Chelsea: Comparisons to Pep Guardiola do not flatter Maurizio Sarri

Maurizio Sarri styles himself a tactical aesthete in the mould of Pep Guardiola, an image Sarri’s sycophants and a bemused Guardiola do their part to promote. Few of the comparisons survive scrutiny, and Chelsea fans should be wary about using them as praise.

One of the most vacuous statements made in support of Maurizio Sarri is how Chelsea would be doing better if only Sarri had better players. This is axiomatic. Every manager would be more successful with better players. Sam Allardyce, Neil Warnock, Alan Pardew and David Wagner would all be employed and thriving if they had had better players at their previous (or, in Warnock’s case, current) clubs.

Much of Pep Guardiola’s success in three leagues stems from him always having better players than anyone else, often the best players in the world. This is the fragile underbelly of the Guardiola mystique. While having the best players in the league is not a sufficient condition for winning the title, for Guardiola, it is uniquely necessary.

Guardiola’s philosophy – and it is a philosophy – offers endless avenues for creativity and productive improvisation among players who have the highest levels of tactical intelligence and technical abilities. His teams at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City each showed what is possible when he has those players. Guardiola’s first season at Manchester City showed the necessary learning curve among such players, and also how important it was to have the right players. Guardiola improved that side throughout 2016/17, but needed the right men as well as the right amount of time to produce what we saw in 2017/18.

Chelsea fans and fans of other teams look jealously at Manchester City and excoriate their own clubs for not similarly backing their managers. They should stop and think about what they are praising.

That first season at Manchester City is as instructive as his second. The lesson coming out of the Etihad in 2016/17 was that £300 million was only the first installment of a payment plan. Only upon an additional £200 million outflow would that first tranche reveal its value.

Translate those amounts as a percentage of income or previous years’ expenditure to Chelsea or whatever club you support. Then ask yourself if it is worth hiring a manager – however visionary, celebrated, enigmatic or successful – for whom that is the minimum necessary price for whatever results he promises to bring your club.

Guardiola’s legacy will take at least three hits once the lustre of his teams passes into memory. First is how much the difference in quality between two seasons mirrors the difference in the squads’ financial value. The second is Guardiola’s refusal to acknowledge the usefulness and his own use of traditional, basic, pragmatic elements of the game, such as tactical fouling and Route One long-balls from centre-backs to forwards.

The third is how his philosophy, because it is so rigidly dependent on having exclusively high-talent players, has spawned so many bastardized imitations. Whenever you see a top club like Chelsea fetishizing tippy-tappy keep-ball or a youth coach ordering his players to take only one touch and make a minimum of eight passes before shooting, you are seeing someone locked into the expression of Guardiola’s philosophy without understanding it conceptually. Guardiola is not responsible for what people do with his ideas. But legacies are defined by adoption and impact, and Guardiola’s are limited almost by design.

This is not a flattering interpretation of Pep Guardiola’s success, and yet I write this as a fan of Guardiola. As an incorrigible elitist in all aspects of life, of course I will respect someone who designs something great exclusively for the best to be enjoyed by all. That’s part of why those cheap knock-offs are so frustrating for me.

On the other hand, I put a high premium on resourcefulness. If you can’t make the best with what you have, you don’t deserve to get much more. And that brings us right back to Maurizio Sarri and Chelsea FC.

Before anyone says “but Manchester City” to argue for Chelsea giving Maurizio Sarri more time and money, they should consider two things. First, Sarri has not improved this squad enough nor done enough with Jorginho and Gonzalo Higuain to justify further expense. Guardiola improved his players and his team in his first season, and showed what he could do with a “partial” squad. City had as firm a basis as one could have for spending the next £200 million.

Second, Maurizio Sarri’s fans should be asking themselves if this is really the argument they want to be making. Chelsea fans, more than any other should know that having the best players is not a necessary condition of winning major trophies.

Clubs need to support their managers in the transfer market and with a necessary amount of time to implement their vision, but citing the Manchester City – Pep Guardiola model as the ideal inadvertently construes their manager as being as dependent and brittle as Guardiola.

Sarri’s promoters may take some reflected glory from casting Sarri as their Guardiola, but Sarri is enough of an imitator as it is. Chelsea FC and the fans should not enable him to go further along that path by letting him hide behind Guardiola’s own imperfection.