Tearing yourself up like that is fuckin weird, no two ways about it. I mean, look at the state of his head! I mean, sure, he didn't mean to draw blood, but it's still not healthy behavior. The guy needs to chill the fuck out, it's only football. That people are calling his "joke" insensitive is also weird, because it suggests his behavior is somehow normal or unconcerning. Skeeves me out.

    Was the head picture real? I assumed it was AI generated scratches. In reality he just had that nick on his nose, right?

      Coombs he wins like a sadist. Of course there's something wrong with him.

        flobaba I was told they were real, but I don't really know

          It'd be good for Guardiola longer term to experience a period of failure and difficulty. I pray he has that good fortune.

            daredevil I'm with you. I have a lot of respect for the impact that Pep has had on the game. He's given us a long sustained era of football built on his principles, with other managers employing his approaches (if not his budget). He's also developed a lot of managers - much more than either Wenger or Red Nose did in the process.

            Manchester City sometimes put me to sleep. But that's just a style preference. I can appreciate that they are superb while not as swashbuckling as the football I am drawn to. Pep's influence and impact though is hard to ignore.

              He got most of his ideas from Cruijff. Let him scratch. Grown ass millionaire cheat who comes to a presser looking like my 5 month old son when I forget to clip his nails and put gloves on his hands.

                Gurgen everything builds on a precedent. While Cruyff gave us Total Football, Guardiola made several adaptations around it

                • positional play / juego de posicion where players occupied much more structured zones than before
                • tactical flexibility such as the inverted fullback, false nine, and hybrid formations
                • rapid counter pressing through swarms (the 5 second rule)
                • his hypnotic football which is actually more about destabilising defenses during possession with rotational movement, to retain the ball and then create fractures in defense
                • goalkeeper as a playmaker. He’s the first guy to truly integrate the goalie as a part of play.
                • and then taking advantage of modern trends such as improved data science to enhance the above.

                So yes, he took a template that Cruyff had - but he made significant changes to it which have had reverberating impacts on the modern game. I don’t think anyone comes close this century in terms of re-shaping the game.

                  Many of the things you list existed decades before he first managed a game. He is a fantastic manager but he has never managed a club in trouble, so we will never know how good he really is.

                    Gurgen football has been around for over a century. We’ve seen lots of innovations in that time from Chapmans W-M, to Socialist Football, Total Football, Catenaccio, snd Tikitaka. What you see is a lot of these systems build on each other. Total Football is borne of Socialist Football. But none of them are exactly like precedents because they add new elements which create a fundamentally different look and feel. That’s how most innovation works.

                    The part about the club in trouble - let’s see. City have structural issues that are showing up a season or two earlier than I expected, plus this Rodri issue. He has a job on his hands. Hope he flops

                        Gurgen Many of the things you list existed decades before he first managed a game. He is a fantastic manager but he has never managed a club in trouble, so we will never know how good he really is.

                        That is the thing, in this country managers like Shankly, Fergie and Wenger took clubs which were historically big but nowhere near the top and transformed them into footballing superpowers. From a purely footballing perspective Pep may be better than them but he's taken over clubs with deep pockets and great players, clubs who has won titles a year or two before he took over. No doubt he has taken them up a level or two while he was there but he's never built a club from the foundations up.

                        At Liverpool Shankly is seen as a bigger figure than Paisley who won a lot more than Shankly. Nowadays people have a very simplistic way of comparing with stats/trophies.

                          Claudius "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun..."

                          Who knows, Claude. Soon we might be back to flying wingers and paired strikers in a good ole 442, eh? 😛

                              7 days later