Guardiola as shrewd as they come in the top echelons
EVERY spring, we end up in a tangle over whether the manager of the year is the one with the silver pots or the one who turned water into wine with a side much higher in the table than they ought to be.
Trophy winners versus overachievers is an annual slanging match. This year’s is Pep Guardiola against Sean Dyche.
Thirty miles (48.2km) separate City’s east Manchester Gulf state satellite and the unsponsored Turf Moor, home of the Clarets, who are a decent bet to finish above Arsenal in sixth position but are 35 points behind Guardiola’s champions.
Convention dictates that we say Burnley’s whole team cost less than a City left-back and point out that the seventh-best team in the Premier League are not owned by a country or fuelled by sovereign wealth.
For the purposes of gong allocation, we insist on choosing between Guardiola and Dyche as the manager most worthy of a black-tie coronation.
The debate, however, is flawed. The fallacy is that one is merely achieving what money dictates, while the other is performing miracles of upward mobility.
This myth needs debunking. Guardiola was not destined by a balance sheet to win the league with a 16-point margin five games from the finish any more than Tottenham Hotspur’s massively lower net spend condemns them to relegation struggles.
Plainly you get what you pay for in transfer fees and salaries, but you also end up where your manager’s ability [or lack of it] steers you.
Fans of West Bromwich Albion will concur. As each new detail about Guardiola’s management style emerges, curmudgeons have reverted to the one comeback likely to cast doubt on his accomplishment. City, they say, are chequebook champions, as if every other Premier League winner was put together with sticky-back plastic and cereal boxes, like a Blue Peter toy.
One detail particularly caught my eye. It was the claim that Guardiola lives in a “£2.7-million [R46-million] flat” in Manchester.
If you live in a society where a Manchester flat can be bought for £2.7-million (or a flat anywhere), creative midfielders are probably going to cost £50million (R850-million).
When we rail against grotesque inequalities and extravagance in football, we are really railing against our polarised economic culture – of which football is a very accurate expression. Sovereign wealth funds owning football is akin to their owning The Shard, or part of Heathrow airport or all our giant amusement parks.
The idea that English football is a haven from globalisation – a refuge for community values – has been obliterated. Equally, an American speculator who runs a club by remote control is no more appealing as an ownership model than a Gulf state using the club as an international billboard, unless you extend the discussion to human rights, which, again, would have to include the whole of the British economy, with its laissez-faire financial system.
It was predictable that some Manchester United fans should throw human rights at City. And these are not trivial concerns, except when weaponised for the sake of convenience by jealous Mancunians. Yet they cannot be held against Guardiola as a reason to make Dyche manager of the year, because what he has accomplished is hard; a different kind of hard to what Burnley have done – but still hard, because City could have been like United: a collection of expensive individuals with no animating spirit.
They could have been like Paris St-Germain – a kind of luxury French boutique with no soul – or like Arsenal, flimsy and outmoded. The proof of Guardiola’s brilliance this season can be seen in last season’s campaign.
All the mistakes he made last year, and all the manpower deficiencies that were apparent (goalkeeper, fullbacks), were corrected, even if Liverpool have raised more doubts about Guardiola’s ability to win the Champions League without Lionel Messi.
City might have been decadent, inconsistent, clique-ridden, agent-disrupted, strolling rich kids. Instead, they are an extension of their manager’s personality, as United were under Alex Ferguson. So when Guardiola takes his place alongside Dyche, Rafael Benitez, David Wagner, Roy Hodgson, Jurgen Klopp, Chris Hughton and Eddie Howe (yes, the goodmanagement list is long) in the annual beauty parade, he stands there as a football coach, not only as a spender of other people’s money. His candidacy is based on improving individual players in a culture that generates scintillating football and fierce commitment.
The scintillating football bit is beyond Dyche at Turf Moor, but he too extracts more than could reasonably be expected from his resources, which he also adds to through good judgment. At a smaller club, he can cultivate an image of himself as bigger than the team, in the sense that the club would be bereft if he left. Guardiola’s selling point was that he alone could give City an identity, a grand design. But both he and Dyche are judged in the end on their coaching and management, which makes them more equal than their budgets suggest. —