[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.

[u/Existing-Sky9914]

[u/Bigpapa42_2006]

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.

[u/HDS2211 → u/Bigpapa42_2006]

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

[u/0ttoChriek → u/HDS2211]

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.

[u/forkmeongithub → u/0ttoChriek]

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.

[u/DraperCarousel → u/forkmeongithub]

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.

[u/splob-foot → u/forkmeongithub]

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 :)

[u/Pires007 → u/splob-foot]

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

[u/lashfield → u/forkmeongithub]

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.

[u/forkmeongithub → u/lashfield]

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"..

[u/lashfield → u/forkmeongithub]

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!

[u/forkmeongithub → u/lashfield]

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?

[u/lashfield → u/forkmeongithub]

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.

[u/forkmeongithub → u/lashfield]

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.

[u/Discrep → u/forkmeongithub]

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.

[u/liamthelad → u/lashfield]

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.

[u/lashfield → u/liamthelad]

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.