Manchester City

Like I said, money accelerates the process of Guardiola’s work, doesn’t affect the quality of his work. The quality is there with or without the money.

You are right, Sane, Ederson, Stones etc will all be better, more polished and accomplished players after 4 years.

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There’s are very few players in the Man City team that we couldn’t have bought but Wenger decided not to spend, or if he did, a lot of the players he bought weren’t good enough.
What world class defenders has Guardiola bought, and how many of them that were there when he started were world class?

I can’t see how anyone can take away what he has done as a manager.
What does he have to do to convince you that there isn’t a better manager out there?

Supporters here should be getting CL every season and challenging for the PL for the prices we pay.

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City have spent 350m on defenders in the last 4 seasons, most of that was Guardiola. If a 50m defender doesn’t work out they can write him off and spend another 50-70m on another defender. No other club can do that.

Wenger could spend 110m on fullbacks and another 110m on centre backs another 50m on goalkeepers to replace the 100m of defenders already at his disposal? I tend to think not.

As for ‘which world class defenders’, they’re arguably all world class given they are going for world record fees for defenders depending on the definition of world class.

Also no way in fuck were any of those players attainable for Arsenal as soon as City wanted them and priced us out of any deal.

I think Klopp is better than Guardiola

Bollocks

Anyone that gets Fabian Delph playing that good gets my applause :slight_smile:

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Of course they were within our price range.
We could have had any of them the season before Man City became interested.

I don’t think he is better but he is pretty close, and he is also someone we could have had here if we had an owner with any ambition.

You are the one who said, “what we are getting right now is in accordance to what fans are paying right now.”
So if we are paying some of the highest prices in Europe, how do you explain that we are only getting Europa League football?

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Guardiola has spent about 230mil on defenders. That’s a 120mil difference you are quite quick to dismiss.
To be fair I can’t name one 50mil defender Guardiola has signed that has been written off and replaced, can you?
On the other hand I can quite quickly assemble a list of defenders Wenger has signed very recently that we have already shipped or written off.

Gabriel - 13.5 mil
Debuchy - 12 mil
Chambers - 16mil
Mustafi - 35 mil

Almost 80 million down the drain.

Also the fact that City overpay for players doesn’t mean that these players haven’t been available for less.

Mendy went for 50mil, valued at 12.
Danilo went for 27mil, valued at 14.
Stones went for 50mil, valued at 25.
Laporte went for 58, valued at 22.
Walker went for 46, valued at 27.

All bar Stones and Walker could have been negotiated for something very close to their market evaluation by a club that isn’t a notorious big spender like City.

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Because other clubs are demanding stupidly low ticket prices from their fans given the cost of football these day.

Matchday revenue is not even large enough to cover player wages, let alone transfer fees.

I know.
I was responding to what you said about supporters getting in accordance to what they are paying.
There is nothing we can do about Man City, but we should be competing with spurs, Liverpool, or even Chelsea and Man U.
The fact that Burnley are only two points behind us, with a squad that cost around the same as Aubameyang, tells you that it’s not just the spending that makes clubs better than others.

I see Mr “I’ve never been to a football match” is piping up again.

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As point of reference, the team we just lost to could be assembled for the amount we spent on Auba. :facepalm:

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Agree with this in the main. Guardiola is undoubtedly a top coach who is able to extract fantastic performance levels out of his players. Jules mentioned Delph above but I’d also say Walker, Sterling and Stones have benefitted immensely from his coaching.

However, without money, he is simply unable to assemble a squad capable of executing his system to the required level. And I don’t think he would achieve anywhere near the level of success he has had without having vast resources at his disposal.

He shares a similar quality with Wenger which is his biggest flaw - he’s not a pragmatic coach and will always stick to his style / system regardless of opposition. None of his teams since Barcelona (prime Xavi, Iniesta, Busquets and of course Messi) have been able to execute his system to the level required to dominate other European teams in the CL.

Winning the league this year in the fashion they have is certainly an achievement and shows definitive progress, but he will have failed in this latest project if he doesn’t get them to a CL final. That is the true measure of how far he has taken this City team.

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This may be true, but considering he’s only spent really major amounts of money at City, and even then, nothing out of the ordinary for similar clubs of their wealth (Utd for example), I’m not sure how much it really means even if it is true. He’s doing what’s best for the clubs he manages, not the ones he doesn’t, so unless he manages a small club I don’t really see the point of this statement.

I don’t really agree, aside from the fact that comparing Wenger and Guardiola is like comparing night and day, Guardiola does a massive amount of tactical preparation whereas we’re led to believe Wenger is the opposite, and based on the evidence we have (Guardiola managing 3 superclubs, Wenger Arsenal–if anyone wants to chime in with how it was in his Monaco days feel free :wink: ) Wenger probably varies his tactical approach a lot more than Guardiola, I don’t really think a lack of pragmatism is a fair criticism.

Guardiola’s approach is extremely pragmatic–it’s basically the definition of pragmatism, juego de posición, which is as pragmatic as it gets, and the underlying theory of controlling the tempo and the ball, which is also, in a couple words, pragmatic as fuck–and I certainly wouldn’t say that going out to play the game that has had you playing as well as basically any team in the Premier League ever against a premier league team in Europe in the first leg is a bad idea. If he’d have changed it and it had gone badly people would just be saying the opposite-- “How could Guardiola go away from what worked so well, overreacting to one bad performance against Liverpool in the league!!!”

I think, unfortunately, there’s a lot of truth in the tweet @Phoebica posted – the Liverpool tie proved basically that there’s no tactical defense for defenders making bad isolated errors. I don’t remember too well the details of the Monaco tie but I seem to remember it was similar, and that Guardiola’s approach was a good one insofar as he did what Wenger didn’t, wrongly, against CSKA, which is come out in the away second leg tie having conceded in the first looking to get an away goal or two. (Who could expect you’d then concede, what was it, 4 or 5? Again, it takes some rather shit defending for that to happen…)

With Bayern, remember, the team was decimated with injury when they played Barça in the semifinal, against Madrid Pep openly states that he got his tactics wrong and it’s one of his great regrets of his career, and the Atlético semifinal, well, it’s stretching my memory, but Atlético certainly got the better of a couple Barça and Madrid teams too, so although I think there’s maybe something slightly fishy about him not having got through that tie, I think it’s also important to remember what a force Simeone’s Atléti was in the Champions for a number of years consecutive.

I wouldn’t be so bold as to say that CL is the “true” or only barometer for his success at City, such domination in the league really should not be discounted so flippantly…this isn’t Barça jammy Messi-dependent domination where the xG show that Madrid actually could be ahead, this is utter, deserved domination of a league that no longer has poor competition at the top (Klopp’s Liverpool, Poch’s Tottenham, Conte’s Chelsea though not so much this year). That said, let’s say he stays another 3 years at City, continuing in this vein, but not getting to a CL final–we’d have to see how it happens exactly, but I think there would probably be something kinda fishy in that.

Finally, before I finish my thesis :joy: , let’s remember that while he’s spent a good amount of money at City, he inherited a team from Pellegrini with massive holes in it. Aging and shite in defence and GK (as such, he’s had to buy a whole defence, basically, while still finding his internal solutions with players that looked like bad buys, such as Otamendi and Delph at LB), extremely poor in central midfield (let’s remember that under Pellegrini no one rated Fernandinho, everyone had swung to the other end of the pendulum thinking he was crap)–for that he’s relied on internal solutions, basically, the aforementioned Fernandinho, having him playing like one of the best 6s in Europe, moving De Bruyne to CM), and nothing special (for a top club’s standards) in terms of wide forwards. It’s not like he’s been buying Bale and Neymar, or even Alexis or Martial or Lukaku to solve these problems–he bought Sané for a very reasonable fee, same with Silva, same with Gündogan, same with Jesus (which was a massive coup convincing him ahead of interest from Barça and Madrid), and he’s helped turn Sterling into a good solution when he wasn’t looking like one.

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Look I hate Mourinho as much as anyone, but if you’re going to talk about Pep no longer having poor competition at the top then it’s a bit rich to not mention the team in second place but go as far as fifth in the table (yes I did notice the caveat) for evidence of your point.

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There are some very good points in here but what I was arguing is that he doesn’t change his system / style of play (in your first point you talk about tactical preparation which I didn’t bring up or dispute).

What I meant by pragmatic is having a plan B i.e. another methodology / tactical approach to try and win a game. Guardiola’s system may be fluid / flexible and be able to adapt to most teams, but against the very best sides in the final stages of the Champions League where they will be facing teams that are set up specifically to diminish the effectiveness of his system (e.g. against a magnificently drilled / disciplined team such as Simeone’s Atleti, Mourinho’s Inter, or a Liverpool side that has an extremely efficient pressing system), he does not have any other way of playing. That was where the comparison to Wenger came in. It may be a vastly superior and more intricate / advanced system than anything Wenger has ever deployed, but the point remains imo.

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United hasn’t really advanced at all from van Gaal. They’ve got a decent pts haul but every single analytic suggests that it’s hugely misleading of their actual performance levels. Thusly I would consider the other two clubs mentioned and Vhelsea based mostly on last season to be considered more serious competition. Anyways haven’t had a look at the table in a while but pretty sure Liverpool and Tottenham are a pretty marginal distance off utd no?

This argument is such bollocks (@Sol). Not sure why you’re repeating it all the time.

Think the reason is pretty obvious. He’s Trion.

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