I'm perhaps the only one in the world that does not believe Pep is as great as everyone claims him to be. A very good coach with great success at Barcelona, but perhaps it was more of a result of being fortunate to be around exceptional players. One of them being the greatest club footballer, statistically, the game has ever seen.
Part of the reason why Pep has sought out a move to the Premiership is because of the very fact that without true competition, he can never be considered a great manager. In La Liga, his only competitor where Real Madrid that despite all their gazillions, have a clown as their owner who doesn't know how to run a football club. With Bayern, by taking the two best players from their closest rival, he effectively ended any worthwhile resistance.
With the Premiership, things are a little different. Most people who have played on the continent and come to England, have commented on how tough it is. Yaya Toure, briefly under Pep at Barcelona, talked of how much more difficult it was to win the league with City than with Barcelona. There are very few easy games where you are in complete control, and with the passion of speed with which the game is played in the Premiership, it makes the job for the manager all that more difficult.
For the sake of Pep's legacy, he needs a move to the Premiership. It is imperative that he does this. If you would imagine, Pep decided to retire this summer, how would his legacy read? Would he really be regarded as a great manager alonside Mourinho, Ancelotti and Ferguson? Can it be fair to say he achieved greatness when having only coached two of the biggest clubs in the world?
If you look at Mourinho for example, I know people are beating him up for his bad time at Chelsea, leading them down the relegation path. But let's look at the totality of his career. He won the Champions League with FC Porto, a team not part of the European elite fraternity. Then he went to England and gave Chelsea their first ever Premier League title, and he moved onto Inter giving that club their first ever treble and ended with Real Madrid having the record number of points in a La Liga season and the only manager employed under Perez to have won the league.
Those are exceptional achievements and very strong arguments for him to be called a legendary manager. That is what Pep needs. He has to achieve under duress with a degree of difficulty. So if he either takes the City or United job, those are two really good challenges. United presents the problem of taking this once great club back to the top and fixing a lot of problems that Van Gaal has been battling with for the past two years. But the City one is even more interesting. With their failures in the Champions League, to be able get them to a Final or even win it for them and dominate the domestic side in the way Ferguson did, would be an achievement that I'd happily tip my hat off to him for.
Fact of the matter is, these past three years at Bayern have done nothing to prove to me that he's a better manager than the criminally underrated Simeone. He's improved the team in aspects, but he took over one of the most perfectly constructed machines, built with expertise by Heynckes. It's time for him to move to a club that needs help, that needs fixing. City and United both require that...as well as Scunthorpe.
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HH
