Matt Dickinson in the Times this morning. Good read.
Manchester City belong with great Ajax and AC Milan sides
Pep Guardiola’s team do not need Treble to secure legacy — the artistry of their football places them amongst very best
It struck me by half-time on Wednesday night — Manchester City 196 touches in the attacking third, Real Madrid ten — that we were watching much more than a team closing in on the Treble. Something more significant, almost intangible, was being pursued by Pep Guardiola and his players.
In all that sublime control you could call it a quest for perfection (how to reduce Real to zero touches?) though the goalless Erling Haaland will not have imagined it was close to that — and certainly not the restless, insatiable Guardiola.
A pursuit of greatness? Arrigo Sacchi summed up this ambition when he was asked by Marco van Basten why their mighty AC Milan team not only had to win the biggest prizes but to do so emphatically, always striving for more.
Sacchi pulled out a football magazine which put that Milan side of 1989 — Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard, Franco Baresi, Paolo Maldini
et al — on a list of the greatest of all time and said to his Dutch striker that this was the sort of discussion that would truly define their legacy; it was not just about winning but how they did it.
“This is why you need to win and you need to be convincing,” he told his Dutch striker. “I didn’t do it because I wanted to write history, I did it because I wanted to give 90 minutes of joy to people. And I wanted that joy to come not from winning, but from being entertained, from witnessing something special. I did this out of passion, not because I wanted to manage Milan or win the European Cup.”
Easier to say in the afterglow of historic victories, obviously, but Sacchi knew that his tactical innovation, a squad’s vast talent and a grand stage had come together in perfect synchronicity. “The greatest compliment I received was when people said my football was like music,” he noted.
What a waste if they did not create moments and matches such as a 5-0 rout of Real Madrid, at San Siro in April 1989, that was not just a famous semi-final triumph but a shift of the sport’s tectonic plates.
A similar seismic shock unfolded spectacularly around Europe on Wednesday evening and Guardiola and his players bear a responsibility to reach such peaks of mastery given the manager’s brilliant creative mind and more than £1 billion spent on some of the planet’s best footballers.
Watching City
should feel idealistic. It should feel like the creation, in front of our eyes, of a masterpiece like Sacchi’s Milan and the grandest teams that have come before.
It is City’s challenge to enter these discussions; yes, even before they have won a single prize this season. My colleague Martin Samuel put Guardiola’s construction in that conversation in
his piece from the Etihad and the debate is justified by much more than 45 minutes in which Luka Modric and Toni Kroos must have looked at Kevin De Bruyne’s orchestration with Bobby Jones’s anguish about Jack Nicklaus: “He plays a game with which I am not familiar.”
City have not won anything yet, but maybe that is the point. Winning is one of the important criteria on which we judge greatness — Manchester United’s 1998-99 Treble-winners triumphing when all seemed lost was a wondrous, defining quality — but sport at its most exalted offers so much more than winners and losers.
Forgive the name-drop but Johan Cruyff — clang! — taught me that precious lesson sitting in the shade of a tree in Catalonia in 2011 when I asked him whether Guardiola’s Barcelona had to win a second Champions League trophy in three seasons to cement their reputation as a truly great team.
“That’s absurd,” Cruyff responded, testing convention as usual. “Winning is just one day, a reputation can last a lifetime. Winning is an important thing, but to have your own style, to have people copy you, to admire you, that is the greatest gift.” I never tire of using that quote, which may be the most important I ever scribbled down in my notebook.
To have people copy you and admire you: that is surely essential to true greatness and, of course, Guardiola’s team is itself an unfolding tribute to Cruyffian football with its relentless pressing, fluid movement, and patterns which make the man on the ball just one part of an unfolding ballet of overlaps, inversions and passes, passes, passes.
City have all this and their own modern twists. Guardiola has half-joked about a team of 11 midfielders but perhaps of all the people on the planet only he reimagined John Stones as one of them. The City manager is both a disciple of Cruyff and a one-off who has already changed English football in profound ways: opening minds and aspirations at all levels of the game, teaching us a new tactical language with ball-mastery at its heart.
Cruyff is, of course, the thread between the three greatest club teams; Ajax of 1972 (second of three successive European titles), AC Milan of 1989 (first of two), the Barcelona of Lionel Messi-Andrés Iniesta-Xavi which reached its peak at Wembley in 2011 (a second in three years). The team that most influenced Sacchi’s development, with its rejection of Italian conventions, was Cruyff’s Holland of the 1970s.
Jonathan Wilson, author of the acclaimed
Inverting the Pyramid, once conducted an imagined tournament of the greatest club sides for
Sports Illustrated and finished with the Ajax of 1972 pipping Guardiola’s Barcelona in the final.
It feels like City should barge their way into this debate. They are not the first petrodollar-champions given Chelsea’s rise under Roman Abramovich, but sovereign wealth has provided a financial clout which seemingly makes anything possible.
It feels like City should barge their way into this debate. They are not the first petrodollar-champions given Chelsea’s rise under Roman Abramovich, but sovereign wealth has provided a financial clout which seemingly makes anything possible.
It could be argued that the deals struck with Uefa over Financial Fair Play breaches and 115 outstanding charges from the Premier League will sour the legacy. I suspect the answer, for most of us, is not black and white. It is possible for City to have broken the rules and to deserve punishment, but also for Guardiola to be a rare genius who has built a side that need not have reached its apogee in that first-half battering of Real.
Their destiny? “It would be a sporting tragedy if a team as great as this did not win European football’s greatest prize,” Martin wrote. Perhaps, but actually I think a bigger prize is at stake when a squad has such depth of talent that Riyad Mahrez, Phil Foden and Julián Álvarez (a world champion this season yet only a bit-part at City) can be summoned off the bench.
Yes, it is about trophies. Sacchi proved that much when — perhaps my second-favourite name-drop — he once showed me around his home in Italy; it was a residence so classy that you hardly dared sit down for fear of finding out a couch was last used by Louis XIV in Versailles.
Sacchi led me upstairs to the gym, which seemed unremarkable until he pointed to a glass case containing two full-sized European Cup trophies. Beaming proudly, he showed how he could run on his treadmill and gaze at his silverware. Not bad for a guy who started out selling shoes.
Guardiola should soon have the third of his own European trophies but will that prize, or a fourth or fifth, be his true legacy? Or will it be tens of millions of us mesmerised on Wednesday night wondering: “When was the last time I saw football as brilliant as this?”
We will all have our own answers — it is subjective and prone to recency bias. But never mind trophies, City will have fallen short if the greatness debate is not inflamed once more.
