Twenty years, an entire European club football mini-era, and one grand, toxic backstory in the making: this is the one we’ve waited for. When José Mourinho and Pep Guardiola walk out at Old Trafford on Saturday for the first Manchester derby of the season it seems fair to say the surrounding machinery of the Premier League, from clubs and fans to sponsors, broadcasters, hacks and hangers-on, will feel a sense of pieces falling into place, a plot-line resolved.
José versus Pep is a match the Premier League has circled relentlessly, a thrillingly poisonous sibling rivalry entwined for the last eight seasons around Europe’s grandest clubs. And now at last it’s ours. A little past its ripest point, a little out of time as the age of the preening superstar manager begins to fade, but with its key personalities poised at a fascinating point in their own careers.
Never mind that the match itself is likely to be a cautious affair, with any managerial interaction dialled back to suit the occasion. The re-gearing of the Pep-José franchise is a significant step in itself for a footballing culture that prizes above all the operetta of pure personality. Not to mention another staging point in the Premier League’s own aggressive expansionism, a supremacy measured out in advertising eyeballs, social media heft, global TV audiences, Taiwanese rolling news crews, US magazine covers, and the sheer commercial event-glamour of a meeting of the current Big Football A-listers.
At the heart of it all is that two-hander, the itch that refuses to be scratched. The story of Pep-José, with its deeply personal animus, its shades of light and dark, has been told many times. But it remains a deliciously cinematic affair. The essence of any great TV sitcom is that the main characters should appear convincingly stuck together, incapable of leaving one another’s orbit. So it is with the world’s two highest-paid football managers. It has been four years now since Mourinho and Guardiola shared a stretch of touchline. The sense of sibling claustrophobia has never left them.
Even in his most significant moment of recent triumph in May 2015 Mourinho chose not to dwell on Chelsea’s league title or the immediate space around him, talking instead about the state of the Bundesliga. “I could choose another club in another country where to be champion is easier. Maybe I will go to a country where a kitman can be coach and win the title.” Ah yes. Pep The Kitman. You get the feeling José, stung by those Translator jibes, really had thought about this one.
It is a fraternal obsession forged in the extraordinarily fecund Barcelona coaching ranks of the mid-1990s, a footballing camelot from which Mourinho would eventually be exiled, Guardiola enthroned in perpetuity. Mourinho first turned up at Barcelona as Bobby Robson’s bagman in 1996. Guardiola was a senior player, a European champion, a Catalan. Even here it is easy to detect an evolving battle of favourite sons. Robson would later recall his first sight of José with a fond chuckle: “This young good looking ex-schoolteacher who spoke very good English and had a minor Portuguese coaching certificate.” Bobby’s first impressions of Pep, meanwhile, were stingingly chaste and respectful. “I liked Pepe, as we called him. He knew the game and he knew how to conduct himself. He always had something to say in the dressing room at half time. Pepe had class. He had bearing.”
Mourinho, a little less taken, preferred the company of Hristo Stoichkov. He stayed long enough to learn at the feet of Louis van Gaal, then built his own coaching legend elsewhere, but Barcelona would still in its own way come to define him. Mourinho had assumed the Barça job was his for the taking in 2008. Guardiola, the insider, was hired instead.
And so an easy dichotomy presents itself. On one hand José the dark angel, the bastard stepson, avenging Edmund to Pep’s entitled Edgar. On the other cosseted Pep, the natural heir with every advantage from his own Catalan nationalism to a supreme playing career given ignition by Johan Cruyff himself, who famously appeared unannounced at a youth game and instructed Carles Rexach to move the skinny right midfielder to the more central, tactically vital pivote role, from where Guardiola has surveyed the world ever since.
The contrasts between the two, personal and tactical, have perhaps been a little overplayed down the years, magnified by the epic tensions of Mourinho’s time at Real Madrid. At times there has been a cartoonishness, a sense of an extreme, exaggerated position being taken. If Barcelona must always seek to mean something, to project a slightly cloying notion of beauty, a love affair with the ball itself, then Mourinho would be the opposite, a manager for whom the only meaning was in winning, the ball a bore.
It is tempting to conclude the most satisfying moment of his career to date, Peak José, is still that brutally pared-back 1-0 defeat with Inter at the Camp Nou in 2010 with 10 men and just 19per cent possession, enough on the night to knock Pep’s Barcelona out of the Champions League. Even in his second spell at Chelsea Mourinho will perhaps be remembered best for the gleefully smothering 2-0 win at Anfield that derailed Liverpool’s title challenge, an act of tactical spite from which Brendan Rodgers never really seemed to recover.
In professional middle age it is instead the similarities between these managerial siblings that become more interesting. Both are above all exhausting, obsessive personalities. For all his beatific visions of fluid and inventive football there is a little darkness in Guardiola too. As early as last summer at least one regular inside the Bayern boardroom was talking about the club’s eagerness to appoint a more easy-going, less draining replacement. This is the nature of relentless high-end football management. The lines of style and tone and texture blur. What remains, above all, is simply a desperation to win.
So too with tactics and ways of playing. Like Guardiola, Mourinho knows the value of possession and “resting on the ball”. In England he was an innovator, the man who finally killed 4-4-2, who won the league title with a high-speed three-man forward line, and whose best teams have been defined by creative, goalscoring midfielders from Deco to Frank Lampard, Wesley Sneijder, Mesut Özil, Eden Hazard and Cesc Fàbregas. Similarly some of Guardiola’s most inventive work has come with his defence, from Carles Puyol and Gerard Piqué to Jérôme Boateng, given licence at times to pump long lofted passes forward from the back, another note of evolution beyond the pure possession fetish of his early years.
There is another note of sympathy. For all the fanfare both men come to Manchester having edged out now beyond the usual 10-year sustained success cycle that has defined so many of the great managers from Shankly to Clough to Sacchi. Both carry with them a pleasantly antsy need to push on and rebuild and maintain.
Guardiola’s Bayern played some sublime football, but the fact remains his last really tangible triumph came five years ago. Mourinho has two league titles in the same period, but in his last year at Chelsea he seemed to be entering his supernova phase, still giving out heat, but oddly toxic and doomed. There is a line of thought he only got the United job because of the Pep-José narrative, the arrival of Guardiola across town forcing United’s hand, compounding Mourinho’s value like the slightly less famous partner in a celebrity marriage of convenience.
Beyond this even the basic idea of the grand, maestro-like uber-manager can look a little overblown, a little pomp-rock. Doing more with less is the thing now: Seville-era Unai Emery or the stripped-down, punkish brilliance of Diego Simeone. Meanwhile the Premier League has just booked Led Zeppelin and the Eagles. The sense of a plateauing out, of an over-ripeness to both men’s legends lurks just beyond all this. Certainly it is hard to envisage a situation where both get to emerge from this victorious.
Not that too much should be read in to Saturday’s game beyond the basic spectacle. These are a pair of brittle, evolving teams. There is a waiting game around City’s midfield, with Ilkay Gündogan only just gaining fitness. How Guardiola deploys his cast of slightly underwhelming full-backs, a key Pep role, will also be fascinating. The most interesting note to date has been his revitalising effect on some of the attackers at his disposal, with the banned Sergio Agüero already in mid-season bloom, and Raheem Sterling showing the benefits of the kind of tight, detailed, no quarter coaching that seems to bring the best out of him.
For Mourinho there are loose joins and new combinations all over the pitch, plus the apparently compulsory question of what exactly to do with Wayne Rooney. Not to mention the key issue of what Mourinho’s own persona will be at United. Perhaps in time he might even be able to claim a slightly absurd kind of underdog status given United’s absence from the Champions League, a position that has always best suited his team-building qualities.
For now, as football’s grandest theatrical duel cranks up its engines once again it is time simply to sit back, enjoy the big fat schmaltzy notes, the fine-point detail, and above all the enduring syzygy of football’s most toxic managerial siblings.
(Guardian service)
