Alex Ferguson

There's this article that said that Alex Ferguson didn't have any former player who became a great manager. And in many ways it's true. Gordon Strachan and Mark Hughes have made a decent fist of their managerial careers. Steve Bruce has had a long but undistinguished career, and a back handed compliment to pay him would be that he's one of the legends of the second tier. Bryan Robson, Paul Ince, Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Dwight Yorke, Jaap Stam have flattered to deceive. Maybe Mike Phelan has found his level at the assistant coach level. As has Steve McLaren. Never cut the dice in his role as a head coach.

The verdict is still out on Wayne Rooney.

Maybe it's the case that what Alex Ferguson did was something that you couldn't teach or pass on to another person: Alex Ferguson was very hardworking, and he was very good at psychology and motivating people. I don't know if he was great at tactics: I suspect that what he did was to delegate this portion to other people.

Rio Ferdinand said it this way: you didn't know how good Alex Ferguson was until he left. Which probably means that there were people who never figured out what was good about him, and therefore they didn't have much to learn from him.

Man United's downfall after Alex Ferguson could have been held up as evidence that he is Man United's greatest manager. For me, one of his greatest triumphs was how he managed to fend off the challenge from Chelsea, and eventually win 5 titles in 7 years between 2006 and 2013. It was a triumph that was all the more pronounced, given that he had to fend off the challenge from a club like Chelsea that was even richer than Man United. But that was a triumph that had quite a few question marks next to it.

First, was he lucky to have Cristiano Ronaldo in his team? One could also argue, then again, that Cristiano Ronaldo was lucky to have Alex Ferguson as a manager.

Second, it was an era that didn't really have a dominant club in England after C Ronaldo left: the champions were Chelsea, Man U, Man City, Man U, Man City, Chelsea, Leicester and then Chelsea. After that, we have the age that we're living in right now: the age of Man City dominating the league.

Third, during the last years, he got his ass kicked by Barcelona and Pep Guardiola twice in the Champions league. During both finals of 2011 and 2013, he was defeated, and it wasn't even close.

In my mind, during those 2 matches, the torch of the greatest manager in the world was passed from Alex Ferguson to Pep Guardiola.

Alex Ferguson's three-peat from 2006 to 2009 included 1 champion's league, and was maybe his last hurrah. And thereafter there would be a wide array of forces against him: 

1. old age hampering his ability to be as effective as once was,
2. the Glazers bilking money out of the club, making it harder to compete against ....
3. not one but two big bankrolled clubs in Chelsea and Man City. 
4. Pep Guardiola leading a revolution in how clubs are managed....
5. Not just on the coaching side, but also how the CEO of the club manages. 

Man United's fortunes have faltered because of these factors, but even if the 2008 version of Alex Ferguson were to carry on managing the club, he would no longer be the greatest manager, because he wouldn't be able to catch up to the revolution of Pep Guardiola and his peers. 

Pep Guardiola and Alex Ferguson have one or two things in common: they are absolutely ruthless at culling from their team players who they don't want, and they also have this great ability to get the best out of their players to fit the system. But from then on, the difference couldn't be greater.

Guardiola's strength is mainly as a tactician / strategist. He doesn't man manage people. He failed to manage big personalities in the past, like Zlatan. Perhaps after that experience, he decided that he had to weed out all the rebellious people. Football has been following a trajectory where it depended less on the individual and more on the system. Especially in Guardiola's teams, it's always been about control. Individual flair and spontaneity just seems to be choked out of the system. Or rather, it has to be constrained to fit within his system.

This being the age of Guardiola, football has become a science rather than an art. It has become about rehearsed sequences rather than allowing improvisation and spontaneity. While Ferguson was one of the most dominant managers within the structure of a club, Guardiola has been about building institutions, where there was a greater leeway for other people to play supporting roles within the club. Somehow, the machinery of the club is such that they'll usually buy the right player, make him fit into the team and get the best out of them.

Sergio Aguero, John Stones, Riyah Mahrez and Jack Grealish did not fit into the team at first, and people wondered whether or not they were flops. But they eventually adapted and flourished.

Jose Mourinho and Alex Ferguson represented a time when the force of personality of the individual players mattered. The force of personality of the manager mattered. They were the great titans of the game. Arsene Wenger was also a great manager, but to be honest, he got knocked off his perch the moment Jose Mourinho stepped in. Arsene Wenger oversaw a revolution in English football, and for those glorious years between 1997 and 2004, he was he vanguard of that revolution. But eventually the rest of the league caught on to what he was doing, and in many ways surpassed him.

Guardiola represented a regime where the players were just cogs in the machine and it was the force of that machine that imposed itself. I don't know that you could really represent what Guardiola did. There were times when what he did was tiki taka, and other times when it was the pressing game. Maybe I'll leave it for others to interpret what he did, but maybe he was like Miles Davis, in that he was so impressively innovative that you couldn't reduce into a few words what it was he did.

Thus the years between 2017 and 2022 were the years when Guardiola and Klopp ruled the premier league. Even more impressively for Guardiola, it seems that he has already produced one protege who has the potential to be a great manager, in Arteta. Quite possibly Tito Villanova could have been a great manager if not for his untimely demise. Vincent Kompany is relatively unproven but he's made a great start to his career. (But then again so did Roy Keane).

One of the hardest things to assess in a footballer is intelligence. It used to be more obvious in the good old days when the main criteria were athleticism and skill. But these days it's more about being able to execute a better strategy and play the right pass. That is harder to assess and see. What makes a high value footballer is less obvious to the untrained eye. I think about how dominant some of Pep Guardiola's teams have been, and I'm reminded of a saying: I don’t know any examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things. Pep Guardiola's teams are dominant because at their best, they are just more intelligent.