To be fair, the day one interacts with you for the first time is the day one truly gets the meaning of the word "nonsense". It's like an epiphany. You used the word before but you never knew somebody could stretch the boundaries of it's definition that much. I'm sure you're used to having this effect on people by now
Why are Pep and Klopp so dominant in the EPL?
- Thread starter Physiocrat
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik and Imran hold a long overdue conversation about United's awful league form with 1 win in 7. They discuss a disappointing draw at Bournemouth, a not so disappointing draw against Liverpool and a crushing defeat at Chelsea - Is time nearly over for Erik Ten Hag?
Then in a special second half of the pod, Nik welcomes Natalie ( https://twitter.com/natalie_17) to discuss the fortunes of Manchester United Women as they booked a place in the FA Cup Final after a historic first ever win vs. Chelsea.
BDL having a mare yet again.
Same shit, different day
Klopp dominant? Really? Until now he has been as dominant as Ranieri or Kenny Dalglish.
In my opinion, Wenger has been more dominant than him, winning the league 3 times and battling United in the 90s and early 2000s.
City are a fake plastic club, but they are dominant. Period.
In my opinion, Wenger has been more dominant than him, winning the league 3 times and battling United in the 90s and early 2000s.
City are a fake plastic club, but they are dominant. Period.
Wenger wouldn't have won the league if Klopp or Guardiola had been around back then.
As usual, few watched him in the last few years or his last 10 years and thought Wenger was like that throughout his career
Next you will see "If Pep and Klopp were there, Jose wouldn't have won the league too"
It gets worse with every post they make.As usual, few watched him in the last few years or his last 10 years and thought Wenger was like that throughout his career
Next you will see "If Pep and Klopp were there, Jose wouldn't have won the league too"
SAF saw off Mourinho who was arguably a greater coach than Pep (I'm not even going to cheapen the debate by including a guy who has won one Premiership title in 6 years). He would have lost a couple of titles to Guardiola initially but he would then have adapted and sent him crying to PSG to make use of another Sheikh's chequebook.
Well if you say so. You come across as someone who started watching football only in the last decade and has no idea about what went on before that and how highly previous managers are rated.
Two of the best managers to have ever lived. And pitiful competition. In City's case - also a lot of money
There is no argument for Mourinho being a better coach than Pep. Zero.
They would also love to claim Ancelotti or Zidane wouldn’t have won a CL with Pep and Klopp around but they must be devastated that the reality is different.As usual, few watched him in the last few years or his last 10 years and thought Wenger was like that throughout his career
Next you will see "If Pep and Klopp were there, Jose wouldn't have won the league too"
You can tell from his posts @Zehner is most likely a teenager. So that’d make sense that he’s only been following football last 5-10 years.As usual, few watched him in the last few years or his last 10 years and thought Wenger was like that throughout his career
Next you will see "If Pep and Klopp were there, Jose wouldn't have won the league too"
I mean, only in 20/21 Wenger's record 90 points would have been enough to win the league over Klopp or Guardiola. So his best season in 20+ years would coincidently have to happen in the same year the other two had their worst. And that's not even counting that those two would probably have taken a few points off his record as well.
I know nostalgia is a sweet thing but Klopp and Guardiola are a different breed.
I know nostalgia is a sweet thing but Klopp and Guardiola are a different breed.
Do you think Pep could win a CL with a Portuguese side with a negligible net spend?
I highly doubt he could. If the linesman hadn’t been blind Jose’s Porto would have gone out to us by the way but I digress. I’ll try to sum it all up in one post because it’s my last post in the mains today.
Footballers have peaks and they decline. They decline physically, they lose a yard of pace, a bit of sharpness in the box etc. This is common knowledge. Managers however cannot simply decline. Mourinho is still the same manager he’s always been. He still has the same tactical ideas he’s always had. Managers don’t suddenly become stupider, they’re simply left behind by the latest tactical trends. That’s one of the things that made Fergie so good.
It’s very clear there was a tactical revolution in football in the last decade. It’s clear it was spearheaded by Pep. Teams are fitter, with more running power, they press high, they play out from the back, they’re compact as hell. Mourinho’s teams are not good at any of this as we’ve seen first hand. Teams today also choreograph their attacks a lot more, again spearheaded by Pep, again something Mourinho teams are terrible at. Mourinho cannot be a better coach than Pep because Pep’s ideas themselves that have revolutionised football are the cause of Mourinho no longer being a successful manager.
He couldn't even win it when he had one of the best Bayern teams.
Pep is not a manager you hire to overachieve, he is one you hire when you have alot of money and are the best team in the league.
Klop - because of the morons running Barca at the time spanking 120 million on coutinho
Pep - financial doping
Pep - financial doping
Managers can and do decline. There was an article posted not long ago which highlighted the shelf life of the average manager (where 10-15 years is their peak with a relatively sharp decline after that).
A lot of managing isn’t just what’s done on the training pitch or tactics. It’s down to man management, motivation, scouting, psychology and other more qualitative aspects.
I've got to agree here. It's also why imo Pep and Klopp wouldn't stand a chance against league giants like Brendan Rodgers(106 points with Celtic)and Gary Barnett(105 points with Barry Town). And that's not even counting that those two would probably have taken a few points off Pep/Klopp records as well.
I know nostalgia is a sweet thing but Rodgers and Barnett are a different breed.
If we are to compare two managers? How do we do it? What makes one better than the other? Let's take three std. measures.
Point System: Shows only their ability to break down smaller teams rather than how they are against each other or against top managers across other leagues(CL) or across different eras.
Head-head count: Head to head favors certain styles that counter against certain others (like Conte's low block counter attack working well vs KLOPP and Pep but failing against low bock Burnley) or just get lucky in a game or two. Surely Ole must be better than Pep if we go h2h. Even Sam Allardyce and Alan Pardew will make the list against better managers.
No of titles: Meeting the objectives. Problem then is if the conditions are fair? Who has the better starting point (most resources, quality of team, budget etc.,) and what non-football advantages they are given. Or sometimes lucky in cup competitions (Arteta winning the FA Cup or Di Matteo the UCL with Chelsea both are not better than Ole in my opinion)
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Of the three "No of titles" is the best measure (not perfect) because it allows the manager to do just what's needed. Discounting the lucky cup wins (which is not the average), The titles are what the managers are truly set out to do, rest of it (H2H and Point system etc., are just decorative crap). If we go purely by titles Pep will win the argument, but the argument against him is the starting point. Its like winning a running race by starting ahead of other runners. In that aspect, Klopp has done tremendously well (despite people putting him down with number of titles). He has dragged your average FAT AUNTY (Liverpool) to a 2nd place against USAIN BOLT (Sheikh City) beating them once and running them close many times, surely its commendable.
Now combine both Pep and Klopp - Pep with all his titles and dominance in the league and Klopp with his ability to drag sub par teams to greatness despite starting from behind in the race: Ladies and gentlemen, I present you - Sir Alex Ferguson = Klopp + Pep, (not perfect, but better than the two).
Point System: Shows only their ability to break down smaller teams rather than how they are against each other or against top managers across other leagues(CL) or across different eras.
Head-head count: Head to head favors certain styles that counter against certain others (like Conte's low block counter attack working well vs KLOPP and Pep but failing against low bock Burnley) or just get lucky in a game or two. Surely Ole must be better than Pep if we go h2h. Even Sam Allardyce and Alan Pardew will make the list against better managers.
No of titles: Meeting the objectives. Problem then is if the conditions are fair? Who has the better starting point (most resources, quality of team, budget etc.,) and what non-football advantages they are given. Or sometimes lucky in cup competitions (Arteta winning the FA Cup or Di Matteo the UCL with Chelsea both are not better than Ole in my opinion)
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Of the three "No of titles" is the best measure (not perfect) because it allows the manager to do just what's needed. Discounting the lucky cup wins (which is not the average), The titles are what the managers are truly set out to do, rest of it (H2H and Point system etc., are just decorative crap). If we go purely by titles Pep will win the argument, but the argument against him is the starting point. Its like winning a running race by starting ahead of other runners. In that aspect, Klopp has done tremendously well (despite people putting him down with number of titles). He has dragged your average FAT AUNTY (Liverpool) to a 2nd place against USAIN BOLT (Sheikh City) beating them once and running them close many times, surely its commendable.
Now combine both Pep and Klopp - Pep with all his titles and dominance in the league and Klopp with his ability to drag sub par teams to greatness despite starting from behind in the race: Ladies and gentlemen, I present you - Sir Alex Ferguson = Klopp + Pep, (not perfect, but better than the two).
Firstly it's a shame that you can't post more in the mains. You're clearly a good poster and although I don't agree with you you've made good points- I'd like your post if I could.
What I will say is that my response was more a devils advocate one in relation to there being "no argument" for Mourinho being a better manager. There are very good arguments either way. Unless Pep actually takes on a challenge successfully (eg. wins the title with Spurs or something) there will always be an argument for Mourinho being greater.
You can’t compare different seasons, especially not seasons nowadays (when top clubs have huge quality squads and can easily rotate without too much drop in quality) to seasons 1 or 2 decades ago.
Jose won the league with 95 points in 2005. Two seasons later he lost the league to United when United gained less than 90 points. Because the league got stronger. From 2007 onwards for a few years England had 3 teams in the CL semi finals.
Or another example: United had to invest much more energy in 99 to win the league only with 79 points on the last day. The league was very competitive with Arsenal finishing only 1 point and Chelsea only 4 points behind us. Even the three relegated teams gained 30, 35 and 36 points, much higher than the relegation teams nowadays.
The following season United won the league with 91 points in more or less second gear and 18 points ahead of second place. But United were not better than in the previous season and no way was the league more competitive than in the previous season.
His biggest quality was his ability to constantly adapt - longevity, it may be called, but eclectic is the better definition because it didn't matter what he was up against, he adapted and assimilated, and we have proof of that. Repeatedly.
I don't think you're making sense with the CL barb when Pep has absolutely tanked in the competition outside of the god team he had at Barcelona. In fact, the caveat here is Pep's riches are infinite; every season he reloads with preposterous acquisition, and fails again. The patterns are formulaic by now - Ferguson was actually at his apex when age caught up to him as well as financial constraints, and poof... our world-class team was decimated and dross replaced it.
Klopp is having a golden period, and yet he hasn't much to show for it in a weak league and it remains to be seen what his net gains are come the end of this run. Ferguson's golden period(s) concluded with more trophies and accolades against superior opposition.
This rebuttal doesn't make any sense. So what if his role doesn't exist anymore? If he was around, it would. You cannot use anachronism to state your point - you take Guardiola back in time and he doesn't have state oil backing him and can't just wash his mistakes down the toilet and get a new one to play with; there is also zero evidence of what happens to him when he has constraints that everybody else has had to contend with. Klopp's football would need to be severely modified if going back in time, so anachronism serves no purpose in this discussion, which is the whole point with Ferguson - as an eclectic manager, his football would not be the same in this day and age as was in any iteration you wish to assess/denigrate him by. In terms of rising to, and modifying for a challenge, neither of these coaches have done anything like what Ferguson did. We can say Klopp's flying this season, yet last one, he collapsed under basic adversity, the type Fergie flew through with the most bizarre teamsheets imaginable. Even with haggared squads on their last legs, he was a threat, and when given the money to spend, his only obstacle was a Barcelona team full of all-timers.
If you are going to make an assessment, it should be an objective one; I find you're being petty in this thread when you're capable of more.
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I understand the basic idea that City and Liverpool having more points might mean the league as a whole is weaker. A competitive league would, in theory, see a more equitable share of points. But, in actuality, how could the Premier League have gotten weaker when, outside of the very worst teams, the whole league is more stacked with international players and managers than it ever has been?
Look at the team Leicester can put out to finish midtable: Vardy, Tielemens, Pereira etc. You've got Richarlison, one of Brazil's starting attackers, playing for a relegation battler. You've got a manager like Hassenhuttl, who managed at the top of the Bundesliga, managing a side who barely scrape lower midtable. There's blatantly more talent than ever in the league. Just because United and Arsenal are worse doesn't the mean the league is weaker. It's hard to admit, I know, but maybe City and Liverpool are historically good Premier League teams.
Look at the team Leicester can put out to finish midtable: Vardy, Tielemens, Pereira etc. You've got Richarlison, one of Brazil's starting attackers, playing for a relegation battler. You've got a manager like Hassenhuttl, who managed at the top of the Bundesliga, managing a side who barely scrape lower midtable. There's blatantly more talent than ever in the league. Just because United and Arsenal are worse doesn't the mean the league is weaker. It's hard to admit, I know, but maybe City and Liverpool are historically good Premier League teams.
Did the Bernabeu game break him mentally or something? He seems uncharacteristically bitchy as of late and never takes the bait by the press.
Shiny new toy thing. Newest things are the best. From @Zehner posts you can see that he thinks that football 2 decades ago was shit.As usual, few watched him in the last few years or his last 10 years and thought Wenger was like that throughout his career
Next you will see "If Pep and Klopp were there, Jose wouldn't have won the league too"
Good thing that Pool fans are not on this thread. Van Dijk would be level above Maldini or Rio and Mane would be above Robben.
"Ronaldo? Wait, there is another Ronaldo
?"He is losing it. I just hope he has enough strength to win the league. He can continue with his mental breakdown afterwards.
He is not coping well with the fact that more and more people and media are mocking him about his insane spending. And that is not new. He is nervous about it for years now
A weak league? Sorry I'm not sure I heard that properly over what's being said in every other thread on this board.
Pep's CL record is indeed a weakness, but it also says something that three semi finals in a row are considered "absolutely tanked" for him and I think his insane consistency in his league campaigns stand above everyone else.
And I think the fact that Klopp has been keeping up as well as he did also reflects very positively on him.
We finished above Pool last season. And City have a bottomless pit of money.
Hilarious. The guy is cracking up. Just wait until you see the league over the line first before you have a full scale meltdown.
I'm sorry, I didn't intend to be petty. Anyway:
Discussions about Ferguson usually bring up this idea of his adaptability. But I think this is oversimplification. Ferguson may have been very adaptable and reinvented himself multiple times but he never faced anything similar to the rapid systemization of football that happened since ~2008 when Guardiola overtook Barcelona. As you've read, people blame it on ignorance when German fans claim that these two are better coaches than Ferguson but I believe it's rather a question of perspective. Most fans of German clubs witnessed first hand how stream lined, highly organized but individually inferior teams constantly outplayed teams with much more quality - both domestically and on the international stage - simply due to great coaching. So we may be paying more attention to these details than EPL fans - a league that was traditionally very much about individual class and less about cohesive tactical units. At least until Guardiola joined the league.
And that's not just something you can "adapt to". Idealism has got the better of opportunism in football over the last decade or so. And thinking you can just adapt to the new tactical developments comes across ignorant to me as well because in a way it belittles the complexity of the work of somebody like Guardiola or Klopp. So to speak it's the idea that football is "a simple sport" as Solskjaer recently claimed vs the view of somebody like Tuchel who treats it as a science. And this reflects in the organization of a football club - Guardiola for instance is a specialist, Ferguson was a generalist. But in order to achieve the highest level, you need somebody who specializes in coaching. Somebody who's a lunatic, obsessed with details, so much that he hasn't enough time to scout players, negotiate or anything like that.
Some in here said that Ferguson would just have surrounded himself with co-managers who are specialists themselves. That sounds so simple when in reality, those people are incredibly rare. It's basically claiming that he'd just magically make somebody appear who's as good as Klopp or Guardiola but doesn't want any of the lime light.
In the end, the new structure (or more precisely, only in the EPL it is new) of DoF + coach enables more specialization like that. It's a way of setting up your football club that puts the coaching in the center of the organization. It's a question of philosophy. And in a way, United's glorification of Ferguson that we're wtinessing in this thread as well for me is part of the reason why it took you so long to modernize. Ferguson was a great, great manager but he was not a great coach. I'm sure it's been a great time with him but if the club wants to get back to the top where it belongs, it has to move on from that line of thought. It's not "belittling" him or anything, it just means that he can't really be compared to historical coaches like Guardiola, Cruyff, Sacchi etc. because they effectively did a different job than him.
God I miss that man as our manager
Klopp can have all the dominance in the world if this means only 1 league title. Long may it continue.
Now anyone want to know what real dominance is? Being a grand total of 1 point away from winning seven Premier League titles in a row.
Now anyone want to know what real dominance is? Being a grand total of 1 point away from winning seven Premier League titles in a row.
Football has advanced drastically over the last 10-15 years, like it or not. Denying that reflects poorly on you but not on the players you named.Shiny new toy thing. Newest things are the best. From @Zehner posts you can see that he thinks that football 2 decades ago was shit.
Good thing that Pool fans are not on this thread. Van Dijk would be level above Maldini or Rio and Mane would be above Robben.
"Ronaldo? Wait, there is another Ronaldo
By the way, I think that the Brazilian Ronaldo before his knee injury was probably the best player to ever play the game.