Pellegrini spent £200m at Real and won nothing... Surely we have better managers here
Manuel Pellegrini is going to be the new manager of Manchester City. And right there is the reason why Manchester United’s appointment of David Moyes was so important for English football.
A coach who has won nothing in Europe, not even in the season when he spent £200million on four players at Real Madrid, will now occupy one of the prime jobs in the Premier League. And as one door opens, another slams in the face of our home-schooled managers.
And not just British coaches, in fact, but those like Roberto Martinez or Gus Poyet who came to the game in this country, embraced it and stayed. Could Pellegrini have won the FA Cup with Wigan, as Martinez did on Saturday? Could he have got Wigan playing better football than Manchester City?
Thankfully, he does not have to answer those questions. Pellegrini enters the English game as Roberto Mancini did, at the top. He served his apprenticeship at clubs in South America, beyond our gaze, so all we have is received information. British managers play every match in the public eye.
We know every mistake, each little failure. We know that Alan Pardew struggled at Charlton Athletic and his success at Newcastle United was not maintained. So it counts against him.
Yet was Pellegrini so hot at O’Higgins or Palestino in Chile? And how much achievement in Spain has been aided by owner investment? We don’t know the details. He is one of the most admired coaches in Europe, we read, and Barcelona also want him, and that is our gospel.
No doubt Pellegrini is highly able. He did a fine job with two traditionally minor clubs, Villarreal and Malaga, and got 96 points in his sole season at Real Madrid, 2009-10, a record, although not enough to stop Barcelona winning the league.
Yet that campaign also saw Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaka, Karim Benzema and Xabi Alonso arrive in the summer for £210m, plus a 4-0 defeat by third-tier Alcorcon in the Spanish Cup and elimination by Lyon in the last 16 of the Champions League.
Pellegrini then moved to Malaga, who finished fourth backed by the wealth of Sheik Abdullah Al Thani and another significant spending spree of more than £50m. Is this so much greater than Pardew taking Newcastle to fifth in the Premier League in a year when many had them down for relegation?
'City have always claimed to be different, yet on the day of the FA Cup final the club allowed their manager to be a lame duck and his team played like it. '
Pellegrini’s triumphs — he was the last manager to split Barcelona and Real Madrid by finishing second with Villarreal — may have come in unfashionable locales, but his small clubs had big ideas.
Villarreal were backed by investment from the owner of a major ceramics company, Malaga’s overspending made them one of the first clubs to fall foul of UEFA’s financial fair play regulations.
This wasn’t success on a shoestring. Pellegrini was supported in a way many British managers can only dream about.
These were not legacy projects, either, in the manner of Moyes at Everton.
Villarreal are currently in Spain’s second tier and Malaga are banned from Europe next season for financial misconduct.
Pellegrini is clearly an impressive coach and his record in South America includes three titles, but right now is there such a huge difference between this and a Roman Abramovich appointment?
Pellegrini could be brilliant, or he could be gone in a year, replaced by the next fancy of Barca Lite.
City have always claimed to be different, yet on the day of the FA Cup final the club allowed their manager to be a lame duck and his team played like it.
They were lifeless and uninspired, took Wigan too lightly and had no fear of consequence as the Mancini regime limped towards cessation. They got what they deserved. City’s owners clearly do not value the product of English football.
They have bolted fragments of Barcelona on to their administration by appointing Txiki Begiristain sporting director and making Ferran Soriano the chief executive.
In January, Barcelona president Sandro Rosell accused City of trying to poach other Nou Camp employees. The result, though, is that a new executive level goes with what it knows. And City’s staff know Malaga, not Wigan.
How could Begiristain adequately evaluate the job done by Steve Bruce at Hull City or Steve Clarke at West Bromwich Albion, for instance? How could he assess Moyes? Begiristain has been 47 years in Spain and just over six months in Manchester.
He was appointed by City at the end of October and there are suggestions Pellegrini was being courted as early as January. Didn’t exactly play the field, did he?
Once Begiristain had taken against Mancini, he headed directly to the market he knew best.
Saturday’s FA Cup defeat may therefore have come as a bit of a shock, the discovery that there is a Spanish manager playing better football and working tiny miracles 25 miles down the road.
Little about City’s performance at Wembley spoke for Mancini.
He did, however, win the club the league and back-to-back trophies and the last time that happened was 1969. Yet Mancini was lucky, too. He got the break, he got the chance. An English manager has to fly to travel the same distance that managers in Spain or Italy walk.
Moyes had to wait eight years after getting Everton into the Champions League before a better offer came along. Alan Curbishley never got the call in his prime despite just missing out on Champions League football with Charlton Athletic.
Meanwhile, because City have been trying on identities and are currently being run as a Catalan enclave, Pellegrini is about to strike a rich man’s gold again. If he emulates the success of Mancini he will have done very well. Yet the manner of his appointment suggests it may not be enough.
Nothing may ever be enough for the restless elite.
There will always be a fashionable name, a fresh look, a new style that catches the eye. City hitched a ride on the fag-end of the Pep Guardiola era at Barcelona, so are in their Spanish phase.
This is dressed up as radicalism. At root, however, it’s just the same old, same old.
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