Manchester City under Pep Guardiola | Pep on City v Liverpool ref: "He likes to be special"

Minimalist

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I'm not aware that the top 6 are cowering against them though? Everyone except Chelsea has had a go at them, and Liverpool and United actually beat them.

Arsenal and Spurs didnt cower, but tried to attack and just got slaughtered. Liverpool and United have had the most success against them which is not a surprise. Both Mourinho and Klopp put emphasis on direct counter attacking which is most effective against his teams.

It can also be said that City just had an off-day against Lyon, just like against Wigan. They lost the ball a lot and were much slower in their build up.
I thought United were too cautious against them at Old Trafford especially early on and the first half at City was dreadful.

I'm not saying it's only option (to attack) but it seems like it's your best option.
 
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I thought United were too cautious against them at Old Trafford especially early on and the first half at City was dreadful.

I'm not saying it's only option (to attack) but it seems like it's your best option.
That game at old trafford was weird, united were shitting but once city score we came out and played. Bar a lukaku horrorshow it should have been a draw

Away last season i don't think there was much we could do to stop them - it was more them being really good that united being bad. They should have been 5 up at half time. Incredible mental strength from our lads to turn that game around, would love to have seen Jose's half time talk.

Sitting back is dangerous against city because they have the players to unpick any defence - get them on the back foot and try to out score them is the only way, sometimes it will work but sometimes it results in a heavy defeat.
 

breakout67

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I thought United were too cautious against them at Old Trafford especially early on and the first half at City was dreadful.

I'm not saying it's only option (to attack) but it seems like it's your best option.
How much of that is down to City being good though? If they keep the ball so well you can't actually get a chance to attack. As soon as City scored we upped the tempo which is a clear indication that the players needed a wake up call to actually implement the tactics.

We've seen it countless times where we complain that we don't play properly until we concede; then Mourinho says in the post match that the players didn't have enough intensity.

Chelsea were the only team that actually decided to not attack at all. They just watched City pass the ball around for most of both games.
 

antihenry

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Putting aside the fact that Duncan is a well-known and the most fervent Mourinho's ass licker, this article has some valid points about how City have become so successful off the pitch.

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/sport...chester-citys-financial-figures-dont-13286271

In many ways Manchester City is the model of a well-managed football club. Across 10 years of ownership Abu Dhabi has deployed extraordinary wealth to recruit the most competent professionals in the game, then entrust that hired expertise to deliver.

Abu Dhabi isn’t particularly passionate about football per se – the titular owner, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has attended just one home game in that decade. The club was acquired to further the public relations and geopolitical ambitions of the Gulf state. Yet the model works precisely because City’s owners only intervene when necessary.

Unlike a Roman Abramovich, Abu Dhabi doesn’t instruct players on tactics or second guess the manager. Unlike a Glazer family, Abu Dhabi is not driven by the pursuit of profit. On the contrary, the oil-rich monarchy has spent 10 years pumping as much money onto City’s balance sheet as UEFA and Premier League rules allow.

That has returned seven major trophies. The 2011 FA Cup, three League Cups, and a trio of Premier League titles. The latest acquired in a landslide of domestic records – including a century of points, most goals, most victories, 18 consecutive league wins, highest goal difference and points margin over second place.

So impressive was their latest season that UK bookmakers’ installed them as favourites to win this season’s Champions League . Even, if as discussed on this week’s Transfer Window, such odds ignored Pep Guardiola recent questionable record in the competition, they stand as testimony to the image Abu Dhabi’s vast and intelligent investments have constructed for the club.

Last week City published an impressively robust annual report. Turnover for the 2017-18 financial year had been pushed just beyond the symbolic half billion pound mark, returning a small profit of £10.4m, while keeping the reported wage bill below £260m despite a plethora of player acquisitions and contract upgrades.

Those revenues have increased almost sixfold since Abu Dhabi’s first year of ownership and place the club fifth in the world, behind the historic behemoths of Manchester United (£581.2m of revenue in 2016-17), Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich. In some ways, City have already surpassed Europe’s grandest clubs.

City Football Group owns chunks of clubs on four continents. Major League Soccer’s New York City, the J.League’s Yokohama F.Marinos, Australia’s Melbourne City, Uruguay’s Club Atletico Torque and Girona, currently sixth in La Liga. It’s a clever structure which has helped City workaround Financial Fair Play, trading players via sister clubs’ books (Daniel Arzani is an example pertinent to Scotland), or charging them for the sale of “intellectual property”.

Abu Dhabi’s spend on player recruitment has gone far beyond anything ever witnessed before. Recent studies by the CIES Football Observatory report that City have committed €1.47billion to transfer fees since 2010, easily outstripping all others, and some €558m more than famously high spending Madrid.

Forget the strategy of “playing catch up” by buying big in the initial years of ownership, City’s spending on players accelerated around Guardiola’s appointment. In the Catalan’s first two years at the club €586m was committed to transfer fees alone.

When CIES examine the transfer-fee cost of clubs’ current squads, City lead the way on €976m, a spend 24 per-cent higher than second-placed Paris Saint-Germain – another state-owned football club that has come into conflict with European football’s governing body. Barcelona and Madrid’s squads combined cost just €162m more than City’s alone.

The club’s annual report mentions “historical evidence of support provided of more than £1.3billion over the last 10 years” from patent company Abu Dhabi United Group. Yet that figure under-represents the flow of cash into City from the gulf state.

How does a club with a relatively small global support, one that was relegated to England’s third tier as recently as 1998, build the fifth-highest turnover in world football so rapidly? Part of the answer lies in commercial revenues.

City reports turnover from “other commercial activities” of £232.3m last year, 46 percent of all revenue. Only five clubs on the planet have ever returned higher numbers – Bayern Munich, Manchester United, Barca, Madrid and PSG.

City’s numbers are almost a £100m higher than Liverpool’s for 2016/17 and easily outstrip Chelsea (£139.8m) and Arsenal’s (£117.3m). How have City got within striking range of United – a club famed for its ability to mine sponsorship opportunities – and trounced clubs with larger followings?

Four of City’s global partners – Etihad Airways, Etisalat, Visit Abu Dhabi and Aabar – are owned or part-owned by the government of Abu Dhabi. As the emirate is a constitutional monarchy, this means that four of City’s main sponsors are owned by the same family that own the football club. In other words, sponsorship is just another way for Abu Dhabi’s royal family to bankroll the club’s pursuit of sporting dominance.

City’s annual report doesn’t break down the percentage of commercial revenue that hails from Abu Dhabi. In Scottish terms that circa £100m premium of commercial revenue on Liverpool is similar to the entire turnover of Celtic. It’s a lot of excess firepower.

And with it the PR and political powerplay that is Abu Dhabi’s ownership rumbles on. Last week, Sheikh Mansour released a letter to “fellow Manchester City fans”, announcing he was “truly honoured to be one of you”. (So honoured he last attended a match at the stadium his country’s airline lends a name to in November 2009.)

The 47-year-old deputy prime-minister of the UAE, born into a family with a reported wealth in excess of $1trillion, also eulogised the power of sport.“I have always said that football has a much bigger role to play than any normal ‘business’,” his letter read. “I believe that through football we can help empower better lives for people. Not many organisations get to do that directly”.

So that immense investment in Manchester City is about empowering people? Some may consider it a surprise that a man so concerned with empowerment prefers the wealth of his nation to be spent on a football club, rather than on allowing that nation’s people democratic control of it. Others, as is this sport’s way, just won’t care.
 

totaalvoetbal

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"He helped me to love this game, to love football, and to love it you have to understand it," Guardiola says of Cruyff, whose famous black boots are the basis of the pair Guardiola wears on the training pitch, adorned with Cruyff's signature and initials in golden stitching.

"He gave us secrets, because they were things nobody else saw. The way he sees football is totally different; he had a lot of power in that way. Obsessive, demanding, stressful. He was like a brutal father. He was so rough - so tough, you cannot imagine.

"Nothing was easy, and there was a time when I could not stay with him anymore, but he was fair.

"I am not such a religious guy - I grew up going to church but I don't believe too much - so I don't talk to him, but I always remember. Maybe I would like to have faith to believe he is there watching us. Sometimes I think maybe it's happened."

Guardiola on Johan Cruyff:
 

BobbyManc

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Cracking up.
Whichever journalist asked that is a dickhead. Literally nothing whatsoever to suggest Pep has received such payments, very tactless to ask him that apropos of nothing after he's just won the FA Cup. Imagine if a journalist randomly asked Fergie after he won one of his titles how much his son had made from United transfer dealings that season when there were allegations around that a while ago. It's a question designed purely to provoke a reaction and create a headline.
 
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Whichever journalist asked that is a dickhead. Literally nothing whatsoever to suggest Pep has received such payments, very tactless to ask him that apropos of nothing after he's just won the FA Cup. Imagine if a journalist randomly asked Fergie after he won one of his titles how much his son had made from United transfer dealings that season when there were allegations around that a while ago. It's a question designed purely to provoke a reaction and create a headline.
Allegedly The Sun.
 

VP89

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A very dick question and a very apt answer. Some of our own posters are weird, unless they are joking with the "cracking up" posts.
 
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It was Rob Harris. His Twitter feed today is hilarious, keeps shoehorning in the fact City are under investigation for breaching FFP into tweets about the cup final.
The replies on that Twitter feed are funny too. People getting so worked up.... pro and anti City.

Imagine Mr Harris is getting banned from the Etihad.
 

C'est Moi Cantona

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Whichever journalist asked that is a dickhead. Literally nothing whatsoever to suggest Pep has received such payments, very tactless to ask him that apropos of nothing after he's just won the FA Cup. Imagine if a journalist randomly asked Fergie after he won one of his titles how much his son had made from United transfer dealings that season when there were allegations around that a while ago. It's a question designed purely to provoke a reaction and create a headline.
It comes with the territory I'm afraid.
 

PepG

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Really fascinating interview with Pep Guardiola about his principles , way of work and the need of adaptation..


Q. The World Cup in Russia showed many physical teams playing in a low block against more technically gifted opponents who circulated the ball expecting the opposition to tire but the teams were so well organised and in good physical condition to survive. This past season in Spain saw winning teams also have a lot less possession. Has there been a change in football or is it just a coincidence?

A. Firstly, it’s extremely difficult to work on a process of attack in the three or four weeks that a national team have at a tournament as that stuff takes a lot of time. It’s far simpler to play in a 4-4-2, defending and counter-attacking as it takes less time to perfect. To play with positional football and attack spall spaces is so complicated; each player has so many individual roles.

Q. But Spain won consecutive trophies playing with the ball and then Germany won in 2014. Then Portugal and France won with a contrasting philosophy. Look at Real Betis last season, they had more possession than anyone else in La Liga but didn’t even qualify for Europe.

A. Yes, but it depends where you have the ball. Are you creating chances? You need to be decisive and ruthless in the final third. At City we had the record for the most passes in the Champions League last season, but 80% of them were between the two centre-backs; these numbers are nothing, they count for nothing, there’s no point in them. This isn’t possession!

If you do nothing with the ball then what’s the point?! Everyone in the world knows when you’re playing with meaning or when you’re just playing because you like having the ball. If your possession doesn’t have motion, it’s like living without a life; it’s more dangerous to play like that. I may as well just sit down with my legs crossed on the bench, waiting for the opposition to counter attack. As both a person and coach I love to have the initiative, that means playing higher up the pitch, in-and-around the final third and creating chances on goal.
https://www.canofootball.com/articl...diola-part-1-enemies-bayern-and-burnley-away/

https://www.canofootball.com/articles/90-minutes-with-pep-guardiola-part-2-philosophy/

https://www.canofootball.com/articl...3-var-brexit-and-champions-league-priorities/