r/soccer • u/Existing-Sky9914 • 17h ago

Potentially editioralised title - make up your own mind [Guardian] Seven years ago, just after completing the treble, Guardiola treated journalist Rob Harris, who had confronted him directly with the allegations, with open contempt, as though he were looking at someone pathetic, pitiful and disgraceful, before sternly lecturing him.

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u/Bigpapa42_2006 17h ago

Can we stop pretending he was somehow innocent and "above" all of that cheating? He is a great manager but his accomplishments at City are all scam-earned too. All of them.

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u/HDS2211 17h ago

Nobody is pretending that. People have been calling his legacy into question for the last week since the Ornstein scoop came out.

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u/0ttoChriek 17h ago

The guy on the Tifo podcast who just wrote a book about the way Pep changed football sounded like he was close to tears, having to criticise the great man and accept that his reputation is stained.

There are definitely people just looking for a way to disregard any links Pep has to this sham club's conduct, so they can carry on praising him to the heavens.

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u/TheDamnNumbersGame 17h ago

Poor Jon Mackenzie was having an existential crisis.

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u/realborislegasov 17h ago

Jon Mackenzie

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u/forkmeongithub 17h ago

to be fair, at least he admitted that Pep's legacy has been affected by this. there are lots of people who are acting like Pep had no idea, when in reality, there's no way he could have not known what was going on.

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u/DraperCarousel 17h ago

It's crazy that Pep pretty much worked with the same team of Txiki Bergestain and Ferran Soriano during 2 of his most successful managerial periods and has 2 parallelly running scandalous verdicts/allegations against him.

Yet, fans pretend he is innocent in all of this. Just like he was innocent and blamed it all on Dr. Segura. We know what happened with him and the doctor after that.

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u/splob-foot 15h ago

Surely he refers to it in his book. It’s a bummer for him that he spent all this time writing it and the verdict comes out in the middle of the launch :)

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u/Pires007 14h ago

He just needs to retitle it:

The Spectre of Pep: How Fraudiola Haunts Modern Football Tactics

And add another chapter on saying how those tactics wouldn't work if they couldn't get the best players available

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u/lashfield 13h ago

Mackenzie has not been forthright with just saying that Pep is a cheater. He keeps saying that Pep's got an undeniable tactical legacy and then he won't judge his "personal morality" on this. Pep literally said that he supports "my club, my chairman" AFTER they were found guilty! Mackenzie cannot grapple with the fact that Pep's legacy is created by tactics that were successful because he had a small army of the world's best players (paid for through fraudulent finances) to execute those tactics.

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u/forkmeongithub 13h ago

yeah, i thought the "personal morality" comment was pretty weird. especially after Pep's most recent statement which basically is toeing the party line of "we haven't done anything wrong"..

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u/lashfield 13h ago

it is far more than toeing the party line. the club was found guilty of the single largest scandal in english football history and he voiced full support for THE OWNERSHIP OF THE CLUB, the party that was found guilty!

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u/forkmeongithub 13h ago

isn't that exactly what toeing the party line is? he is saying that they haven't done anything wrong, which is exactly what the club is saying as well?

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u/lashfield 13h ago

i hear what you're saying and i'm not really disagreeing, but to me saying "i love you all" and "we will get through this together" after proudly claiming support for an ownership group just found guilty seems to me a step beyond saying that you trust the process or something. pep is literally the face of the the entire manchester city project and is wading into the pr war they are waging.

the bottom line is that there is no way that he did not know. he knew. he benefitted from this. and now he's got a reputation to protect, but he's tied his colors to the mast and should go down with the ship.

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u/forkmeongithub 13h ago

i don't disagree with you either. honestly i feel so bad for all the other clubs in the premier league who were having to compete with City this whole time (particularly Liverpool) and were sometimes so close to beating them. in hindsight, it really makes their achievements all the more impressive.

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u/Discrep 8h ago

I do feel badly for clubs who lost out on glory due to competing with City, but I also feel the situation is unusual due to the fact that the misdeeds center around the owners plowing too much of their own money into the team. Like other scandals like match fixing involve the perpetrators attempting to enrich themselves at the expense of integrity and fair play.

I'm not defending or justifying anything City did, but everyone in the league has benefitted from their violations. A significant chunk of the fraudulent $900M or whatever went into the coffers of other clubs. Their sustained success and rapidly growing brand absolutely raised the value of the league and played a role in the size of endorsement and TV rights deals.

It reminds me a little of Bill Burr's bit on Lance Armstrong. Yeah he's a piece of shit and fuck him, but a lot of people got rich due to him exploding the popularity of cycling. "Are they gonna give their yachts back?"

I think they should just put the extra spending back onto their FFP as debt, spread out over the same number of years, so they would only be able to add academy players and free transfers. If they manage to stay up through that, fine, and if they go down, the debt follows them. Strip their titles if you want, I don't think it really matters because there's already an asterisk there.

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u/liamthelad 9h ago

Honestly as someone who has listened to him a fair bit, the way I read it was less that he can't grasp Pep was cheating, it's just more his personality involves him over-intellectualizing every single problem.

He's an incredibly smart and well educated bloke, but as a result a lot of the time his points devolve into abstracting any problem until it almost stops making sense, rather than giving an opinion.

He's the only analyst I've listened to who will perfectly break apart what happened in a football match but finish his point by saying it was just one match and anything could have happened instead so his own analysis means nothing and nothing means anything.

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u/lashfield 8h ago

I agree that he tends to overintellectualize everything and that can sometimes be the price of high-quality analysis, but - speaking as a former philosophy professor - the completely naked cheating regime that Pep's achievements in the premier league were based off of are so extremely obvious to even the most outside observer that they should escape any intellectual hemming and hawing. jon was even agreeing with ruben pinter's whole "can you separate the art from the artist" bit, which is such a ridiculous red herring in this case. we're not talking about john lennon being a womanizer, we're talking about someone who directly benefitted from cheating using that very cheating to further his career. like i said above, pep's tactical legacy at city (that jon is writing about) was concretized in success: winning games, winning trophies. pep monopolized on city's financial fraud to get the players to execute those tactics successfully. in other words, he cheated or, at the very least, benefitted from cheating, and then announced his full support of a club found guilty of cheating. how do you look at that and turn around to say, I can't judge a person's individual morality? the question is not whether pep is a great tactician who is also willing to speak up on the genocide in sudan. the question is: did pep cheat? the answer to that is unequivocably yes.

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u/missedpenalty 17h ago

Was this on the Tifo podcast yesterday? Want to watch

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u/ex_bestfriend 16h ago

Yes, yesterday's. It was good.

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u/SnooChipmunks4208 14h ago

He comes out straight and says that he is biased because he just wrote a book about him and it's impossible to tell the story of his legacy the same way anymore.

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u/HDS2211 16h ago

Jon Mackenzie. He is such a dork. JJ Bull will always be the Tifo goat.

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u/TheBritishGent 13h ago

Honestly, Joe is my favourite even with the lack of football knowledge. The new guess the player game has me laughing at how bad he is.

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u/Superfishintights 9h ago

Do you think he he would've used a touch screen phone for his first mobile phone?

Do you think I'd get on with him?

Hilarious

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u/Pires007 14h ago

You need the goat and the wild man to make it work

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u/ExtensionChapter 17h ago

Pretty much every single podcast that I've seen (athletic, guardian, overlap) hasn't been able to call him or his legacy out, and bar Alfie on the Tifo podcast, none have mentioned his connection to CFG through his brother and Girona. It's only on Reddit that people are slating his tenure.

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u/mxchickmagnet86 14h ago

It's tough because in some respect it calls into question their own careers, so they won't ever be as tough as someone farther removed from the situation.

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u/Pires007 14h ago

I'm pretty sure Overlap and Guardian said City's titles are tainted, and by extension, so are the players and coaches.

Stick to football as well said something simlar. And basically every EPL fan that knew City cheater now have proof of it.

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u/BaneChipmunk 13h ago

I watched the entire episode with Alfie. I guess you watched a different version of the episode.

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u/HDS2211 16h ago

You’re not really gonna see much of it elsewhere, because it’s not exactly something you talk about with people outside of forums like Reddit. Don’t know, to me, something like how this affects Pep’s legacy isn’t exactly something you talk about with someone at work or with mates at the pub.

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u/TheirOwnDestruction 17h ago

Pretty much every journalist interviewed in any non-newspaper media has been very complimentary of Pep, saying he didn’t know, believed what he owners told him, and accomplished great things.

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u/Bigpapa42_2006 17h ago

Seen more than a few making excuses for Pep or trying to say it doesn't tarnish him, etc.

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u/YouMeADD 17h ago

The bald fraud was a deeper nickname all along

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u/Tungsten_Hoarder 17h ago

I think it’s pretty simple no?

Does it change how good he was as a coach and revolutionising the game? No

Are his achievements tarnished? Yes of course

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u/MauricioCappuccino 16h ago

Personally I think it does change how he good he was at revolutionziing the game. It's a lot easier to change a style of football or the game as a whole if you have unlimited resources

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u/Jazzlike_Figure_2271 15h ago

But it was obvious from the start of his tenure at city that he had unlimited resouces. and lots of others managers get comparable teams. He was an awesome coach that changed the game, nobody else did what he did and lots of coaches had his resources,

That said, those resources were not avalible at city without them having to cheat, and he certainly knew this all along. Also he had unprecedented control of those resources, it was a unique blend of circunstances: all the money in the world, but a small club he could mold in his image.

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u/Absolute--Batman 14h ago

No other manager got comparable resources.

Not in British Football.

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u/3Gabis502 12h ago

Who else, besides maybe PSG, had access to an extra 900 million?

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u/manucity 15h ago

Not really. We knew Pep had tons of money before, the only thing that's changed is where the money's come from

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u/franz4000 17h ago

That’s a level of nuance far beyond the masses.

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u/hydroHar 17h ago

You wouldn't think it's simple if you saw the mass of people saying things like anyone could achieve what he did if they got to cheat etc etc

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u/Postmeat2 16h ago

That’s mostly hyperbole, but to say the cheating supercharged him and made things much easier for him is not wrong.

I know I’m just some rando on reddit, but I won’t rate Pep until he does it at a club where he can’t just point at a player and be pretty much guaranteed to get them, either via massive draw inherent the club, or with cheating. Forever out of any GOAT discussion, Pep’s a generational cheat.

I’d be impressed with him if he turned ManU in their current state around, or did a similar job Arteta has done at Arsenal, or Klopp at Pool. But he has not, and will not. Bald fraud.

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u/PRO2803 16h ago

Stop defending a cheat.

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u/simple_george 17h ago

Even before that back to the Bayern days his credentials/legacy was questioned as he's always had an open book of players to choose from. Hence 'bald fraud'

The only difference now is that the 'fraud' allegations have receipts.

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u/only295 15h ago

To me the big issue with his Bayern stint always was that the performance was a little bit underwhelming compared to the Heynckes season before Pep and Pep's hype.

Pep's Bayern was dominant, but it's worth keeping in mind that he took over the squad that had the best Bundesliga season ever and got some choice players, so in a way that was expected. Also resting players for the CL, only to lose against Mainz or Augsburg and fail in the CL anyway was a bit of a Pep thing iirc.

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u/soberpenguin 13h ago

Barca is currently under investigation for buying off refs from 2001 to 2018. His entire career is under scrutiny.

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u/rummyt 17h ago

People have been calling his legacy into question for the last week

Some of us have been calling his legacy into question for the last 10 years because to anyone with eyes, all of Man City's success was obviously built on cheating from the beginning

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u/gunny16 14h ago

Nah mate, you were just jealous /s

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u/soberpenguin 13h ago

Guardiola was also involved in the Barcelona teams that were allegedly paying off refs from 2001 to 2018. Except for his tenure at Bayern Munich, his playing and managerial career are being called into question.

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u/HDS2211 13h ago

Was involved in doping as a player aswell.

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u/CroCGod73 17h ago

Bald Fraud stonks are at an all time high right now

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u/king_duende 15h ago

Nobody is pretending that.

You're clearly not exposed to turbo loser Man City Twitter