His argument for the three years was always that he recognized at Barcelona that the players aren't open to his thoughts anymore in the fourth year - and that doing this fourth year was his biggest mistake at Barcelona...
You don't have to believe everything he says. 2011-12 side was a work in progress with lots of new ideas being implemented, I still rewatch some of their games and see it as an (yet) unreachable benchmark. It's an open secret that Pep has left due to the Board. He couldn't bear the rats who marked the start of their tenure by stripping off honorary presidency from Cruyff.
At Bayern to lead that team from one to the other generation would have been challenging, too. Schweinsteiger gone, Lahm and Alonso finish, Robben and Ribery in their last season... - including a big new youth academy that opens that was build and will open this summer.
You also forgot to add that Bayern refused to get Pep 'his' players (Thiago being an exception) and sold Kroos. Buying Vidal against his will was probably the last straw.
I honestly think that dealing with the boards was the main challenge in both clubs, he doesn't seem to have such obstacle here. He'll stay for a long time, the only other high-profile club suiting him is Barca after all. I would go even farther and say that in ideal case Pep would enhance his influence over youth teams and wait for the academy products to ripe - the luxury his teacher was denied. Cruyff needed to wait 20 years (1988-2008) to see his La Masia conquering the world, so would Pep. Guardiola is not a lone revolutionary as it's sometimes represented by media, he steadily develops the concept of his teacher. This concept needs time and patience, and who bar City can provide a background for such mammoth work right now?
The most serious obstacle for Pep in England, IMO, is FA and its stubborn approach to refereeing and management of youth, and I'm not even talking about the quality/consistency. PL football is 'physical' and chaotic thanks only to different interpretetion of rules here. Allowing harder tackles, closing eyes on fouls that would nave been cards on continent disrupts passing game in the middle and logically forces coaches to resort to primitive hoofball (Guardiola:"nothing happens in the middle in England"). In Spain or Germany this style hasn't survived due to its general ineffectiveness, but PL refs make it a different sport - more tackling and running, less brains and tactics.
It's like playing with a different set of rules in England, no surprise that PL teams are so poor in Europe since Guardiola's success at Barca - he has stimulated so many coaches to implement more complex ideas of attacking play, you can see even Madrid nowadays sticking to Cruyff's ideas of midfield control. When you remove the bodychecking element off a top English team (say, Spurs), all that's left is a slightly above average technical level (except 2-3 'stars') and fairly simple tactical setup that can be easily countered.
This and the absence of a proper 'B' teams make English football a very bad environment for small technicians that rule the world for almost a decade already.
Quotes from Pep:
- “The only problem the managers have in the first teams with the second teams is that the league they [the second teams] compete in it doesn’t count, so the gap between the first team and second team when they compete is so big”
- "I think it’s physical [in England] because of the way the referees conduct the games. Contact is more allowed. That is the only difference I have found".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football...nchester-citys-youngsters-will-not-play-much/