Jose vs Pep: Battle Lines Are Drawn in Manchester
OLD TRAFFORD IS RED
Once Pep Guardiola was announced as the new Manchester City manager back at the start of the year, it was pretty clear that Manchester United would respond in turn. As much as some may have wanted to see Ryan Giggs thrown in there, as much as some may have even been indifferent to Louis Van Gaal staying on another season to see out that contract (any chance of that he blew when he missed out on Champions League footy), neither or those, nor any left-field option, was ever going to suit this club in the post-Fergie era.
Since Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement in 2012, it hasn’t been the best of times for his old club. Three finishes outside the top three, two seasons without qualifying for the Champions League (and the one they managed they went out in the groups). There are all sorts of variables at play there and no manager was going to have an easy job of it replacing a legend like that – least of all David Moyes who immediately sunk timidly into the iron throne that Fergie sat on so commandingly. But also of huge note was that Fergie’s retirement coincided with CEO David Gill, who moved on to an FA role, though along with Ferguson he remains a board member. In his place, Ed Woodward took over as the head of the operational side of things.
Now, Woodward has had his share of blunders in the gig, such as the Fellaini transfer where they missed a buyout clause and paid a chunk more than they needed to for the Belgian on deadline day. Transfer frustrations have been a common thing since then but financially, despite the on-field dramas (or lack of, in LVG’s case), the club is hitting record profits. Woodward has instilled a sort of English Galacticos mentality around the club – going all in on huge transfers and playing up the commercial side of things like never before. Say what you will about the cold-hearted business side of that but you can’t fault the investment. Big money transfers for the likes of Angel Di Maria (whoops) and Anthony Martial (not so whoops) and consistent links with mind-blowing transfer fees for players like Gareth Bale and, yes, Paul Pogba. Even just the speculation has been enough to keep United relevant through a flood of tweets and clickbait newspaper reports amidst the failures at Old Trafford and on the road.
For a club as desperate to flaunt their wealth, power and relevance, there was never really any doubts as the last season dwindled to a close that Jose Mourinho would soon be their new manager. From the moment he was sacked by Chelsea there was speculation that he’d move for that job. Mourinho may have been conspicuously silent about the whole thing but his agent and others made sure there was never a poor MUFC result that didn’t coincide with Jose being photographed at some event or a new batch of rumours for the papers to fight over. A stab in the back to Louis Van Gaal, a former mentor? Sure, but LVG was only vulnerable because of his own failings. He left the door ajar.
THE ETIHAD'S BLUE
Across town, the campaign to bring in Pep Guardiola was a much longer one, carried out over a number of years. When Pep left Barcelona in 2012, Manchester City wanted him and they wanted him bad. They even started hiring his friends in order to help persuade him. Here are some words from a TNC article back when the Guardiola thing was announced:
“See, they didn’t just send a few nice texts, they damn near paved the roads for him. First by appointing former Barca VP Ferran Soriano, who played a big part in getting Guardiola the manager’s job at Barcelona, as their new CEO. He’s still there and has had massive success, cutting their losses in half in his first season before actually leading them to a profit in 2015 for the first time since Sheikh Mansour and the Abu Dhabi United Group bought the club. Plus he’s overseen the global expansion of New York City FC and Melbourne City as part of their envisioned global family of clubs. Reminds you a fair bit of the old Catalonian model, doesn’t it? La Masia?
That was followed soon after with Txiki Begiristain being given a Director of Football role with City, a similar one to what he held at Barca before leaving when Club President Joan Laporta left – there’s a story worth looking into if you’ve got a little time. Nobody mixes politics and sports like the Spanish. Anyway, Begiristain happens to be one of Pep’s closest friends to this day and is expected to work closely with him as far as transfers go.”
Txiki is pronounced as “cheeky” if you listen to Pep say it. Kind of Disney cute, that.
So, spoiler alert, they didn’t get him in 2012, he went to Bayern Munich and won three straight Bundesligas. But when he left them, City were always the frontrunners. Guardiola is the kind of man that likes to test himself and learn new things. The English Premier League is the clear next step.
That left Manuel Pellegrini in a dumb place, but one he always knew was on the cards. Manchester City had risen from a long way back to become the force that they are now – when United won the treble, City were competing in the third tier of English footy. Having re-established themselves in the top flight in the early 00s, things changed forever when the Abu Dhabi United Group bought the club in 2008 and flooded it with incoming cash and expensive players. Within half a decade they were Premier League champions.
But that clearly wasn’t going to appease everyone. Money will buy you success, while success buys you more money. But it’s all dependant on exponential dollar figures. Manchester City reinvested that money after their initial flurry and have done all they can to build a nurturing culture around the club. Something that will ensure that they don’t need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars every couple of seasons in order to stay relevant. Their training facilities and youth academy are now something that the club takes enormous pride in, while their women’s team is one of the best in Europe (Man Utd doesn’t even have a women’s team) and, in line with new home-grown player regulations, they have made a real effort to bring English players into the squad as well – for better and worse.
See, City fans had every right to celebrate their League titles regardless of how much their ownership spent on them but Manchester United still bragged about that little thing called history. You can’t change the past, but you can affect the future. City have responded by swiftly instilling what they claimed, upon Roberto Mancini’s sacking, to be a ‘holistic approach’ to their football club – though they also made a nod to the past (City isn’t some battler club that was built upon modern money, even before the takeover they were one of only 19 clubs in the 120-odd year history of English football with multiple top division titles) as they unveiled a new badge at the end of 2015, which is now in use – a redesigned version of the old circular badge that they used to use in the old days. It’s not all about immediate success anymore, this is a very sustainable football club built to inspire and impress.
MANCHESTER DIVIDED
So much about great leadership is the illusion of confidence and control. As much as Manchester United have tried to fabricate that about their club, the results don’t exactly back up the dollars. But Jose Mourinho is a man with a cult of success around him. Listen to the way people talk about him: “He’s a Winner”, “He just Wins”. People talk about Mourinho the way that Donald Trump talks about himself. What does that even mean, he ‘wins’? Does it mean he’ll keep on winning now that he’s signed with a team that finished fifth last season in the league – because he sure didn’t win a lot last season himself. But that doesn’t matter, the fact is that he exudes that success in the way he talks, the way he carries himself and the way he influences others. In Mourinho, Manchester United have a manager that backs up the elite standing that they’ve spent so much money trying to preserve.
Pep Guardiola is also a man synonymous with winning. He has to be, in order to make any sense as the new Manchester City manager. Except that Pep isn’t just a winner, he’s an idealist as well. He looks at football like a philosopher and comes with an inbuilt style that stems from a romantic quest for perfection. High pressing and even higher possession stats – he has said in the past that his ultimate desire is a game where his team holds 100% on the ball. Given kickoff rules and the requisite for goals, that’ll never happen – but that’s not the point. His Barcelona team and their Tiki Taka have set the standard for modern football like Ajax did in the 1970s with their Total Football. Mourinho is a perfectionist as well, but from the other angle. Pep, like his new rival Arsene Wenger, believes that performances beget results. Mourinho believes that results beget performances. If Jose Mourinho is a dictator then Pep Guardiola is a conductor.
Which is funny because for as long as most fans can remember, it has been Manchester United setting the bar with their youth policies and flowing football. It was the shattering of the latter – the so-called ‘United Way’ – that cost Louis Van Gaal the Stretford End. Now, with City looking to confirm their dominance over Manchester and United trying to climb their way back up, that script has flipped. Suddenly United is the club staring upwards with something to prove while City are trying to consolidate their recent strengths. And, most stunningly of all, both are playing catch up to Leicester and Spurs. Arsenal too, now you mention it.
Both managers were unveiled this week, Guardiola on Monday and Mourinho roughly 24 hours later. Guardiola before thousands of crowded fans and Mourinho at the head of a room of reporters. It all made lovely sense as each professed their intentions and desires. Pep wants to create a team that the City fans can be proud of while Jose just wants to win. Pep talked about team spirit, building something special and taking it one win at a time. Jose talked about how he never hides behind words, how he feels no pressure and intends to win every trophy he can.
Although when one journalist had the guts to ask specifically about his old enemy (a word Jose hates), Mourinho dodged the question by talking about the legacy of Leicester: how the Premier League is so much more than a two-horse race and focussing too hard on one opponent would be dangerous. Meanwhile Pep spoke with City’s premier fan/mascot Noel Gallagher about the wealth of managerial talent in England now without ever directly mentioning the “guy across the road” by name. Oh, Jose didn’t hold back at all. There were veiled allusions to not playing to philosophies, managers who hadn’t won anything for a decade and how he was a big enough man for the job. All probably digs at Arsene Wenger, Louis Van Gaal and David Moyes. But to his greatest nemesis there was nothing, same goes from the other perspective too. No punches thrown from either side, which the clubs would have been extremely relieved about as they engage in their constant one-upping of each other.
The pair have some famous history, stemming from the fact that Jose Mourinho wanted the Barcelona job and Pep Guardiola got it. But it’s so much more than that. Even their conceits differ, as Jose’s brazen arrogance contrasts with Pep’s more subtle pretentiousness. That’s what makes it so fascinating that Jose vs Pep will now be transposed onto the Premier League… and even more fascinating when it’s centralised in Manchester given the strange dynamic currently existing between those two clubs.
Take the stuff about academies for example. Manchester United’s two greatest eras have stemmed from the foundation of youth. The Busby Babes and the Class of ’92. But Jose Mourinho is a manager who is notoriously averse to promoting talent from his youth teams, preferring more dependable experience. Plus, as he pointed out in his introductory press conference, his teams have a low injury rate, meaning less need to find players from outside his core. It has been something close to 80 years since Manchester United last picked a match day squad that didn’t include at least one academy graduate. For a while that record seemed under threat from Louis Van Gaal but his faith in youth ended up as the last harness holding him in his job. Marcus Rashford, and to a lesser degree Cameron Borthwick-Jackson, Jesse Lingard, James Wilson, Tim Fosu-Mensah and Andreas Pereira, ought to keep that record standing for a while to come supposing a couple of them can make things stick with their new boss.
Still, the 49 player list that Mourinho came armed with against that pestering was really nothing more than a charming PR trick. A closer look and most of those players either barely played more than a handful of minutes under Jose or they had been bought young and debuted elsewhere. It’s supposedly the United Way to give the kids a run but recent struggles have seen them mortgage that to some degree. Meanwhile the man who oversaw the blossoming of the finest youth system of the last decade – players like Lionel Messi, Xavi, Andres Iniesta and Sergio Busquets – is taking charge of the once-dubbed ‘Noisy Neighbours’.
Hey but Jose has some aces up that sleeve of his all the same. In his presser he spoke about how the club needed specialists in every position – another thing in contrast to his predecessor – and that Wayne Rooney, to his mind, would never be a midfielder. Rooney is a player he once tried to sign with Chelsea and as far as he’s concerned, it would be a waste to place a player with that rare instinct for goal so far from it. Tough chatter. He also spoke of how the club was targeting four players in the transfer market that would bring them to where they need to be – any other moves would be to replace those who get sold (one thing both Pep and Jose agree on is that neither wants unhappy players). Eric Bailly and Henrikh Mkhitaryan are two of them. The fourth, we all assume, is Paul Pogba. The other? That’d be Zlatan Ibrahimović – the bloke that in his autobiography referred to Guardiola as a “spineless coward”.
A DERBY RENEWED
So, yeah. There’s no reason to worry about Jose vs Pep flying into Manchester and overshadowing United vs City, because to be honest those two duels are the same thing. They’re not just running parallel, they’re identical, and these two teams have managed to handcuff their ongoing power struggle to one of the great fundamental debates in football. In a way, they’re now as dependant on each other as they’ve ever been – right now it’s their rivalry that keeps them relevant and heading into the next season, the most fascinating in years after what happened last time, all eyes are inexplicably on the teams that just finished fourth and fifth.
We saw briefly in the final years of Sir Alex’s time at MUFC what he Manchester Derby had the potential to become with a series of all-time classics. From the ‘Why Always Me’ 6-1 City annihilation to United’s last minute 4-3 victory, courtesy of Michael Owen of all people. And now that derby is back at top billing.
Welcome to Manchester, lads. This is gonna be good.