It’s a beautiful day, friends. It really is. Last night Bayern Munich came back from 2-0 down to equalise 2-2 in the dying minutes and spurred on to win 4-2 in extra time. Do you know what would have happened if Juventus had hung on? Do you? We would have been bombarded with ‘Has the Pep Era been a failure?’ articles. Bleurgh.
Football is a game of fine margins. You could be the most dominating team throughout all of a Champions League campaign, only to lose 1-0 in the final. That’s it. It’s done. You can’t go back and change but one ball in the net has decided your whole legacy as a team.
As an Arsenal fan, I am more than accustomed to fine lines. It was May 2014 when Arsenal finally ended their nine year trophy drought. But it wasn’t simple. Hull were 2-0 up within eight minutes and it seemed like it was another case of ‘same old Arsenal’, of course Arsenal did come back and won the game. But what if they didn’t win?
Educated people are well aware that the past nine years had been dedicated to stability and paying off the stadium debt so the club would be better off in the future. Trophies are just a bonus in football. But suddenly winning one game – which they were originally losing – validates their season. It’s weird. Trophies are seen as a sign of linear progress, they validate that you’ve put together a winning team and it’s working. But say you got to three finals and lost them all, does that mean you haven’t put together a superb team? Of course it doesn’t.
Fine lines are mostly linked with trophies and/or winning. But football possesses perhaps the highest number of variables of any modern sport, so why do we measure it by trophies/winning?
This comes full circle to our mate Pep because even though he’s gained worldwide recognition by winning an absurd amount of trophies, his impact goes well beyond that. Pep Confidential by Martí Perarnau dived into this subject:
“They [Bayern] had built their excellence on the virtues that best represent the German character: ednurance, unshakeable belief and an iron will. What they lacked was a playing philosophy. Hoeness and Rummenigge were no longer interested in just winning titles, now they wanted a clear identity, an enduring hallmark which would establish their dominance once and for all.”
(Special thanks to @WarAndSetPiece for the quote)
Bayern Munich currently have 24 Bundesliga titles, the next highest? Borussia Mönchengladbach with five. When it comes down to it, managers at Bayern can only lose the title, they can’t really win it. This is similar to Arsenal and their ‘fourth place trophy’ “If you don’t get fourth place, it’s failure, but if you do get it, it’s expected. You can’t win.”
It’s clear Hoeness and Rummenigge have seen the bigger picture with Pep. Even after the 4-0 against Real Madrid in 2014, even after the tie against Barcelona last year, Bayern management never became disillusioned with Pep’s purpose. His purpose was to install a philosophy and a principle of play that will stick with Bayern until they seek a new identity. For those who claim Pep’s time at Bayern has been a failure are not looking beyond the temporary and illusory gratification of success. We won’t know until maybe ten, twenty years later whether the Pep era has been a success.
Jupp Heynckes’ treble winning team were a fantastic team to watch. Arguably the most devastating counter attacking team of the modern era, but look at this Bayern team now! A few players from that team remain but even those have been reinvented into ball playing players. Manuel Neuer, Jerome Boateng and David Alaba have all evolved into exceptional ball playing footballers. Almost every footballer at Bayern has progressed under Guardiola, aside from Mario Götze.
The squad is arguably better, aesthetically the football is better, player development is unrivalled, a philosophy has been laid out for future managers to abide by. But this is all nulled by the absence of a Champions League trophy? Truly absurd.
Guardiola and Wenger aren’t the only ones who have been lambasted due to the fine lines of football. José Mourinho is a man who has been defined by winning in the last decade, but his time at Real is a grey era for some. Real Madrid since the 1990s has been a club defined by success, their identity has been success. Managers have been chopped and changed when they have ‘failed’, players are kicked out and replaced by shinier toys.
For one season, though, Mourinho ruled Spain. Fresh off their sextuple season, Mourinho won the Spanish league, smashing the record for points amassed by a club. The Portuguese ego-maniac only delivered on title during his three year stint in the Spanish capital but I would argue his influence goes beyond that. Mourinho at least broke the Barcelona dominance, he put Real Madrid on the managerial map again (their three previous managers before him were Bernd Schuster, Juande Ramos and Manuel Pellegrini), he set up Real with an identity and a playing base that Ancelotti capitalised on (and won La Decima). He furthered the careers of multiple Real players and gave new life to a club that had been stumbling it’s way through the 2000’s. Perhaps I’m being super-duper positive here, but it’s not all about trophies.
So here’s to everything in football beyond trophies and fine lines. Because there’s so much more to the game.
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