I think you are slightly overstating this point. Two things: if you want to say taking a smaller team and achieving great things with them is the single best thing you can achieve, and that winning more things with a bigger team is an inferior achievement, he is still not alone. The one that springs to mind is Clough. But there have been others too. (Unless you mean alone up there in terms of managers in the game now. In which case, maybe by this very narrow criteria you use you are right, although it is more that I have a limited knowledge of the goings on outside the PL, so I cant think of any other examples.)
No, I do rate Clough's achievement as exceptional, not sure to which extend exactly because I lack knowledge of the football in his day and age. But I think it's fair to say that he didn't take a bunch of kids and bargains and went out to be the best team in Europe for two years, showing everybody the football of the future.
But I think the other thing is that your criteria is too narrow to be accepted generally. It is fine for you to think this way, it is a fairly easy opinion to defend. But others have just as much reason to say winning a treble with Barca or United is greater, especially when you set it in context. This is all highly subjective, there is no way to say one achievement is worth more than another. Yes Ajax had limited resources financially but it had unbelievable resources in terms of a generation of players that then went on to populate the best clubs in Europe over the next decade. It isnt like he used his philosophy to achieve that CL win (and another near miss) with a bunch of very limited players. The fact he didnt have to buy them at the market rate is hardly relevant to the achievement, in some ways.
He had to buy his left winger, his right winger, his No. 10, his left back, his right back (who he turned form failed midfielder to good right back) and his captain was not about to become an international superstar either. There happened to be 2 great talents coming throught from the youth academy at that time, Kluivert and Seedor, and one was a bit older and started to blossom (Davids) but don't forget they were 18, 17 and 21. It's not like he could relie on their experience, he had to learn them a lot and he had to give them a lot of instruction. He didn't have players that were worth millions, he had players with the potential to become players that are worth millions.
Yeah I agree with this. And I think it will be really interesting to see what Guardiola does next. I was also interested, a few years ago, to see what Mourinho did, for his next "challenge". Years ago I had a theory he would end up at Liverpool. I thought that would be the way to prove all the doubters, that said he only went and managed rich clubs, wrong. If he had revived Liverpool his legacy would have been secured. If Klopp does it, his reputation will be further enhanced. If Guardiola goes to City it will reinforce your point about him. Its hard to say exactly where we - United - are in the spectrum between those two extremes (City as the club with infinite resources, and Liverpool as the terminal fckups) as we are a work in progress. But you are right, Van Gaal took on a much harder job with us than Guardiola took with Bayern. And until he takes on a different kind of challenge to the ones he has taken at Barca and Bayern, there will always be people questioning what he has done.
He can also excell by only taking on the jobs like he's taken so far in his career, but at a real top club the bar for special achievements is also raised.
Although I am a little more optimistic than you are in your last sentence. It is true that Madrid and Barca have an advantage over us but we have been stronger than them periodically over the years and I dont see why we cant be again.
I'm not pessimistic at all, but with the weather and the city, it will be very hard to buy first choice players in their prime from Real, Barca and Bayern. They're happy there, especially the South Europeans and South American players. Stopping the best players in their prime from leaving to Spain should be a more realistic goal. It's possible to be stronger, but not by outbuying the other big clubs. It should come from buying smarter, buying younger, better management and tactics, more stability, the high paced PL and some old fashioned British fighting spirit.
So what LVG did 2 decades ago is your answer to whether he is a better manager than Pep?
It was about achievements in the past, wasn't it? Pep's last CL final is also half a decade ago. It wouldn't count for much if LvG was a dinosaur with outdated ideas about football, but more recent achievements prove the contrary.
You throw the money factor in it, how much did Pep spend on building that side? Most of the players were La Masia graduates.
Het got very lucky with Messi, and players like Iniesta and Xavi were already in their prime. The difference between a rich club like that and LvG's Ajax is that Ajax can't afford talented players when they get into their prime. Van Gaal just had to let Bergkamp and Jonk go, his most important players, so everybody said the time of succes was already over because of that. But it just begun.
How about Pep taking a Barca side which finished woefully and completely in disarray and making them the most dominant club which football has seen? How about him bringing in youngsters and letting go of the likes of Deco by promoting Xavi and Iniesta? How about him bringing back the style which has become a template for many teams to follow?
He certainly did make some important and right decisions. But he just had to finetune a playing style the whole club and all the players from La Masia were already very familiar with. He didn't have to start from scratch.
About the dominance and the template I have my doubts. I don't think they were that dominant, they got very lucky in some crucial matches. The style of play can be very impressive, and it's impressive manager's work anyway, because it takes a lot from a manager to have a team play this organized. But I don't think it's that effective. It proved to be quite effective with the best players in the world, but it also proved to be quite vulnerable to teams with less or almost equal player quality. At one time he had 3 of the 4 best players in the world in his squad, is it really that special for a manager to win the CL twice with players like that?
Jose Mourinho won the title with Porto. Do you consider that a great achievement to make him better than Pep? Di Matteo won the CL with Chelsea. Do you consider him a very good manager?
I think Mourinho's win with Porto was very impressive, a bigger achievement than winning the CL with Messi and Iniesta.
Again, winning a CL with a minnow is big thing but he lucked out with some brilliant players in that side. You don't win the title or the CL without having the players for it.
"You don't win the CL with kids"? I agree it has never happened since. Porto shouldn't have won the CL either, the Dutch national team should have gone out in the first round of the WC. But sometimes brilliant managers do achieve things with a group of players that shouldn't be good enough.
If he was that brilliant a coach/manager, why did he not achieve the same with Barca twice and with Bayern? They had the same resources even then. He had a lot of the same players which Pep has but he could not get the best out of them. Why is that? You conveniently forget all those points while bigging up a couple of his achievements.
He didn't have a lot of the same players, there's this whole generation of Ronaldinho and Deco in between. But that he's brilliant doesn't mean he's without shortcomings. He tried to make Barca into Ajax 2.0, and made a mess of the politics required at Barcelona, there's been some good football played at the Nou Camp back then, but generally it wasn't wat it should have been. At Bayern he showed his brilliance in his first year, implemented a very new style, got some very young players in and made them play like experienced players, and got great results.
Bigging up achievements? If Pep is such a great manager, why is it he didn't yet match LvG's first year at Bayern? His starting point was much better. Why did his Bayern get trashed by Real, did he miss Messi and Iniesta? Why did Luis Henrique win the CL with Barca also in his first attempt, trashing Pep's Bayern to?
