The trouble with Pep

 

Pep Guardiola is, of course, one of the most innovative and influential coaches the game has ever seen; and - until a few months ago! - pretty much the most successful. But all of that has suddenly changed with City's remarkable meltdown since the end of October.

I am not particularly surprised by this turn of events; well, surprised, perhaps, by its suddenness and its catastrophic severity, but.... the only big surprise for me is not that it's happened, but that it took so long to come around. I think the seeds of Pep's self-destruction have been apparent for a while, and are inherent in the management 'style' that has brought him so much success thus far.

Here, I think, are some of the main reasons for the spectacular collapse we've seen unfold at City:

1)  The adamantine ego. Pep's strength of personality, his massive self-confidence and force of will, are obviously among the key factors in his exceptional success as a modern football manager. But they also evidently make him a rather prickly character, not always easy to get along with. And he has sometimes appeared to be rather petty in his dealings with his players - the very public spat with Yaya Touré being the most conspicuous instance, but surely not the only one. His rather brutal dismissal of Joe Hart (even before he had anyone decent to replace him - Willy Caballero, remember him?!), the protracted sulky controntation with Touré, and the frequent sidelining even of such giants in the team as David Silva, Sergio Aguero, and Vincent Kompany (although there were injury issues etc. behind a lot of that, it did often seem that he was reluctant to make use of them even when they were available) made it appear that he was prima-donna-ishly attempting to set his own stamp on the club by ostentiatiously shunting aside all the core contributors to its previous success. And some of the players who've left City during his reign - notably Leroy Sane and Raheem Sterling - have expressed a dissatisfaction with their treatment by him.

2)  The finicky perfectionism. "Don't let 'perfect' become the enemy of 'good'," a wise old saying goes. And I think this might be Pep's tragic flaw - or one of them. It's another thing that not only may occasionally harm results, but potentially harms his relationships with players... and fans. When you see Liverpool players being interviewed about their time under Klopp, you don't just see professional respect and gratitude towards the man, but something like adulation. When Pep's City players talk about him, there's usually a lot of positive emotion there too - certainly the respect - but it doesn't generally sound quite so warm; and it's often undercut with hints of exasperation at his obsessiveness, his perhaps excessive attention to 'small details'.

3)  The 'over-thinking'. While I wouldn't question the astuteness of Pep's understanding of the game in general, there have clearly been occasions where a compulsion to tinker with his tactical set-up has proven to be unnecessary and detrimental. At least two or three times, an undue 'respect' for the opposition in the latter stages of the Champions League has prompted a drastic change in approach which backfired and led to a premature exit from the competition.

4)  The constant 'evolution'. Now again, this isn't an outright bad thing: it's a good thing.... that can be overdone. The ability and willingness to develop the team's tractical system, to respond to new challenges from rivals and stay continually fresh (and surprising to opponents) is admirable... up to a point. But Pep seems to have been introducing a radical change of approach almost every season, and sometimes even a series of significant tweaks within the course of one season; and this is perhaps a bit too much, a bit too often. It makes it sometimes hard for the team to get settled in a particular system. And, even more importantly, it can make it difficult to recruit appropriate players - if there's an uncertainty about how the team will be playing next year, what kind of profiles they'll be needing. It probably also makes many players reluctant to accept a move to City - my climactic point here, soon - because they realise that, however good they are, they might soon become redundant under Pep's latest scheme. One year he likes attacking full-backs; then he suddenly decides that they're obsolete, and he'd rather play 3 or 4 (or 5?) centre-backs instead; then he thinks full-backs might be OK after all, but he wants them to invert into deep midfield rather than pushing up the flanks; then he decides that maybe he'd like at least one of them to join the attacking line, but more centrally rather than out wide....  It is head-spinning. (These switches of approach have been particularly pronounced in defence; and this is maybe part of the reason why there has been such a revolving door of top international defenders passing across City's books in recent years: Pedro Porro, Angelino, Eric Garcia, Oleksandr Zinchenko, Aymeric Laporte, Joao Cancelo - all unceremoniously shown the door!)

5)  An ultra-conservatism in selection.  While 'Pep Roulette' has become a notorious concept in the world of FPL (the idea that almost any City player is a risky pick because Guardiola's squad rotations can be so frequent and so unpredictable), this distracts us from the deeper truth that in many ways Pep is extremely reluctant to make certain alterations to his team. Most of his changes come in the defensive positions, or among his wide attackers, where he's usually had multiple options; but in other areas, he's often appeared to be afraid of giving key players a rest. OK, we can see that players like Ruben Dias, Rodri, and Kevin DeBruyne are 'irreplaceable' - but you have to try to do without them occasionally, both for the sake of their stamina, and for the harmony of the squad... giving the 'fringe' players enough minutes to keep them happy. Between these two extremes - rotating like crazy in positions where he's got multiple options, and being unwilling to rotate at all in positions where he's got a vital player - many of his squad have sooner or later become disenchanted and sought a move. I mentioned at the end of the point above some of the defenders who've got fed up of him (or he of them...); but there are perhaps even more examples among the attacking players who eventually tired of the limited or erratic minutes he was giving them - Leroy Sane, Riyad Mahrez, Ferran Torres, Raheem Sterling, Gabriel Jesus, Julian Alvarez. This problem is perhaps particularly noticeable in regard to promoting youth team talents to regular starting responsibility. Poor Phil Foden is still being regularly dropped or constantly shunted around different roles (despite having just been 'Player of the Season' last year, when he was mostly able to take the responsibility of the central playmaker, due to DeBruyne's extended absence), and perpetually having to play second-fiddle to DeBruyne whenever he's fit - after 4 or 5 seasons as a more-than-capable understudy, he still hasn't been given the confidence-boost of a regular lead role in the team. And I kind of feel he's been a fool to stay there so long: his career - particularly in the international arena - could probably have blossomed more at another club. The example of fellow Academy graduates like Jadon Sancho, Morgan Rogers, and - most trenchantly - Cole Palmer, who left City for better things, must surely now rankle with him. (And one wonders how long youngsters like Oscar Bobb and Jason McAtee, and even current Pep darling Rico Lewis, will stick around, given this history of being glacially slow to fully integrate younger talents.)

6)  The chronic risk-aversion. While Pep's City have sometimes been quite exciting to watch, it's usually been because of the outsanding individual creativity they have at their disposal, rather than the overall style of play. His relentless stat-crunching, the arid quest for optimum efficiency, the preference for hanging on to the ball (even if you're not going to do much with it!) rather than doing anything that might slightly increase your chance of conceding a turnover.... these things often make for a rather dull and robotic experience for the spectator. And possibly for some of the players too; I suspect that could also be the reason so many attacking players have become disillusioned at City and left in the last few years. (Jack Grealish was the club's most expensive acquistion to date, at a reported fee of £100 million; but he couldn't get a regular start for Pep until he'd learned to be a 'defensive' winger rather than an attacking one! I love Jack, but he is a bear-of-very-little-brain; the move to City was not good for his career, and he should not have taken it.)

7)  That one big gap in his experience. Although Pep's revolutionised the modern game and won all the silverware there is to win.... he hasn't previously had a long tenure at a single club; in fact, he's now been at City for longer than he held his three previous coaching jobs combined. Thus, he's not had to deal much before even with 'succession planning' to replace a few key players, much less with remaking an entire squad over the course of half a decade or a decade. And this is the challenge he's now facing at City. The age balance of the squad is all wrong: DeBruyne is 33 and increasingly injury-prone, Walker and Gundogan are now 34, and appear no longer to have the legs for top-level competition, Bernardo Silva and John Stones are 30, Ake and Akanji will soon be turning 30; there are a lot of great young talents in the squad, but only a few - like Dias and Grealish - are in their 'prime' of mid- to late-20s. Now, player recruitment might be partly - or entirely?? - outside of Pep's control; these days, the Director of Football at a club often takes the lead on transfer trading (it is perhaps not coincidental that City's DoF, Txiki Begiristain, will be stepping down at the end of this season, after more than 12 years in the position). But many of City's acquisitions in recent years have been excessively expensive and ludicrously unfit-for-purpose (Jack Grealish?? Kalvin Phillips??). And the club has signally failed to procure any credible emergency back-up for Rodri or Haaland (they desperately need a 'Plan B' for the next time the big Viking gets injured, beyond trying to play Foden or Silva as a 'false 9'....).

But wait, does all of this tie together into some over-arching flaw in Pep's Manchester City? Yes, I think it does. 

The tactical aridity and the apparent distrust of attacking flair (too 'risky'!); the often thorny relationships with some players; the frequent reluctance to give regular starts to younger players (or players new to the club); the numerous seismic shifts in the tactical formation; the over-frequent rotation in some positions and complete lack of it in others; the large number of dissatisfied players leaving the club - these factors all contribute to Manchester City not being such an attractive destination as you'd expect it to be.... with its unique record of success in the English game and internationally, its revered and peerlessly innovative coach, and its near-bottomless coffers. Some players just don't want to go there, because they see how difficult it can be to get in the team, to stay in the team.... or to play the kind of football they enjoy playing, to 'play their own game' in this team. (You think Lamine Yamal or Nico Williams or Jamal Musiala would ever consider a move to City?? No way!!! Not if they have any sense, anyway.)

And the core failing I see in all of this is.... an exclusive focus on one-game-at-a-time, rather than the medium- or long-term good of the squad and the club. It seems to me that Pep is so afraid of failure in any single game that he can't bring himself to contemplate playing a 'non-ideal' eleven.... or a 'non-ideal' (in his view) formation and gameplan. Even if DeBruyne, in his dotage, is still better than Foden, you need to rest him more often - to get the best out of Foden, and encourage other young players coming up through your youth ranks. And you might have more chance of capturing a good alternate for Rodri if you showed a willingness to occasionally play a double-pivot - allowing both to play alongside each other - even if that's not your conception of an ideal system for this next game. Damn, yes, sometimes you have to be willing to put out a slightly 'weaker' side or utilise a slightly 'weaker' system for the long-term good of the squad. Pep has never done this; and so the City recruitment team have found it difficult/impossible to attract the new players they need for cover and rebuilding. And 'suddenly'.... everything's falling apart. Suddenly?? No, it's been a long time coming.

Oh, and there is one other Premier League manager who seems to me to demonstrate almost all of these same qualities! Unsurprisingly.... it is Pep's 'Mini-Me', Snr Arteta. Last summer's transfer window, when four fantastic young back-up players all quit in a huff, and the club was unable to land any of the big names it was after (well, not the crucial ones, anyway: I think Calafiori will prove to have been a good acquisition, but he didn't seem all that essential), was a disaster for Arsenal, leaving them with a significantly weaker squad than they had last season. And why did that happen, Mikel?

And DON'T FORGET The Boycott:

#QuitFPLinGW23         #DownWithTheNewChip