Hello and welcome to another edition of Offside.One of the side effects of democracy is that people have too many asinine opinions that they feel the need to air, including questioning gospel truths by wondering if Babar Azam can be compared to Sachin Tendulkar or if Hyderabadi biryani is a better gustatory offering than Kolkata biryani. To quote the Pakistani viral guy: Khuda ka khauf karo. Yet, some even have the temerity to make the blasphemous suggestion that Pep Guardiola is a better manager than Sir Alex Ferguson. They somehow believe that the man who has only managed clubs with transfer budgets that could be the GDP of a nation is comparable with Ferguson’s footballing legacy.Can you imagine Guardiola taking a club like Aberdeen, breaking up the Old Firm hegemony and then going to the Cup Winners’ Cup to beat Real Madrid with a team from Aberdeen? Or taking a relegation-threatened team known more for being a social club than a football club and converting it into perennial winners with a force of personality that held a massive club together despite a huge debt, only for the club to immediately collapse when he left?Now that doesn’t mean Guardiola is a bad football coach. He is a genius who understood the geometry of football better than anyone else, but he did it with clubs like Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City that spent a league’s budget on fullbacks.Perhaps it’s the timing that makes the terms of the debate even more hollow.As Guardiola’s City legacy is thrown under a shadow by the independent commission’s findings, Ferguson’s new book is upon us: Games of My Life.The book is built around 21 matches from a footballing career that spanned 69 years as a player and manager, encompassing more than 2,800 official fixtures, and even then the 1999 Champions League final doesn’t make the cut.As Ferguson put it, in the line that truly explains the difference between a manager and a coach, the games that stayed with him were often about the people rather than the games.It will be a fascinating follow-up to Ferguson’s older books and will perhaps explain how an apprentice toolmaker from Govan, whose certificate listed his skills as “milling, shaping, slotting, turning and all forms of grinding”, managed to use those skills to create dynasty after dynasty of footballing legends.Ferguson’s real genius was never drawing arrows on a whiteboard. Before he became the red-nosed benevolent dictator at United, he was a trade-union shop steward who went on strike, taking his apprentices with him, because he believed it was his duty towards the group.Years later, it was the same system, except the apprentices were multimillionaire footballers and the industrial action was knocking Liverpool off their f***** perch.Ferguson often used Lunch atop a Skyscraper – the famous image of construction workers calmly eating hundreds of feet above Manhattan – to tell young footballers that if those men weren’t concerned about falling, then perhaps they shouldn’t be concerned about going in for a tackle.
Ferguson often used this picture to make a point to his charges.
Hear any player speak about him and you get the feeling that they would have powered through brick walls and mountains for Ferguson. Perhaps Guardiola too evokes that sort of loyalty.There used to be a saying in English football about Lionel Messi: but can he do it on a cold, rainy night in Stoke? Could his mentor Pep Guardiola ever do it on a cold night in Aberdeen? It’s a big What If for a man who has only managed Barcelona, with some of the world’s most gifted footballers and the greatest to ever play the game; Bayern Munich, where even the kitman can win the league; and Manchester City, whose books were so cooked, according to the Premier League commission’s findings, that it now looks like a Breaking Bad sequel.Strip away the footballers that City could attract for Guardiola and wonder if those trophies would still be there. On the other hand, Ferguson won league titles with Tom Cleverley, Darron Gibson and Anderson.Much the same team with which Ferguson won the league finished seventh a year later under David Moyes. In the Fergie era, coming second was considered an abject failure. Post-Fergie, it was a high point.But Guardiola’s performance at City, where he also won the Treble, opened the gate for a debate and perhaps, looking at a piece of paper, there’s an argument to be made. In his ten years at City, he won the league six times and a total of 17 major trophies, excluding Community Shields. In 27 years, Ferguson won only 28 major trophies, excluding Charity Shields.But Guardiola took over a team that had already won two Premier League titles in the previous five seasons, had reached the Champions League semi-finals the season before he arrived, and contained Sergio Agüero, Kevin De Bruyne, David Silva, Fernandinho, Vincent Kompany and Raheem Sterling.Not exactly Aberdeen.And then consider the money.Depending on how transfer fees and add-ons are calculated, during Guardiola’s decade City spent roughly £2 billion. Fergie broke British transfer records too, but during Ferguson’s final eight seasons under the Glazers, United spent £343 million gross and only around £153 million net on players, while almost £496 million left the club in interest payments. Ferguson still won five Premier League titles in those eight seasons.And then we come to FFP, which leaves the true asterisk hanging over Guardiola’s City legacy.We now know that the Premier League’s independent commission found that City had inflated revenues and concealed costs during the period from 2009-10 to 2017-18, with the financial distortion exceeding £900 million. That period included the season in which Guardiola’s City finished with 100 points.So, on one hand, you have a manager working under severe financial constraints brought on by the Glazer buyout of Manchester United. Ferguson was never particularly candid about his time under the Glazers, refusing calls from hardcore fans to step down and insisting that he needed to be there for the club.Contrast that with Guardiola, who left before the verdict came out.After it did, he posted: “I want every single Manchester City fan across the world to know I am here; more than ever.”Except he wasn’t. He had already left.A similar shadow hangs over Guardiola’s time at Barcelona because of the Negreira affair, in which Barcelona paid more than €7.3 million over 17 years to companies linked to José María Enríquez Negreira, then vice-president of Spain’s refereeing committee. Barcelona says the money was for technical reports on referees, and no evidence has established that referees were paid to fix matches. Unfortunately for Pep, his entire Barcelona reign fell within the payment period.And then history decides to provide a joke that would have been rejected by a scriptwriter for being too obvious.Many years ago, Guardiola’s mentor Johan Cruyff told Ferguson: “You’ll never win the European Cup.”Ferguson asked: “Why?”Cruyff replied: “You don’t cheat and you don’t buy referees.”Guardiola is not accused of participating in either the Negreira affair or City’s financial breaches. But both controversies sit squarely inside his two most successful managerial eras, which means they will inevitably cast a long shadow over how those achievements are remembered.Earlier, one could at least fathom why people were willing to debate Guardiola versus Ferguson.Now, with the City findings and the Negreira affair added to the historical record, the argument becomes much harder to make. There was never a meaningful debate.The UK-UAE KerfuffleSince David Cameron called for the ill-fated Brexit Referendum, the UK has had seven Prime Ministers, the latest being the “King of the North”, Andy Burnham, who just happens to be a little too pally with the Man City owners, and might just find his head on the chopping block soon.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham applauds on stage at the Labour Party Conference, in Liverpool, England. (AP Photo)
Before he became PM, he spent nine years as mayor of Greater Manchester, during which time he repeatedly praised the Abu Dhabi ownership for investing in the club and in east Manchester. After the guilty verdict, he even put his neck out and said he would be “really concerned” if City lost their owners.The Financial Times revealed that City chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak, one of Abu Dhabi’s most powerful officials and the man who also runs the £290 billion Mubadala investment empire, has held diplomatic immunity in Britain since 2020, shielding him from criminal prosecution and most civil proceedings in the UK.The Daily Mail reported that Abu Dhabi warned the British government as far back as 2023 that an adverse outcome in City’s case could damage UK-UAE relations. The Mail also found that the Manchester Life partnership had first refusal on large development sites, and Manchester City Council received no rental income till 2023-24 even as Mansour-linked companies earned more than £39 million over five years.Given the UK’s modern love for swapping Prime Ministers, it’s not unlikely that Burnham’s linkages to the UAE become the albatross around his premiership’s neck.India vs Brazil: What the 4-0 actually showedThat India would lose to Brazil was a given, but there was more to see than the 4-0 scoreline would suggest. For a while, India actually inconvenienced Brazil before the natural course of things took over, and perhaps we should take heart from that. Khalid Jamil’s side stayed organised, defended with discipline and showed that they could at least make one of the world’s best teams work for their goals.The gulf in quality eventually told, as it was always going to. But for once, a heavy defeat did not feel entirely pointless.“No time for idiots”Jürgen Klopp has always kept it simple, on and off the pitch. Asked about the latest debate over whether his Germany team was “German enough” or “white enough”, Klopp dismissed it as “complete nonsense”, adding that he had little time in everyday life for idiocy and even less on social media.The depressing part is that German football has been here before.When Germany crashed out of the 2018 World Cup, Mesut Özil, born in Gelsenkirchen to Turkish parents and a World Cup winner four years earlier, believed he had suddenly become the convenient face of failure. Announcing his international retirement, he delivered perhaps the definitive line on conditional European nationalism: “I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose.”The Artist is long gone but it would appear that for German football, the race albatross hangs around its neck, rearing its head whenever a coloured man can be blamed.Ronaldo vs MessiSpeaking of pointless debates, it has become rather tiresome to see Cristiano Ronaldo’s descent into a petulant non-entity. While Messi is turning up for one last dance with Argentina, Ronaldo has gone home from the Portugal camp after throwing a fit. On Football Twitter – and other places where fans discuss the Beautiful Game – Ronaldo has often been labelled “Homelander”, the antagonist of The Boys, a superhero figure with severe narcissistic personality disorder.
And the late-stage careers of Messi and Ronaldo are starting to resemble the final fight between Billy Butcher and Homelander after the latter loses his powers. While Messi still seems to have some stardust left, as we saw with Argentina during the World Cup, Ronaldo’s race seems run. It’s a tragic sight for all of us who watched him grow up, going from a winger of touch and tease to one of the best footballers in the world. One never knows the right time to retire. Take Novak Djokovic, who showed Alexander Zverev how it’s done recently, but a similar redemption looks quite unlikely for Ronaldo.Perhaps that is the only opponent neither Messi nor Ronaldo could ever beat: Father Time comes for us all. Some just have the grace to deal with it with a little more elegancia.