Pep Guardiola's Arrival Is Good News for the Rest of the Premier League
With Manchester City's confession of football's worst-kept secret, countless snap predictions of the Premier League's future were made.
Pep Guardiola's appointment at the Etihad Stadium is more than just the average managerial hiring, with English football now seemingly his domain before he has even arrived.
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Most new managers have to prove themselves in a new league, but in Guardiola's case, the Premier League must prove itself to the Spaniard.
City's move for the Spaniard was at least four years in the making—as confirmed in the club's statement—and now they are counting on a generation of unadulterated success to follow.
With Guardiola in charge, City are presumed Premier League champions for as long as the Spaniard's contract there runs.
Of course, it's true that, up until this point, Guardiola has been successful at every club he has ever been at. With Barcelona, he scaled the heights of the European game (twice), forging one of the greatest football sides of all time, and at Bayern Munich, he has won back-to-back Bundesliga titles and could still finish his time in Bavaria with another Champions League trophy.
Where Guardiola goes, success follows—and now that he is heading to Manchester City, work might as well start on expanding the Etihad Stadium trophy cabinet.
The Spaniard is Europe's most sought after coach for a reason, and for all his philosophical musings, that reason is rather fundamental—he wins more than anyone else. The rest don't stand a chance.
But Guardiola's appointment at City could be the best thing to ever happen to the rest of the Premier League.
Sure, the Spaniard's arrival might finally establish the Sky Blues as a bona fide member of the European elite, but he could also raise the game of everyone else in the process. Guardiola might pull up the socks of his rivals just as much as his own team.
Such is Guardiola's coaching ideology, his arrival at the Etihad Stadium will spark something of a tactical revolution—forcing the sport in England to place more of a focus on tactical education and strategical enlightenment.
As Barcelona manager, he changed the direction of Spanish football, and now he could have a similar effect on the Premier League.
English football has grossly fallen behind the continent, with the Premier League's performance in the Champions League seemingly worsening season-on-season. Much of that is down to a festering naivety at the very top of the division, as the fast and furious nature of the English top flight takes its toll on its teams. Guardiola could at least help spark a continental resurgence, though.
Look at how his achievements at Barcelona forced Real Madrid to respond, splurging close to £170 million on the signings of Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema and Kaka in the summer that followed the Champions League success of their Catalan rivals.
Winning teams force others to aspire to such a level, too—and therein lies the hope for the Premier League.
So while Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and the rest are somewhat apprehensive about the imminent arrival of Guardiola this summer, it will only force them to recalibrate and raise their own standard. That can only be a good thing for the Premier League, and it might even restore English football as a Champions League superpower.
Guardiola's appointment at City could be the most significant since Arsene Wenger first took charge at Arsenal in the late 1990s.
Upon the Frenchman's arrival in England, he found a sporting culture in need of drastic modernisation, and he brought a degree of continental innovation to an otherwise old-fashioned division. English football needed Wenger, and it now needs Guardiola in much the same way.
He needs English football, too. While revered as the finest football coach of his generation, there are questions held against Guardiola's career.
For one, he could be accused of once again taking the easy option by choosing to manage Manchester City—just as he was at Bayern Munich, a treble-winning force of nature upon his arrival in Bavaria. Critics (of which there are few, admittedly) would point out that success has been a given at each of his previous clubs.
Guardiola was a jockey in a two-horse race in Spain, with the Bundesliga even more of a foregone conclusion.
The Premier League will present the former midfielder with the kind of competitiveness he has yet to sample as a coach. The potential for failure is certainly greater than it was at Barcelona or Bayern Munich—and there has been no shortage of those keen to warn him as much.
"He will enjoy the league because it is a great league and a real competition and he is a real competitor," Liverpool manager—and former Borussia Dortmund boss—Jurgen Klopp said of Guardiola, per ESPN FC.
"That is what he wants. I don't think that it will be the same situation as he had in Spain, with Barcelona on the top level, or in Germany with Bayern on the top level, but City have good possibilities."
Should Guardiola fail to win the Champions League with Bayern Munich this season, he will have taken the Bavarian outfit backwards in his three years in charge. His reputation, for perhaps the first time, would be under scrutiny and in need of bolstering at Manchester City. The Spaniard might actually need City more than they need him.
But not as much as the English game needs him. With Sir Alex Ferguson long since retired and Jose Mourinho no longer a part of the picture following his sacking earlier this season, the Premier League has suffered something of a coaching talent drain of late.
Guardiola might not just make City better—he may raise the level of everyone around him, too.
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