This may be true, but considering he’s only spent really major amounts of money at City, and even then, nothing out of the ordinary for similar clubs of their wealth (Utd for example), I’m not sure how much it really means even if it is true. He’s doing what’s best for the clubs he manages, not the ones he doesn’t, so unless he manages a small club I don’t really see the point of this statement.
I don’t really agree, aside from the fact that comparing Wenger and Guardiola is like comparing night and day, Guardiola does a massive amount of tactical preparation whereas we’re led to believe Wenger is the opposite, and based on the evidence we have (Guardiola managing 3 superclubs, Wenger Arsenal–if anyone wants to chime in with how it was in his Monaco days feel free ) Wenger probably varies his tactical approach a lot more than Guardiola, I don’t really think a lack of pragmatism is a fair criticism.
Guardiola’s approach is extremely pragmatic–it’s basically the definition of pragmatism, juego de posición, which is as pragmatic as it gets, and the underlying theory of controlling the tempo and the ball, which is also, in a couple words, pragmatic as fuck–and I certainly wouldn’t say that going out to play the game that has had you playing as well as basically any team in the Premier League ever against a premier league team in Europe in the first leg is a bad idea. If he’d have changed it and it had gone badly people would just be saying the opposite-- “How could Guardiola go away from what worked so well, overreacting to one bad performance against Liverpool in the league!!!”
I think, unfortunately, there’s a lot of truth in the tweet @Phoebica posted – the Liverpool tie proved basically that there’s no tactical defense for defenders making bad isolated errors. I don’t remember too well the details of the Monaco tie but I seem to remember it was similar, and that Guardiola’s approach was a good one insofar as he did what Wenger didn’t, wrongly, against CSKA, which is come out in the away second leg tie having conceded in the first looking to get an away goal or two. (Who could expect you’d then concede, what was it, 4 or 5? Again, it takes some rather shit defending for that to happen…)
With Bayern, remember, the team was decimated with injury when they played Barça in the semifinal, against Madrid Pep openly states that he got his tactics wrong and it’s one of his great regrets of his career, and the Atlético semifinal, well, it’s stretching my memory, but Atlético certainly got the better of a couple Barça and Madrid teams too, so although I think there’s maybe something slightly fishy about him not having got through that tie, I think it’s also important to remember what a force Simeone’s Atléti was in the Champions for a number of years consecutive.
I wouldn’t be so bold as to say that CL is the “true” or only barometer for his success at City, such domination in the league really should not be discounted so flippantly…this isn’t Barça jammy Messi-dependent domination where the xG show that Madrid actually could be ahead, this is utter, deserved domination of a league that no longer has poor competition at the top (Klopp’s Liverpool, Poch’s Tottenham, Conte’s Chelsea though not so much this year). That said, let’s say he stays another 3 years at City, continuing in this vein, but not getting to a CL final–we’d have to see how it happens exactly, but I think there would probably be something kinda fishy in that.
Finally, before I finish my thesis , let’s remember that while he’s spent a good amount of money at City, he inherited a team from Pellegrini with massive holes in it. Aging and shite in defence and GK (as such, he’s had to buy a whole defence, basically, while still finding his internal solutions with players that looked like bad buys, such as Otamendi and Delph at LB), extremely poor in central midfield (let’s remember that under Pellegrini no one rated Fernandinho, everyone had swung to the other end of the pendulum thinking he was crap)–for that he’s relied on internal solutions, basically, the aforementioned Fernandinho, having him playing like one of the best 6s in Europe, moving De Bruyne to CM), and nothing special (for a top club’s standards) in terms of wide forwards. It’s not like he’s been buying Bale and Neymar, or even Alexis or Martial or Lukaku to solve these problems–he bought Sané for a very reasonable fee, same with Silva, same with Gündogan, same with Jesus (which was a massive coup convincing him ahead of interest from Barça and Madrid), and he’s helped turn Sterling into a good solution when he wasn’t looking like one.