The Spectre of Pep — has football reached peak Guardiolismo?

{"text":[[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":8.45,"text":"A spectre haunted this summer’s football World Cup — the spectre of Pep Guardiola. The Catalan coach, who finished as manager of Manchester City after 10 trophy-laden years shortly before the tournament began, made only a fleeting appearance in America as a spectator. But his influence was discernible everywhere you looked on the pitch. "}],[{"start":28.8,"text":"Even teams from smaller nations, who once could have been relied upon to inject some tactical variation (or at least naivety) into a World Cup, instructed their centre backs to “split” at goal kicks. Their full-backs would occasionally “invert” to create numerical superiority in midfield. And generally they would try to progress the ball towards their opponent’s goal by playing out from the back. In doing so, they were obeying the dictates of Guardiolismo, a vision of the game that, for better and for worse, had become hegemonic over the previous decade."}],[{"start":61.3,"text":"Jon Mackenzie, a journalist at The Athletic, has written an intelligent and provocative book about one of the most fascinating and confounding figures in all of sport. The Spectre of Pep offers both a highly detailed explanation of Guardiola’s sustained success and a persuasive account of how footballing philosophies change over time as one layer of shifting tactical “sediment” bleeds into another."}],[{"start":86.15,"text":"Mackenzie places considerable emphasis not only on the way that Guardiola stood on the shoulders of giants in order to become the coach he is today — most notably Johan Cruyff, the great Dutchman who coached him when he was a player at Barcelona in the early 1990s, and Cruyff’s own mentor, Rinus Michels — but also his insatiable hunger for new ideas. "}],[{"start":106.95,"text":"“I’m an ideas thief,” Mackenzie quotes Guardiola as saying. “Ideas belong to everyone and I steal as many as I can.” And it’s not just the ideas of other coaches he pilfers either. He has taken concepts from other sports and also from classical music and chess. Guardiola once said admiringly of the grandmaster Magnus Carlsen that “it doesn’t matter if he has to make some sacrifices at the start of the game because he knows he is strongest in the latter stages.”"}],[{"start":134.65,"text":"Two important things follow from all this. First, by making the story of Guardiola’s growth less linear, more untidy, Mackenzie suggests an alternative to the “great man” theory of the history of football tactics in which “Pepball” is simply the logical conclusion of a process in which Michels “begets” Cruyff, who in turn begets his successor at both Ajax and Barca, Louis van Gaal, and so on down to Guardiola. Second, as Mackenzie puts it, viewed this way, “Guardiola’s evolution appears as a much more exterior process than you might think”. He emerges in this telling as “immersed in the wider world”, not the monkish ideologue he is often portrayed to be. "}],[{"start":176.5,"text":"That image of Guardiola the “philosopher”, as the Swedish striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic called him when he played under him at Barcelona, goes hand in hand with an influential critique of his style of football as overly systematised, robotic and increasingly inhospitable to individual creativity or flair."}],[{"start":195.7,"text":"Although he concedes that Guardiola became more risk-averse in recent years, Mackenzie nonetheless argues that this reading misses the central role played by the idea of “relativity”. In this interpretation, the position of players on the pitch is determined not by their obedience to certain timeless principles, but rather by the position of their teammates on the one hand, and their relation to the opponent on the other. The idea, Guardiola once said, is to “force the opposition’s plans to change via your own actions”."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":229.04999999999998,"text":"But what happens when the opposition, indeed the game at large, figures out your actions and your preferred patterns, and finds a way of playing that neutralises them? That was the question Guardiola was forced to confront during the 2024-25 season in which Manchester City didn’t win a trophy and at one point looked as though they’d fail to qualify for the Champions League. This annus horribilis is the subject of one of the book’s most interesting chapters. Mackenzie explores a changing tactical landscape where Guardiola was no longer “the protagonist of reality” but “just another coach chasing after success in a strange new world”."}],[{"start":265.95,"text":"Does this mean football has put the spectre of Pep behind it? The experience of watching the World Cup suggests not. Mackenzie doesn’t seem to think so either. He quotes something that the French philosopher Jacques Derrida said about the collapse of communism: “A ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come back.”"}],[{"start":285.45,"text":"The Spectre of Pep: How Guardiola Haunts Modern Football Tactics by Jon Mackenzie Seven Dials £25, 416 pages "}],[{"start":296.34999999999997,"text":"Jonathan Derbyshire is the FT’s US opinion editor"}],[{"start":300.54999999999995,"text":"Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":317.15,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1786778388_3667.mp3"}