Here’s the lesson of the past two Premier League seasons at Manchester United: When you have hundreds of millions of pounds to spend, it’s not that hard to keep possession, complete eight out of 10 passes, and protect your keeper from opposing shots. The hard part is doing all that and playing any kind of soccer that’s worth waking up for.
Despite all the possession and all the passing under Louis van Gaal last season, United created fewer chances per game than Newcastle (who were relegated after the season) and slightly more than Bournemouth (who were promoted before it), and took fewer shots than all but five teams. They were boring as hell.
Two games into José Mourinho’s tenure, none of that has changed, except for the boring part. If you can afford to drop over £90 million in transfer fees and £20 million in yearly contracts to stand Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Paul Pogba on top of a relegation-quality attack, can you suddenly score enough goals to win the Premier League? Mourinho is hoping the answer is “yes.”
They have won both of their two matches this season, and scored five goals, but they’ve also created the same number of chances and have taken about the same number of shots per game as last season. Two games in, United is attacking with the same broad strokes, only they’re doing it with two of the best attacking players in the world. Prior to being handed a goal by Simon Francis, United were played toe-to-toe by Bournemouth. And despite the two-goal win, the chances they created weren’t noticeably better than Southampton’s. What was noticeably better was Zlatan jumping over a building and turning a fluttering cross into a goal ….
… and Pogba dream-shaking his way through an aggressive Southampton press and turning it into a counterattack for United:
Last season, United could never create advantageous attacking situations. Much of that seemed to come down to a philosophical choice by van Gaal: If we don’t try anything ambitious with the ball, we won’t lose it, and if we don’t lose it, we won’t get scored on. But in Pogba and Ibrahimovic, they now have two players who can turn something neutral (a floated ball toward the top of the box) or something negative (being pressed in your own half with your back to your own goal) into a legitimate attacking chance. And those two can do it without too much help.
Yet, while Lionel Messi is an actual alien who finishes his chances at a much higher rate than any human, most other top strikers score at such a high clip because they’re both constantly getting on the end of and creating high-quality chances for themselves — not because they’re better at converting. Since 2010, Zlatan’s scored 118 goals to 110 expected goals, so he probably won’t keep pulling a goal out of thin air every weekend, but c’mon …
Players can get hot for 38 games, and there are worse strategies than maintaining an already-very-good defense and hoping that Ibrahimovic keeps finishing at an absurd clip; with three goals on five shots, he’s scoring more often than Rudy Gobert makes free throws. And even if he doesn’t keep up this pace, maybe the presence of Pogba (and eventually Henrikh Mkhitaryan, the €42 million signing who Mourinho has stapled to the bench) will start to open up better chances, if not more of them. Through two games, United haven’t shot much, but they’re among the league leaders in shots on target, and their shots-on-target differential (the number they take minus the number they concede) is the best in the league.
We haven’t seen United go behind and have to play against a defensive shell or an opposing counterattack. We don’t know what’ll happen once the league’s collection of managerial wizards starts keying in on United’s superstars. And despite a relatively healthy career, who knows if a 34-year-old Ibrahimovic can stay on the field for a full, winter-break–less season. But thanks to Pogba and Co., the guys who were lead stars for last year’s team — Anthony Martial, Wayne Rooney, Marcus Rashford — now become a near-overqualified supporting cast.
“For me,” Mourinho said a year ago, “football is collective. The individual is welcome if you want to make our group better. But you have to work for us, not we have to work for you.”
Right now, this United haven’t really played that much better than last season’s United, but with Pogba and Ibrahimovic on the field, the same muted performances feel like a roar. There’s a sense of possibility that hasn’t existed at Old Trafford since Sir Alex Ferguson retired in 2013. Can Ibrahimovic and Pogba carry last year’s team four spots up the table and achieve the Swede’s title vision? A bunch of bounces will still have to go their way for that happen, but at least it’ll be worth watching them try.
Next Story — Can Manchester United Finally Get Wayne Rooney Off the Pitch?
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Manchester United Is Deep and Talented — So Can It Finally Get Rooney Off the Pitch?
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A little over an hour into Manchester United’s season opener against Bournemouth last weekend, new signing Zlatan Ibrahimovic opened his United account, placing a wormburner into the side netting from 25-some-odd yards out and putting his side up 3–0. As Ander Herrera leaped into Zlatan’s arms in celebration and manager José Mourinho sprinted out of the technical area to do that I’m a genius, fuck what y’all talkin’ ’bout celebration he often does, it felt, really and truly, like the dawning of a new era for the club.
And Paul Pogba, who’s dominated most conversations surrounding the Red Devils for the better part of the summer and recently completed his highly anticipated and obscenely expensive transfer back to the club, wasn’t even there.
For the first time in recent years, United has a roster with both depth and intrigue. Assuming Mourinho will stick with the same back four for Friday’s fixture against Southampton, there are six available spots in the midfield and attack, and a glut of sumptuous options to fill them with. Various combinations of Pogba, Morgan Schneiderlin, Ander Herrera, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Memphis Depay, Jesse Lingard, Juan Mata, and Anthony Martial can be deployed as a midfield four; Ibrahimovic could tip the spear, and Martial, Mata, Pogba, or Marcus Rashford could play in the hole beneath. It’s mouthwatering.
But even so, with all of these options, somehow, some way, Wayne Rooney is going to find his way onto the team sheet. It happened last year because, though he was pretty much physically toast and his first touch was comically bad, he was still the club captain, and the most recognizable name. In 12 years at Old Trafford, he’s drummed up a lot of goodwill, sold a lot of jerseys, and become an ambassador for the global Manchester United brand. He’s also four goals shy of the club’s all-time scoring record, which at least partly explains why he has featured so prominently under United’s last two managers.
Ugh.
OK, here are two opinions that a person capable of logically structured thought can hold, concurrently, without friction:
Wayne Rooney is a United hero, and has given more to the club and its supporters than we’ll ever be able to return in kind.
Wayne Rooney is fucking washed.
Yes, sure, fine: Rooney knicked himself a goal in what was ultimately a 3–1 win over Bournemouth. Martial snatched a full volley off target while opposing defenders mostly watched to see where it’d land instead of trying to clear out the danger, and Rooney put his side ahead 2–0 with an opportunistic finish. While pedestrian, it wasn’t one of those things that just anybody could do, you know? It required positioning, a certain level of body control, and obviously execution; plenty others might’ve failed to clear those hurdles.
Still, watching it happen elicited that same dull ache in the pit of my stomach that I got watching him break his 452-minute scoring drought against CSKA Moscow, or, really, any time he scored last season. It’s the same deal as Drew Brees breaking passing records as the Saints finish the season with seven wins and miss the wild-card spot; when Rooney scores, time reverses and it briefly becomes less apparent that he’s nowhere near as good as he used to be, and the team is stuck with him in the starting lineup for at least another week.
In the Louis Van Gaal edition of United, Rooney might’ve been the team’s only household name and “world class” talent. And I use scare quotes because Rooney, who was overused and cruelly old at 30, no longer possessed a world-class game. But there are considerably better options elsewhere now, and we might have to come to terms with the fact that Rooney has no business starting for United. Pogba, a world-class talent in his own right, is expected to get “some minutes” against Southampton, but after a presumably brief period of adjustment to his new manager’s system and recalibration to the English game, those minutes will likely turn into a regular starting role. There seems to be less and less room for Rooney, but it seems Mourinho won’t ax the longtime United captainfrom the lineup for the second game of the season; that’s too strong a gesture, even for someone like Mourinho.
Even if it doesn’t happen this week, Rooney’s days as a capital-I Important First-Team Player will soon be over. At least they should be. United have far too much promising talent to stay mired in the past.
Next Story — Jürgen Klopp Has Found His Tackling, Ball-Hunting, Overwhelming Secret Weapon
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For the last few years, Liverpool has been a club standing just outside a party they desperately want to attend, and quite clearly think they should have been invited to. There is a collection of teams at the top of European football — Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain, and the two Manchester clubs — where every good player seems to eventually wind up. If one of those clubs happen to lose a player, it’s usually to another in that group. In the annual “100 best footballers” list that The Guardian published in December, nine of the top 10 players played for one of those clubs (and the 10th, Alexis Sánchez, used to play for Barcelona). When someone like Paul Pogba hits the market, there’s not a lot of mystery about where he might wind up. It’s one of the big six.
But there are more than six great managers in the game. And if a club can’t buy the best players, it can at least buy great style. That’s what Liverpool did when they hired Klopp in October. He replaced Brendan Rodgers, and brought his “heavy metal football” philosophy with him from Germany, where he managed Borussia Dortmund. There were highs (making it to two cup finals) and lows (losing both cup finals), but perhaps more important to the club, long term, there was an obvious commitment to his style of play. He just needed the right players to better realize the vision.
What’s the vision? Klopp is one of the chief proponents of gegenpressing, or counterpressing — a defensive tactic in which a team seizes on the moment the opposition takes possession of the ball. In Klopp’s system, the best time to win the ball back is when you’ve just lost it. And the best place to win the ball is as close to the opponent’s goal as possible.
This requires forwards and attacking midfielders who play like they just sniffed smelling salts. The ideal offensive player is fast, creative, tenacious, fast, direct, fast, adept at dribbling, and fast. Sadio Mané is 24, has played in France and Austria, and put in two years at Southampton. That’s his biography. Here’s his superhero origin story: He was created in a lab to play for Jürgen Klopp.
On Sunday, Liverpool beat Arsenal, 4–3, to open the season. Mané ended the match with one goal, three shots, six tackles (that’s important), and 26 of 29 passes completed.
He was nominally playing on the right wing (six tackles!), as part of a three-man forward line with Roberto Firmino and Philippe Coutinho, but at various moments Mané popped up as a left winger, as a striker, as a creative playmaker up the middle, as a deep-lying midfielder, and as a fullback. He has a loping running style, and a speed burst that allows him to split defenders who converge on him from two angles. His style embodies the kind of football that Klopp wants to play: You never see him standing flat-footed, he’s always active, always hunting for the ball on defense, relentlessly heading toward goal in possession. Liverpool want to overwhelm, and Mané is an overwhelming player.
You know the cliché “it was a game of two halves”? The Arsenal-Liverpool match was a game of 15 minutes. At the beginning of the second half, play-by-play announcer Jon Champion uttered, “It’s as if Liverpool had an energy drink, and Arsenal a sedative.” Liverpool scored three goals in 15 minutes, and that included stoppages for two Arsenal players to leave the game with injuries. There’s heavy metal football, and then there’s taking someone’s head and holding it against a guitar amp while “Angel of Death” plays. For the first 15 minutes of the second half, that’s what Liverpool did to the Gunners.
In the 56th minute, Mané hounded Arsenal’s Alex Iwobi up the sideline, dispossessed him, and took off toward Arsenal’s goal. Iwobi was able to knock the ball out of play, right in front of Klopp’s technical area. There was a brief stoppage, and Klopp took the opportunity to dap Mané up and then lovingly head-butt him before the game started again.
I’m not saying that Klopp’s encouragement had a cause-and-effect impact on the goal that Mané scored less than 10 minutes later. But I’m not not saying it had an impact.
The goal led to the most amusing celebration of the weekend, with Mané leaping onto Klopp’s back for a piggyback ride.
It was a piggyback ride that taunted the football gods. “I knew in the moment, but it was too late — I had Sadio on my back and in this moment we switched off the machine for a second,” Klopp said after the game. “It was so intense, it was so wrong, it was the first game.” Arsenal clawed their way back into the match and turned a blowout into a nail-biter. Then, on Wednesday morning, news broke the Mané had been involved in a training ground collision, picking up a minor shoulder injury. Ye gods, indeed.
Even if Mané misses Liverpool’s next match, against Burnley, his performance on Sunday — visiting an upper-echelon Premier League team and scoring in his first competitive match for his new club — will make Liverpool feel as though the €41 million they paid Southampton for him was money well spent. He scored 11 goals and added six assists last season, with a scoring profile that put him in the same elite attacking winger company as Riyad Mahrez and Alexis Sánchez. Liverpool knew they were getting a good player. But more importantly, they got the right player.
Next Story — What Comes Next for the USWNT?
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After an Olympics exit, Hope Solo and Co. face a time of change
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The United States hasn’t faced much disappointment thus far in Rio. Michael Phelps has won every race he’s entered, the women’s gymnastics team is turning a major international competition into a de facto intrasquad scrimmage, and the country holds a comfortable lead in the medal count.
The gold rush had to stop at some point, and the flow finally dried up for the U.S. women’s soccer team in Brasilia on Friday. After 120 minutes of entertaining if sloppy play and a pair of questionable (read: just plain wrong) refereeing decisions, Sweden eliminated the U.S. on penalty kicks in the quarterfinals.
For the first time ever, the U.S. women won’t play in the semifinals of a major international tournament; for the first time in the Olympics, they won’t play in the gold-medal match. This is a boon for the Swedes, who have given good teams trouble for years but haven’t won a major tournament. It’s a shocking loss for the Americans, who saw their chances to extend a historic title run fly over the crossbar.
The U.S. is a team in transition, playing in a sport in transition, and Friday’s loss made clear the program’s difficulties in remaining atop the world of women’s soccer.
The game itself was a lively affair, much more so than the tactical 0–0 draw the teams suffered through in World Cup group play a year ago. The Swedes took the lead on a breakaway, Alex Morgan tied the score after a flick-on header by substitute Crystal Dunn bounced off a defender’s face, and the match went to overtime tied at 1. In overtime, a pair of unfortunate offsides calls in a two-minute span stripped a worthy goal from each team, and Sweden outshot the U.S. 4–3 in penalties to advance.
By the numbers, the Americans were the better team: The U.S. held 64 percent possession for the game, outshot the Swedes 26-to-3, and earned 12 corners to Sweden’s three. And those figures don’t include the hordes of crosses with which the U.S. midfield peppered Sweden’s penalty area.
But, Hope Solo’s, um, impassioned thoughts aside, the statistical imbalance belies the fact that Sweden largely dictated the flow of the game. Pia Sundhage’s team was content to sit with 10 women behind the ball, inviting cross after misplaced cross and looking to take advantage of the few counter opportunities available.
Stina Blackstenius, who was playing only because Sweden’s starting forward left in the 18th minute with an injury, sped past an overextended American backline an hour into the match, muscling past Becky Sauerbrunn before scoring on a shot to the corner.
And when the Americans sent in their crosses, Sweden’s defense was consistently able to head the ball clear of danger. (That’s what made Jill Ellis’s substitution patterns so head-scratching. When crosses aren’t working, why insert Megan Rapinoe, whose only plan of attack as she works her way back into game shape is crossing?)
The USWNT’s struggles to cope with physical opposition underline the biggest question facing the program going forward: As the rest of the world matches the Americans in size and speed, how do they adapt? Maybe they turn the technically skilled Tobin Heath into an offensive focal point, or they start relying on the positionally amorphous Dunn as a key creator. Maybe Julie Johnston expands her role and embodies the evolved tactics of an attack-capable central defender.
One thing is certain: The challenges now come not just from one or two other countries, but from a half dozen. When Colombia, whose women’s team had never scored an Olympic goal before this week, can take the game to the Americans and successfully press their midfield, the U.S. no longer has a fast lane to the late knockout rounds of any given tournament.
This is a team in flux. Only seven players on the U.S. roster returned from the gold-winning 2012 squad, and the central axis of the recent American dynasty will soon be aged out. Solo will turn 38, Carli Lloyd 37, and Megan Rapinoe 34 during the next summer of a major international tournament (the 2019 World Cup). Three of the team’s four starting defenders will be in their 30s by then. Even Morgan, who still seems like she should be the blazing-fast sprinter who galloped past defenders as a youngster, will turn 30 in that summer.
The next time the Americans play in an important tournament game, fans might see Dunn and a no-longer-teenaged Mallory Pugh running in overlapping patterns on the wings while Morgan Brian cements a staunch defensive midfield and Johnston bounds forward from the back.
Solo and Lloyd (with her two gold-medal-winning scores) might be gone, though, and Rapinoe might play the uncomfortable “aging star” role occupied by Abby Wambach last year in Canada.
The trophies they won will surely gain company in the coming tournaments, but the U.S. squad that lost to Sweden is the portrait of an evolving team, and it will be up to the next age of American soccer stars to start a dynastic streak of their own.
Next Story — A Manager Will Decide the Premier League This Season
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A Manager Will Decide the Premier League This Season
The greatest collection of coaching talent in the world is about to do battle in England
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When Arsène Wenger arrived in England, in 1996, banning halftime pints of beer was considered exploiting a market inefficiency. The 46-year-old Frenchman showed up at Arsenal’s Highbury in North London with some silly ideas about foreign players, beautiful football, and the importance of a good diet. He’s been there for 20 years, and in that time he revolutionized football in the country.
“When Arsène arrived, he changed things,” said Patrick Vieira, a midfielder under Wenger at Arsenal, and the current manager at New York City FC. “You weren’t allowed to eat chips with brunch. You weren’t allowed the butter. You were doing all the stretching. He’d bring a nutritionist to make us understand how important it is to eat properly.”
He introduced new dietary restrictions to a soccer culture that had none. He placed an emphasis on tactical acumen and individual creativity in a soccer culture that traditionally thought bigger and faster meant always better. And he tore down the figurative border surrounding football in England: When the Premier League began in 1992, less than 5 percent of the playing force was foreign; in 2005, Wenger selected the league’s first all-foreign starting 11.
Since 1996, Wenger has won three Premier League titles and six FA cups. Marshalled on the field by Vieira, Arsenal’s undefeated 2003–04 team, “The Invincibles,” went undefeated in league play, and is still considered among the best sides in league history. They have not finished outside the top four since the 1995–96 season, a feat no other team has accomplished during that time. The highest compliment you could pay Wenger, now in the final year of his contract with the club, is that all of the best managers regularly employ the methods and tactics that he introduced to the game, when he first arrived.
That’s also his biggest problem. He’s got a lot of competition now.
“The game changed from when I was playing because the teams are better organized, the teams are better prepared,” Vieira said. “I think it is more difficult now than it was 10 years ago.”
When the Premier League kicks off this weekend, the top-six teams — Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool, and Tottenham — will all be led by one of the top 10 or 15 managers in the sport. Wenger himself has called this season the “world championship of managers.” While many of the best players in the world can be found on Barcelona, Real Madrid, or Bayern Munich, the Premier League now has more managerial talent than any league in the world — and it’s not close.
This season should be one of the most competitive campaigns in Premier League history, as all six of those teams have a legitimate chance to win the title. Across the board, the talent levels are so close that the clash of managerial personalities and playing styles won’t just be the most fascinating storyline of the year; it’ll likely determine who’s lifting the trophy come next spring.
Postrevolutionary Pep Guardiola
In 2012, just four years after being purchased by the Abu Dhabi United Group and becoming one of European football’s richest clubs, Manchester City won its first Premier League title. From a qualitative standpoint, they’ve been the dominant team in England since then, but they’ve only won one additional Premier League crown during the Sheikh Mansour era. There’s a not-insignificant line of thought that a team with all of City’s resources should basically win the league every year. If there’s one manager in the world who knows how to live under those impossible expectations, it’s their new boss, Pep Guardiola.
In his first four years as a top-flight manager, Guardiola won three league titles and two Champions League trophies with Barcelona. It’s not an overstatement to say that he revolutionized the sport. We’re firmly in the post-Pep era of soccer: Every top team seems to have defined itself in opposition to Guardiola’s Barcelona or taken one of its philosophical tenets to an extreme. His Barca sides could possess the ball for 90 minutes if they wanted to — and if they ever lost it, they’d hunt it down and win it right back. They turned free-flowing soccer into a systematized march forward by creating numerical advantages across the field with 11 players all adept at passing. Then once the ball got into the attacking third, Guardiola empowered his players to be creative:
But when you win everything and you change the game, is there anywhere to go but down? After leaving Barcelona, Guardiola went to Germany in 2013, and took over a treble-winning Bayern Munich team. Under his watch, they demolished the domestic competition and played some of the most trippy high-level soccer Europe has ever seen — positions only vaguely existed, and it often seemed like all 11 players were attacking midfielders. However, a Thomas Müller penalty miss, the existence of Lionel Messi and Gareth Bale, and the arbitrary nature of goalscoring kept Bayern from ever reaching the Champions League final, and Guardiola left Germany without achieving his ultimate goal.
With former Barcelona CEO Ferran Soriano and director of football Txiki Begiristain now in the same roles at City, the club has provided Guardiola an opportunity to recreate his Spanish glory days. Unless Raheem Sterling turns into Lionel Messi, that probably won’t happen. But with Guardiola, the results often feel like they’re secondary; it’s more fun to just watch him try.
José Mourinho vs. Stability
No matter what, José Mourinho is the story. If his team is winning, it’s because they’ve finally bought into Mourinho’s grind-it-out methods. And if they’re losing, Mourinho will poke an opposing assistant coach in the eye, he’ll complain about a cow sitting in the middle of the field, he’ll call another manager fat, or he’ll suggest that Arsène Wenger is a pervert.
Back in 2008, Mourinho had already won the Champions League with FC Porto and a pair of Premier League titles with Chelsea. There was an opening at Barcelona, and Mourinho had worked there before, but Barca chose Guardiola, instead. From that point on, as Jonathan Wilson wrote for Sports Illustrated, “… Mourinho had decided to define himself in opposition to Barcelona: the club had rejected him and he in turn rejected its philosophy.”
Mourinho moved to Italy and took over at Inter Milan, where he won two league titles and a Champions League. The 2010 Champions League semifinal between Inter and Barcelona was a perfect example of Mourinho Ball. His Inter team survived with 10 men against Guardiola’s Barca, holding possession for just 14 percent of the match (they lost, but went through on aggregate score). Maybe you didn’t need the ball to win. (Of course, Barcelona then won the Champions League again the following year.)
Mourinho’s teams are always tightly coordinated defensive units, and they’re at their best when the other team has the ball. Ceding possession lets Mourinho’s teams do what they are best at and draws the opposition farther from their goal, so when Mourinho’s teams do attack, the path to goal isn’t as crowded.
The approach is possibly cynical and often boring, but he’s won trophies at every club he’s managed since 2002. He gets results, but the success isn’t sustainable at one club for too long. He’s yet to manage a team for more than four full seasons, and he almost always leaves a burning building in his wake when he departs.
Since Sir Alex Ferguson retired in 2013, Manchester United have been looking for a long-term successor, but there’s very little to suggest that Mourinho will be the guy. In Zlatan Ibrahimović, Paul Pogba, and Henrikh Mkhitaryan, the club added three superstar-level players this summer, so the ingredients are certainly there for one special Mourinho season. And that’s what he does better than anyone: He maximizes his team’s performance in the short-term, even if it all eventually goes to shit. But if Mourinho beats Guardiola, he won’t be worrying about what happens next.
Jürgen Klopp and Heavy Metal Football
After signing a six-year contract in July, Jürgen Klopp can look further into the future than any other Premier League manager. He took over for Brendan Rodgers eight games into last season, and his version of the team finished the campaign at a 1.6-points-per-game clip, which was only 0.1 better than Rodgers. Liverpool finished eighth in the league and lost in the final of the Europa League.
So, why is that worth six years of security? First of all, Liverpool were significantly better under Klopp — their expected-goal differential per game with Klopp was 0.53, and 0.33 with Rodgers — even if the results didn’t show it. But more importantly, he gives the team an identity:
In a lot of ways, Klopp feels like the midpoint between Mourinho and Guardiola. He takes Mourinho’s dedication to defending and Guardiola’s progressive philosophy and smashes them together. What comes out of the collision is gegenpressing, a teamwide philosophy built around winning the ball back as soon as you lose it. It’s an inversion of the idea that the best defense is a good offense. His team wants to attack, and they want to score, but they’re only going to attack in a way that’ll leave them in position to immediately try to win the ball back if they lose it. Mourinho’s teams wait for moments of transition; Klopp’s try to create them.
In Germany, he took Borussia Dortmund from a 13th place finish in 2007–08 to back-to-back Bundesliga titles in 2010–11 and 2011–12. If a team can play with a coordinated reckless abandon, then Klopp’s Dortmund teams did just that. They reached their peak with a 4–1 win over Mourinho’s Real Madrid in the semifinals of the 2013 Champions League:
Dortmund went on to lose to Bayern Munich in the final. The next season saw Guardiola arrive in Munich, and Klopp’s team never sniffed another Bundesliga title. During his final season in Germany, the club plummeted into the relegation zone before clawing their way back to seventh place by season’s end. Was the tank finally empty? Was Klopp asking too much of his players? Does heavy metal football have a shelf life? Did that Dortmund team suffer from a stretch of rotten finishing and poor goalkeeping? What went wrong?
A neurotic Liverpool fan (read: me) might worry that Klopp’s philosophy is destined to fizzle out in England — there’s no winter break like there is in Germany — but by the end of this past season, he already had them playing like a pack of wolves. And since Liverpool didn’t qualify for European competition, they’ll have less games to deal with than all of their closest competitors other than Chelsea. With all of the clubs around him either in managerial transition or in Europe, he’s not gonna get a better chance to vault the club up the table.
Maurico Pochettino, Arsène Wenger, Antonio Conte, and the Limits of Control
Arsène Wenger (Getty Images)
In addition to Guardiola, Mourinho, and Klopp, there’s also Antonio Conte and Mauricio Pochettino. Conte frightened his way into our hearts this summer, and he’s taking over a talented Chelsea side coming off a terrible season; the last time he found himself in a similar situation, he went undefeated with Juventus.
Like Klopp, Pochettino employs a similar high-energy, pressing approach with his players, and his team put up the best shooting numbers in the league last year.
“It will be an exciting league,” Vieira said. “I think all of the managers have something very special that they’re doing, and they all have their own personality, and that should be important.”
And then there’s Wenger. In some ways, he laid the groundwork for all the competition that might finally knock his team out of the top four. And while he hasn’t stopped innovating — the guy mentioned expected goals in a press conference — Arsenal still haven’t bought that striker it seems like they’ve needed for the better part of a decade. Wenger has his methods, and last year, his team put up the kind of numbers that would usually be good enough to win the league.
“To have a relationship with the players and to trust the players. To try to have the door always open. To talk to them,” Vieira said. “That is something that I take from Arsène.”
As his career winds down, maybe that’s what Wenger’s doing: trusting in the guys he has. If it worked for Vieira and The Invincibles, who’s to say it won’t work now?
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