Pep Guardiola’s wise choice
Well who would have thought it? Less than twenty-four hours after Pep Guardiola was quoted in England as saying that he hugely respected the Premier League, setting off a fresh wave of speculation about whether it might be Chelsea or Man City , it turns out it was all a bit of a red herring , if not a more calculating diversionary tactic designed to gain contractual time.
Now that we know he has chosen Bayern Munich, it seems it is one of those decisions that make quite a lot of sense. I have argued before about how moving to Chelsea would have represented a betrayal of much of what Pep has come to be respected for- a noble character, with principles, for which the ends never justify the means. He has already made his mark in history thanks to consolidating the creative, evolutionary process that began in Spanish football, and Barca in particular, with Johan Cruyff and now its maximum expression in the best games played by his club under his successor Tito Vilanova and La Roja- as adapted by Vicente Del Bosque. He has done so by prioritising youth development over star signings, and moulding a team with a collective ethos, both in its style and attitude towards winning.
There are ex Barca people at Manchester City- but they are in management and are not necessarily the driving force of the club’s personality, let alone its economic control. The club has tended to mirror Real Madrid’s big money galactico policy rather than Barca’s more nuanced ‘dream team’, producing no small quantity of inflated underperforming prima-donnas as a result. To have gone to Man City would have also been a betrayal, inconsistent with the legend of Pep that has been built up since he volunteered to be a water boy at Barca’s first team training sessions as a young lad in La Masia, while reciting Catalan poetry.
But perhaps somewhere behind the decision , even if deeply buried in his subconscious, lies what for Pep must endure as something of a trauma, and indeed what forced him to take a sabbatical from the game: the tension of having to compete with Jose Mourinho in a debilitating war of attrition between the same national league’s giant rivals. The prospect of Mourinho moving away from la Liga to the Premier has gathered strength in recent weeks, and looks likely to prove more accurate than all the speculation about Pep going to England.
In Bayern, Pep will find himself in a club that believes in quality of play and democracy. He will also start with some players who are not exactly modest or easy to deal with. But Pep showed at Barca that he can deflate egos as easily as he can encourage players that he knows can contribute to the making of a great team. I suspect Pep’s presence in the comings months with be felt not just in a more competituve Champions League but also in the way the German national squad plays, making it one of the favourites to do well in Brazil next year, and Bayern a much better team than it is now.
I would not be surprised to see some Barca players move to Bayern, in part because of the huge respect that many of them individually hold for him, but also because there are too many good players in the Catalan club not getting enough prime time, and because, quite frankly Pep will need them to retain a sense of identity with his roots, and for the good of his soul. Unlike Mourinho, he is ill-suited to the role of a mercenary manager, in a foreign land.
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