THEY’VE CHANGED FOOTBALL
Neville puts Pep and Klopp beside Fergie and Shankly as two modern giants face week to decide silverware
PEP GUARDIOLA’S eyes were darting around the press conference in the Bernabeu Stadium, home of Real Madrid, like the hunted animal he was as coach of Barcelona. But when the question came he fixed his eyes on his inquisitor and never wavered in his steely gaze.
This was 2011 and he was younger — 40 — and more aggressive than he is today and he had finally cracked. After a season of Jose Mourinho goading him and his Barcelona team, with the Real Madrid coach citing a series of preposterous conspiracies, organised by UEFA and involving the United Nations which were working against Real Madrid, Guardiola could take no more.
It was vintage Jose, a level of paranoia and confected outrage that only the special antagoniser can master and Guardiola bit on the goading.
‘I also have a list of grievances but I will never talk about them,’ he said. ‘I could list 50,000 things. But in this room [he] is the puto chief, he is the puto master. So he can have his own personal Champions League trophy for that.’
Even given the Spanish propensity for casual swearing in formal situations, this was something else. Speaking live on TV, Guardiola had just called Mourinho the ‘f***ing boss, f***ing master’ of the press conference.
Guardiola was remembering those days on Friday, drawing a direct comparison to Jurgen Klopp. Not in terms of the animosity, clearly. Guardiola, 51, and Klopp, 54, retain nothing of the hostility of those two old sparring partners.
But that outburst from Guardiola came in the middle of a 10-day period where Barcelona would face Real Madrid three times, in the league, Copa del Rey and Champions League. With a Champions League semi-final second leg thrown in for good measure, they would play four times in 21 days. Guardiola would edge that battle, winning the Champions League that year and La Liga but losing the Cup final. There has not really been a week like it since, the two best teams and best coaches in the world fighting it out in something akin to a World Series.
Until now. Hyperbole is the lingua franca of the Premier League but it is hard not to see this as the most exciting week in domestic football for decades. What feels like a Premier League title decider kicks off at the Etihad today. Liverpool will doubtless complete their progression to the Champions League semis on Wednesday but City will take a 1-0 lead to Atletico Madrid. Then, next Saturday, City and Liverpool meet at Wembley in the FA Cup semi-finals.
A season’s work is condensed into six days. By next Saturday evening, one team could be on the verge of winning it all, another’s season could almost be over.
‘It is quite similar,’ said Guardiola, reminded of that epic week of defining matches against Mourinho’s Madrid. ‘But it is more calm here.’
You imagine that he prefers the greater sense of respect he has in this rivalry. But Guardiola resisted the urge to agree with that. ‘I wouldn’t change one second of what I lived there [in Spain], not one second,’ he said.
‘It gave me an incredible experience. Even these games, even these 10 days, four games v Madrid in a row. I have incredible memories. It’s just different [here]. And the rivalry I had with Jose was really good. I learned a lot, for myself. I grew up as a manager, he pushed me to another level as a manager, he pushed me to put the team at another level and it’s quite similar here. But different.’
Even in that assessment of the impact Mourinho has had on his life, you see the change in Guardiola. He has mellowed. ‘I should like to know him better,’ said Guardiola of Klopp. ‘There are many things that make us close.’
Klopp is similar. ‘Maybe when we both finish our careers we might meet somewhere and sit together for hours and hours and hours and just speak about the different things we saw before in this game and that game,’ said the Liverpool manager, who rates Guardiola the best in the world. ‘But we should, as a club, we should enjoy the ride because it is so special.’
Both coaches have an air of serenity about them before this week of destiny and we are a long way from Bill Shankly’s tongue-incheek quote about football being a matter of life or death.
But then both of these men lost their mothers to Covid during the pandemic and could not even visit their dying parents. No one can have endured the last two years and witness the current state of the world at present and not be changed, enjoying football for what it should be, a glorious diversion from the real world. And this week will be glorious. When Guardiola says football is better because of Jurgen Klopp, he means it. There will be minimal gamesmanship and both sides will play to win and that isn’t always a guarantee from the world’s top coaches.
We are reaching for the requisite comparisons: Joe Frazier v Muhammad Ali, Roger Federer v Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic. In domestic football terms, only Alex Ferguson’s duel with Arsene Wenger, which in reality ran at its most intense from 1998 to 2006. These two are in that bracket, according to Gary Neville.
‘These two guys are comparable,’ said Neville. ‘Jurgen Klopp is comparable with Wenger, 100 per cent, in what he’s done for English football and what he’s done for Liverpool. Pep Guardiola, in global standing with what he’s done at Barcelona, Bayern and Manchester City, at the end of his career he’s going to be comparable with the great icons and managers like Sir Alex. If he continues to manage he will be up there with the greatest coaches of all time: [Fabio] Capello, [Arrigo] Sacchi, Jose, Pep, Sir Alex.
These are the greatest managers of all time. Sir Matt Busby, [Bob] Paisley, Shankly these are the greatest football managers that ever lived and you have to put Pep Guardiola in that category and you have to put Klopp in that category.
‘With Ferguson you always have to allow for the fact that he was doing it for 20-odd years. People have always said to me, “You can’t do a Ferguson any more”. Well, hang on a minute! We’re watching it before our eyes.
‘How long has Pep been at City? Five years. Klopp has been at Liverpool for six. So we’re saying you can’t do it at these big clubs any more, you can’t do it for a long time? We need to wake up. Jurgen Klopp is six years in, Pep is five years in. If they stay for another three or four years they’ll have been there for 10 years. Each.
‘You can do it. It tells us about what the Glazers say about Manchester United, that you can’t do what Sir Alex did. Well, you might not be able to do it for 26 years but you can create a framework for a manager to stay there for seven to 10 years. You can create domination over a long period in the modern era with one manager and that’s being proven.’
In the last few days there has been the suggestion that because this rivalry had rarely reached the levels of hostility that Guardiola and Mourinho did or Wenger and Ferguson, that it does not rival
those duels. Which might be true if the metric for assessing their work is the amount of must-watch press conference clips posted on TikTok, which is inevitably part of the whole football show. But as a serious proposition, it should be laughed out of town. As Guardiola said, there is a real prize for what happens on the pitch and a secondary one for whoever is ‘f***ing boss’ of the press conference.
Guido Schafer is a German journalist who played with Klopp at Mainz and remains a friend. They have known each other more than 30 years. They shared long coach journeys as workmanlike Bundesliga 2 players on Saturday evenings, coming back home from the outposts of German football’s second tier before embarking on big Saturday nights out in Mainz. Speaking this week, Schafer maintains that Guardiola, whom Klopp also faced in Germany as respective Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund coaches, is the defining challenge of his career and the very reason why Klopp has become so good.
‘The competiton against Pep for Jurgen is very important,’ said Schafer. ‘He’s a much better coach than he was in the past years because of this great challenge. He needs to improve his performance and now is a quite perfect manager. He has his brain, mentality and his experience. He has learned that he needs the best man, the best physio, the best coach, even the best bus driver. It’s a quite perfect package now. And he and Pep are the two best coaches in the world.’
In his view these two rank alongside the greatest: Rinus Michels, who pretty much invented modern football with Holland, Ajax and Barcelona in the Seventies; Valeriy Lobanovskyi, who was doing something similar at Dynamo Kiev and with the Soviet Union in the Eighties; with Sacchi, who defined the game. ‘Yes, they are at that level of those icons and legends,’ says Schafer. ‘They changed football, took it to a new level.’
Like the rest of the football world, he will be watching his friend today. ‘I hope he wins,’ he says. ‘But this is the greatest match in Europe.’ It is. It would be a poorer world that required a confected degree of animosity to appreciate that.