Guardiola can be both right to speak out and a performative hypocrite | Barney Ronay

"You may find yourself living in a glass and steel yak-fur-lined penthouse. You may find yourself with six Premier League titles and a sport refashioned in your image. You may find yourself in front of a large advert board covered in words such as Experience Abu Dhabi, haunted by images of suffering, a scythe clanking gently at your shoulder. And you may say, well, how did I get here?"

"There are only ever two types of Pep Guardiola article. First, articles announcing that Guardiola's influence has reached some new level of annihilating dominance, that what we have here is our own cashmere-draped, cranium-whirring Ideal Tactics Man, that Pep-ism is bigger than smartphones, bigger than internet porn, bigger than a mother's love, that playing out from the back is now visible from space."

"For a while Guardiola seemed carefree. He said tactics were bullshit. He went off happily over Christmas to tour the high-concept industrial food ateliers of Barcelona and eat fricassee Maltesers on a bed of hamster heart teased with sawdust candyfloss. At other times he has seemed cinematically listless and sated, like a footballing version of that 13-year-old kid who completed Tetris and was caught on film celebrating what quickly became a moment of terrifying emptiness, a game that ends by sim"

Pep Guardiola's public image oscillates sharply between extreme adulation and severe denunciation. Some portrayals cast him as an unrivaled tactical genius who has reshaped modern football and amassed trophies, including six Premier League titles. Other portrayals depict him as exposed, diminished, and ridiculed. Attempts to find a neutral or nuanced portrayal have repeatedly failed. At times Guardiola appears carefree and dismissive of tactics, indulging in extravagant culinary tours, while at other moments he appears listless and sated, resembling a player who has finished a game and faces an empty aftermath. The cultural conversation around him swings between worship and moral reproach.

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