petrusha said:
In my opinion, you underestimate the job they did at the Camp Nou. Ferran and Txiki came to Barca in 2003, five years before Guardiola was appointed. At that point, Barca had just finished fifth in La Liga, had an imbalanced squad full of overpaid and underachieving players and the youth policy was regarded as having stalled (players were versed in the system but weren't coming through into the senior ranks in any numbers). The club had lost its way over the previous few seasons.
The Laporta regime of which they were a key part did restructure the club quite considerably with a view to reintroducing the Cruyff principles, and Cruyff had backed the Laporta regime in the presidential elections precisely because they were pledging to re-implement his philosophy at the club. The situation Guardiola inherited in 2008 was so propitious in significant measure owing to the work that Begiristain had done in the previous five years. Guardiola himself acknowledges this.
There's no point in appointing someone like Begiristain if you aren't going to back him to oversee the football side of the club in the way he sees fit, and rightly or wrongly the board have decided to go down that route. (I think in five years time, we'll be glad they did, but this is another debate). Begiristain is on record as saying, before he came to City, that he needs a manager of the first team who's on board with his way of doing things. I'm not sure whether Roberto is that person, but if Begiristain is prepared to give it a go next season with Roberto then that's fine by me. If not, then Begiristain was a driving force behind two managerial appointments at Barca, neither of which was at all obvious at the time and both of which proved inspired; I'd give him the chance to try and repeat the trick here.
There was a report last week that de Boer had been recommended to Txiki by Johann Cruyff, who worked with him for a spell during Cruyff's short-lived tenure as technical director of Ajax in 2011. Begiristain as a player was one of Cruyff's first signings at Barca and remained a fixture in the "Dream Team" for seven seasons (he averaged 32 league appearances out of 38 per campaign). I suspect that a glowing reference from Cruyff will count for quite a lot with Txiki.
Possibly I do, Possibly you overestimate it. Possibly the truth is somewhere in the middle. As always though, I respect the intellectual and knowledgeable nature of your posts.
I don't blame Soriano and Txiki in the slightest. They've been chosen to do a job, they're trying to do it, but to my mind the environment does not yet exist. I back completely the Barcelona way of doing things but as I say it took at least a decade to build, a decade of building a youth system designed around a specific style of football, before you can pull off the move of choosing the manager who fits the system. The system comes first, especially if you're not already a successful club. Even if you implement a brilliant youth system, if you can't keep hold of your best talents because your club isn't big enough, it's no good. Success first, then a long-term youth policy; a culture, then success with with your youth players rooted in that culture. I think that's how it has to go. We're not even close to finishing stage one as far as I'm concerned. We seem to be trying to run multiple stages concurrently, that might be possible, but as I see it, you can only compact it that way. You can't skip a stage, and to be honest, that's what I believe appointing a manager to fit a system that does not exist would be doing.
