than Guardiola.
After Tuesday night’s game, Hitzfeld was more complimentary and said those who didn’t recognised Pep’s achievements in reaching three Champions League semi-finals with Bayern were “clueless”.
He also dismissed the idea that Pep hadn’t lost himself in the club. “I also don’t agree with the critics who claim Guardiola did not identify himself enough with Bayern. If you saw him on the sidelines you know how much passion he gave for this club.”
This debate is not unique to Pep. More than ever, we struggle to understand how much credit a manager should get. It is, right now, impossible to imagine Leicester being league champions without Claudio Ranieri, but maybe they would have been a different kind of league champion.
Soon Nigel Pearson will be returning to management, coveted too by those who remember what he did with Leicester at the end of last season, while others wonder how he managed to keep the champions of England at the bottom of the table for so long. Either he laid the foundations for what they achieved, or he was holding them back. Or both.
It is, of course, brutally unfair, to dismiss Guardiola’s spell as Bayern’s manager as a failure because they haven’t won the Champions League during his years at the club.
But it is also seems to understate his ability as a coach to insist his time has Bayern has been a triumph, to portray Pep as some sort of time-motion expert brought in to get everything functioning more effectively, with particular pride taken in, say, how the payroll services have been streamlined.
He is, after all, a man who wants everything. He does not believe in football as form of louche self-expression, but as a relentless, obsessive pursuit. This may not necessarily help, and it will be interesting to see how Carlo Ancelotti – a man who has always comfortably embraced a philosophy of ‘why can’t we all just get along?’ – manages in his place.
But nobody in football has a brand like Pep, and nobody stands apart as he does. The frustration with Guardiola – as well as the claim that he didn’t identify himself enough with Bayern – may stem from this sense of his own independence, this clearly stated idea that he is just passing through.
When he spoke of improving himself as a head coach during his time at Munich, he sounded like an executive who had headed to Harvard Business School for an MBA, learned a lot and would look back fondly on his spell in this great establishment.
Manchester City’s dismal season suggests Pep will have a harder job at his next club. However it may be easier to evaluate what he has done, even if, judging by City’s performance on Wednesday night, Pep will need all the time in the world to do it.
In the modern era, we understand that managers will not be around too long. The average time in a job for a Premier League manager is 1.8 years, but perhaps we expect them to suffer for those years, to be driven from their positions at the behest of a baying mob, while they cling desperately to the last vestiges of their dignity.
Even Mourinho, who is also an independent state, conforms to this expectation. He never lasts long, but he arrives talking about dynasties and stability. Soon, however, the world is a darker place. If he were a time-motion expert, the canteen would be shut and the toilets blocked as he walked out of the building complaining that he received no backing from the HR guy.
Pep brings his own relentless drive with him, promising great change and total absorption, but only for a while.
Since he left Barcelona, it has been accompanied by a sense that it will end and it will end on Pep’s terms, as if somebody insisted on inserting into their wedding vows the line that 50 per cent of marriages end in divorce, but, hey, let’s make the most of it while we can.
Guardiola gives all he can, but he is always aware of the statistics, even as he succeeds or fails. Or does both. As Steve Martin used to put it during his years as a stand-up: “We’ve had a great time tonight considering we’re all going to die some day.”
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