Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Is Guardiola an overrated manager?

Is Pep Guardiola really that good? Has he been a good investment so far for Bayern? His career as a manager has been successful, but will he be ever able to repeat what he has done at Barcelona?

First of all, let's put it this way. According to Forbes, the Catalan manager earns £14.8m a year at Bayern. His side are currently sitting 1st in Bundesliga and very likely to win the title.

Mauricio Pochettino earns £2m at Tottenham. The North London team are showing the best football since years and the Argentinian is considered the best Premier League manager by the likes of Alex Ferguson.

Maurizio Sarri, Napoli's coach, earns €0.8m. His side are currently 2nd and they have good chances of winning a title that supporters have been waiting for 26 years.

Comparing them just from the economic point of view, does Guardiola really worth seven times Pochettino and twenty times Sarri as a manager?

To be honest, it is unfair to think that managing Bayern or Spurs is the same job. For the Bavarian a season without successes is a failure, for Tottenham winning a domestic cup would be a great success. The pressure is different.

The salary, though, is too different. And, if we consider certain tactical choices made by Guardiola at Bayern, we could think he is not the best manager in the world at all.

The idea of making Bayern play like Barcelona has always been a feature of Guardiola's German spell. But Bayern have different players, nobody can replace Messi, for instance.

The Manchester City's manager-to-be has tried to find a player who could do what Busquets does at Barcelona. During the last season he played Lahm in that position. The result was something that made Massimo Marianella, an Italian journalist for Sky, say: "Bayern are still among the best in Europe despite Guardiola."

During this season he surprised again, for instance when Bernat, a left-back, played incredibly close to the strikers during the Champions League game against Juventus.

Guardiola seems too confident in his managerial abilities and perhaps he thinks he can develop his football philosophy without any limits, after his great achievements at Barcelona. Sometimes, though, his tactical choices seem to be less effective than the Catalan might think.

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