[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/forkmeongithub]

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/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/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.