Ring for Analysis: How Pep Guardiola Haunts Football

Hello and welcome to the TFO Football Podcast. I'm Joe Devine and I'm an accomplished live narrator. I'm joined today by John McKenzie. An accomplished not live author. There you go. Now the reason I say that I'm an accomplished live narrator and that John says he's an accomplished not live author is because today's episode of Ring for Analysis is going to be a little bit different. Now I'm going to enjoy this one but editor Paul might like it a little bit less. Maybe there's going to be some more pickups. Now John we've done many articles, great articles written by the athletic on Ring for Analysis before but today in a world first we're going to read something that wasn't written by the athletic. Who was it written by? It was in fact written by me. It was written by you and who's going to read it John because it's not me. It's you. It's one of us and it's not you. It's me. It's you. That's right. Now here's how Ring for Analysis works. Usually I would read an article written by the athletic or written by someone that works with the athletic and John would ring a little bell that sounds like this when he wants me to pause for analysis but nay listen to today. John will be reading the introduction to his new book The Specter of PEP, how guadio la haunts modern football and I will ring and well actually I'm going to press a little button that sounds like this. No, no, no, I won't do that. I won't make Paul find a ghost noise. That would be fun but I'm going to ring the bell that sounds like this when I want John to pause so that I can lambast him or so that I can offer some analysis of my own. Now it goes without saying of course that you should read the book and you'll be able to find a link to purchase it in the description but you'll get it in all good book shops and book carriers. John would you book shops as well? And audio book shops. John would you like to introduce the book before you read the introduction to the book? It's in that pointless isn't that what the point of the introduction? I guess so but I would say it's not just about Pep Guardiola. It's not, it's a story about the modern history of football tactics so the last 15 years or so and the book starts with Guardiola bursting onto the scene in 2008 but yeah I'm very clear in this introduction to use this metaphor of haunting of ghosting because for me this isn't really a story about Guardiola himself. This is a story about his impact on other people through that 15 years and you know in the same way that a ghost haunts people without being present often you get the same sort of phenomenon with Guardiola where he's having an impact on other people even though he might not be directly there. He might not be replying to their text messages. That's right. Now when you say ghosting of course you mean something slightly different to modern definition. Yeah I guess that's it doesn't really work does it why I said so but yeah we've got a good joke out of it say. There you go. All right fine well after this little bit of music then John will begin to read his introduction it's funny because you've already heard me read this out haven't you because I sat in a studio listening to you a fumble over and I should have said by the way that if people want to listen to the audio book they can listen to you read the introduction but then they'll listen to me read the book it's sort of like oh it's nice that he's here but now let's hand over to a professional anyway off you go off you go off you go off you go a specter is haunting Europe the specter of Pep Guardiola do I need to say yes Joe yeah please say yes I rang the bell there just because I want to give you a little dramatic feedback just off the base just off the top dramatic enough that I want you to sell the books in there okay I want you to read the book as imagine that you are doing is 1969 okay you have a family that love you and you're doing Amdram together and there are children there and not only do the children enjoy your performance but you're trying to show the little boys that it's cool to act and to try not just like throwing it away because you're ashamed and afraid of trying something new okay a specter a specter is haunting you're here now I want you to start again but I want you to believe in what you've written John okay a specter is haunting Europe very good the specter of Pep Guardiola okay now turn it down 30% a carry on for most of Guardiola's career this haunting took the form of a ghostly presence the signs were everywhere if you flicked on a television and found a game of football the longer you watched the more you would become aware of another agency at work behind the scenes no matter who was playing here in inverted fallback there in eye watering high line at this moment an emerging positional advantage and as you squinted at the screen the pitch shimmered and swirled and you are transported beyond the limits of the four wide lines the colors merged and eddyed for a moment you might have thought you'd caught a glimpse of an ephemeral figure in the periphery of your vision suited booted I regret that line you don't like suits in the booties yeah I don't know it seemed good at the time but maybe less so now it's fine it's fine arms waving directing his players towards a crescendo of passes and a cascade of movement if you watch the screen long enough the threads of causality would eventually converge onto a singular point a man yes Joe is the man your dad that's right this is actually a long Freudian analysis yeah you're correct no anyway I've nothing to say at this stage keep keep reading his influence was undeniable they couldn't stop telling you about it Fabio Capelo who has managed some of the most elite teams in Europe described their Guardiola era as one of the three greatest legacies in the modern history of football after the Dutch school and areigo saki's AC Milan yes Joe now this isn't I like this because you repeat this quote I think 17 times right but you obviously you either you found it early and thought this is great this is an unlock to everything I want to say or you just really like the quote it is nice in terms of being able to stage okay these are some really important moments in football but I want to point out the areigo saki's AC Milan actually that forms the basis for quite a big chunk of the book doesn't it not necessarily describing what that does but describing the environment in which Guardiola was able to be so successful do you want to briefly explain why that is the case yeah so actually under the the sheets of the pages in this book I'm telling us a narrative about the evolution of football tactics over the last 15 years and I think broadly speaking that evolution is is an out of possession yeah evolution yeah so teams without the ball were doing something in a certain way when Pep Guardiola turns up and that was influenced by a rigo saki but through time it becomes it was informed by a rigo yeah rather than influenced right yeah it was more direct than that yeah but through time it starts to become clear that if you're going to defend in this way then Guardiola essentially has a solution to that approach and so what we start seeing emerging through time is this slightly different approach to defending which causes problems to the Guardiola approach which then leads to this almost collapse that we've seen in last few seasons where yeah um it's not quite the case that you've got the your Guardiola teams just dominating games and winning suddenly the game has become much more chaotic again this is what one of the things I liked about the book the most was that when you frame it in that way you get to look at what Guardiola did it's I don't want to reduce what he did without the ball because it was very important but you get to look at what Guardiola did as an attacking team or with attacking teams and the dominance that it had sort of as the flip side of what a rigo saki did with a defensive team purely on the basis that what a rigo saki did you say was so successful that everyone had to do it and in a sense what Guardiola did was so successful that everyone had to try and do it at least right and in both cases one was the antidote to to the other and since Guardiola the book becomes about what the antidote to Guardiola has been and so you sort of you get these kind of peaks and troughs but I like the idea of although football's far too complicated to simplify into defending and attacking I like the idea that there was like a revolution in defending which was adopted by everyone because it was so successful and then there was a revolution in attacking which completely undid that thing I like the idea that we're going back into the revolution in defending again now or we're seeing it play out right now and everyone is trying to introduce that man marking aspect which is you know the evolution into their football although interestingly and so meresco came out this last week and said oh I don't think that this evolution towards man marking is going to move on as well and you know that a big part of the book is asking the question about what does the evolution of football tactics look like yeah it's funny like when you're writing a book about the evolution of football tactics you kind of have to have some kind of sense of what what the mechanism for that evolution is so in the first chapter I talk a little bit about that I think one of the things that so arresting about football is the fact that you always feel as though you're heading in an upward trajectory right you always feel as though like oh everything's improving and we're getting closer to good football or something but the experience I've had of writing this book is that football just constantly goes around in these cycles and it's exhausting yeah exactly it's it's almost like a a sitcom sitcom no maybe soap opera is a better teller tellin novellas it doesn't end yeah and you know at the end of each season it's like oh here we go again and you have to find solutions to the problems of the season before and how's the story going to end yeah yeah and it just doesn't with death and it change that changes your experience of it right like I think whenever whenever you have that the finality of like a book where it's like it starts here it ends here or a series yeah you like you have the book ends just to help you conceive of what's going on whereas I think if football despite the fact we all operate I think we the sense of there will be an ending, that ending never arrives. It's a good reminder to live in the present, I would say, before you inevitably die. Shall I continue? I think you should. Well maybe you would prefer to hear it from Bruno Fernandez, the captain of Manchester United. For him, Pep Guardiola is the best in the world, period. He is the coach who has changed football the most. Everyone wants to be Pep. There's no need to hide that. All teams, everyone tries to play like Manchester City, and tries to find the dynamics they have had due to their success. Former England manager, Gareth Southgate. You okay with me mentioning Gareth Southgate? I think it's okay in this instance. Yeah, normally I'd be upset, even the mention that you talking about his name. Take my manager's name out of your mouth. But no, because you've written it down, it's okay. Former England manager, Gareth Southgate puts it more succinctly. Pep has been an innovator when I watch kids football now. I see them playing out from the back. There was something about Pep Guardiola's approach to football that raised it above the mundane flow of tactical evolution, giving it a prominent over what had gone before. Javi Hernandez? Yes, Joe. I just want to point out that Javi Hernandez is the new coach of the Netherlands. I mean, people will know that by the time we're recording this at least a week in advance. But I kind of love it as a coaching appointment, because while I don't think it will work, although it could do. I don't think it will work. It just makes me feel like it's one of the most correct managerial appointments I can imagine. The historical relationship between Barcelona and the Netherlands is one of the most fruitful football collaborations. And so I'm fully supportive of it, even though I can't imagine it's going to totally work. Well, they were threatening with going with Roberto Martinez at one point, weren't they? Unfortunately, that one fell through. But it's interesting you mentioning that, because we trace that history, I guess the slow migration of those ideas about football, I actually trace all the way back to that first international friendly between England and Scotland, then sort of migrates down through the North of England, onto the continent through the low country. I don't know why I enjoyed saying that so much. You did a little smile on your face after you said the low country. And then with Reenis Micheals and Johan Kroif and Lüven Karl. Lüven Karl. Did you say that in the whole the way through? I also said Martin Erdogor. But yeah, that migration then ends in Barcelona with those coaches going there. But actually, you don't see it going back the other way very often. Do you don't see the Spanish link back to the Netherlands? So that'll be fun to watch. But anyway, I'll go on. Javi Hernandez, one of the most important pieces in Guadalupe, Diola's famous Barcelona side, described this phenomenon in quasi-religious terms as something which cuts through the usual passage of time. In his words, Guadalupe has a way of understanding football which is unique. In one way or another, he lets you understand how the play has to progress and he changed the way of defending by going forward. It's something different. It's not from this moment. Not from this moment. And yet, despite this transcendental quality, Guadalupe's tactical approach almost completely defined the way football tactics were viewed, almost as soon as he arrived on the scene. Pundit and former Manchester United player Gary Neville said it best. "The way he has infiltrated countries, dominated football, but also influenced others, I don't think I've seen anything like it." I like that you've included, oh, I should have rang the bell, sorry, hold on. Yes, Joe. I like that you've included already two examples of like former and current Man United players praising him, just to sort of get over that. The tribalism, this is a Man United fans safe book, I would say. My main worry is that Man United fans will look at this book and think, oh, it's light blue, it's about Pep Guardiola, it's not for me. It couldn't be further from the truth. Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting as well because like, yes, I've included, you know, Bruno Fernandez, Gary Neville, these are two guys who, you know, they simply have to accept that Guardiola is great. We're going to talk a little bit about Lionel Messi starting to go in a different direction here, but that original quote from Fabio Capello where he defines Guardiola's era as one of the big three eras. Actually, some of the quotes from Capello over the last few years, I think he's been a lot more negative about the impact of Guardiola as well. And maybe I should have included some of them just to highlight the narrative arc of the book, right? Which is like, you can write people off when they get old, it's fine. Yeah, I mean, that's where he stopped meaning anything past the year 65, I think. But I do think that that's what's so interesting about this is I think when you view people's opinions of Guardiola from 10 years ago versus where they are, now there has been that shift. Yeah. And that evolution wasn't just people got old. It was also people, you know, the way that Guardiola played football changed. Yeah. And those people started enjoying it less. Right. And a big part of, I think the argument I'm making at the beginning of the book about the way that Guardiola's tactics develop is that you have this swinging needle between risk and risk of aversion. And early on Guardiola's Barcelona can play very risky football because the conditions allow it. The longer time goes on, it becomes harder for him to win. If anything, it's not his fault. Yeah. Right. People loved big brother in the first few seasons. Yeah. It's over time. Yeah. And that's what was the difficulty, right? When you are successful, people do start finding ways of making it harder for yourself. And the solutions for him were to swing towards risk of aversion. And I think actually the last part of the book is about how that swing to risk aversion went to a point where even he had to recognize we can't just keep swinging the turning the dialogue that says risk aversion. At some point, you have to accept that there's problems with your tactical approach as well. Well, also, you know, I said it ingest that thing about big brother. But thinking about it now, it really is a good analogy because if you're saying here that, well, it's actually Guardiola's opposition that work out how to stymie him that force him to be more risk averse, which eventually it means that he plays a slightly less attractive form of football. You know, it was the big brother audience, wasn't it, that became accustomed to these various shocks and dramatic twists and turns of reality TV. And therefore there, their experience forced the production teams to keep upping the ante with more and more drama. It's really the opposition that you have to blame. Yeah, and I guess to carry that analogy on, you know, there's a sense in which it has to be spontaneous, right, with big brother. And as soon as you try and confect that kind of those kind of conditions, it's never quite the same. And I think it was true with Guardiola's football by the end as well. Like, there comes a point at which you just have to accept. We've, this has had its moment. We have to let it be what it was. Right, crack on because you've got a lot to get through. Yes. We're talking about that turn then to this more sinister underbelly now. But for some, there was a more sinister underbelly to this haunting. Take Lionel Messi, for example. Messi is one of the few living players who could make a claim to be the best footballer of all time. He owes a big part of his career to Guardiola, even if his success was inevitable regardless. And has come out in praise of the manager who helped catapult him into the line light, describing him as the best of all. But his admiration is far from uncritical. Speaking on a podcast ahead of the Copa America in 2024, Messi admitted. Yes, Joe. Sorry, this is not, I don't want to start a conversation. I just wanted to make one comment, which is I just can't imagine Messi on a podcast. Sorry, Carry on. What did he admit? He admitted that the Guardiola era has caused a bit of confusion. Everyone wants to play like that now. They tell six or seven year olds to play with two touches quickly. At that age, what happened to me needs to happen to these kids. We shouldn't take away their spontaneity. For all its success then, the so-called Guardiola era came at a cost. It became the reference point against which all football was compared. And after all, why not? Why wouldn't you want to mirror the manager who had defined the era? So much of the introduction. Oh, you've introduced yourself. I'm going to interrupt myself. Ring in a little bell. There we go. It's funny reading this back because so many of these references that I'm seeing are just like people won't ever get them. I mean, they probably will with this one. This is me and- Which, but are you talking about why wouldn't you want to mirror the manager? So what's that reference? Black mirror. Why wouldn't you want to mirror the manager? Is it a meme? It's a Lord of the Rings reference. It's the Frodo when he's got the- Oh, Billbo. When he's got the ring. Why shouldn't I keep it? Oh, no way. Is it? I like that a lot, yeah. That's a reference between- After all, why not? It was mine. Yeah, after all, why not? So I've got a few of those. I know it's funny when you don't do that. You don't- But this was me and Grant Gendo, who's my first reader. Right. Just sort of making a joke or more. So I will include something like this, maybe just to see like what he says. I didn't get it. Yeah, right. I'm a big, you know. And I think you can get away with it, right? So, but there's a few of those little like hidden references like that where- That's nice. When you're writing, you're just like- You throw in just- I am. Yeah. My precious. Why wouldn't you want to try to recreate his football at every level in a bid to generate the same kinds of successes that he had achieved? But as Messi pointed out, reproductions are rarely as good as the original. As a youngster, the original Messi was not being a academy farmed into a two touches quickly system, but was instead given a spontaneity which, at least according to his own version of the narrative, was being taken away from children in the present moment. By trying to arrive at footballing perfection, so Messi's logic seemed to suggest, we had simply arrived at a paint by numbers world of cheap imitation in which the need for success came at the cost of things that drive us to the game in the first place. As time went by, these narratives accelerated. Few people have expressed the idea of modern football experienced as loss, as tersely as the Irish journalist Ken Earley, who, writing in the aftermath of a single goal, Manchester City win over Chelsea in January 2022, bemoaned the fact that the gap between football as understood and practiced. by top coaches like Guardiola and football as understood and experienced by the fans has never been wider. For early, this was typified by the recent decline of long-range shots. As coaches, you can see statistically how unlikely it is that a player will score from distance, increasingly discourage them. And so, the long-range screamer, arguably the most thrilling sight in football, is being optimised out of the game. Football evolves while the fans pine for what's been lost. There it is again, that concept of loss. With the advent of the Pep Guardiola era, so the arguments went, we had started to experience football as loss. The loss of excitement in early's death of the long-range screamer. The loss of player spontaneity. The loss of talents like Jack Grelish, who, in the modern game, had become a cautionary tale. An abulliant winger at Aston Villa, who transferred to Manchester City and subsequently transformed into a workman-like possession specialist whose life on the pitch seemed devoid of all joy. And then there came the homogeneity. A robotic game, says Fabregas called it, speaking to marker. You watch games and you know what is going to happen, and it becomes very monotonous in many teams. Once again, the protagonist here was Guardiola, whose seemingly absolute success had prompted almost every other football manager to attempt a barely concealed imitation. Yes, Geoff. This is not a quiz, but it's a quick game. Let's list the top five coaches who've done barely concealed imitation of the Pep Guardiola. Now, and we can say at some point in the crisper, for example, I would say Lewis and Rico should be on the list, although he has since evolved away from that, right? Yeah. He's there? Definitely. Who else have we got? Meresco. Meresco. Yeah, he's trying to hold onto it now. He don't want to change it now, you know? You can maybe make the argument as well for Shavvy. Shavvy and his Barcelona team, although, yeah, I don't know, but Shavvy is maybe slightly different. I think we should have he what you write later though. Yeah, that's true. But I got the impression with him that he was, it's like Guardiola, but with a bit of frustration that when players do things, they aren't all as good as him. Yeah, yeah. And it's just like, why can't you play these like perfect long balls into the feet of four? What about Hansi Flick does a very German impression? Yeah, but it's quite different. Vincent Company? Again, I think like with Flick and company. Vincent Company is just doing a really marriage impression. Yeah. I like the Flick illusion, because I do talk about that later in the book, right? Yeah. It's almost like with Flick, you have an attempt to return to the original. So we talked about Guardiola shifting from like risk to risk aversion. Yeah. And I feel as though we're Flick, you get that risk. It's sort of like a movement back towards the risk. And you end up with, therefore, some Flick games being like incredibly exciting like end-to-end affairs where actually they end up losing because they don't set up the sort of defensive conditions to be able to support even despite the fact that they're scoring a lot of goals. I've always thought that Johan Croft did a really bad impression about one that was much more sort of, you know, ill-conceived. Yeah. Again, we have a section on that in the book, obviously. And I really like the illusion that we make there. There's actually Abel Mashaarosh put me onto the Borghez essay called Forghe Borghez. Forghe, Borghez, yeah. Kafka and his predecessors, I think it's called something like that. And yeah, it's really interesting thinking about the influence that you can have on history from the, we always think of people having an influence into the future, right? Lineally. Whereas I think it's quite interesting to think about how we change our view of the past on the basis of how people reinterpret the past. And Guadiola obviously reinterprets the ideas of Croft and the ideas of Van Gogh, etc. And actually, in my argument that, you know, brings us to a further understanding than we would ever have reached with just those two before him. Well, I really identified with that part of the book because I'm actually, I'm doing quite a lot to have an impact on my ancestors. I've decided not to have any children so as to mock their existence. Hey, all that struggle you guys went through. It was for nothing. Thank you. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. Yeah, we should get back to this before you cancel yourself. Yeah, think about how hard it was for them. Can I, did we get five then? That was that five flip? Yeah, that's five. Yeah. The result, an indistinguishable world of sameness in which both sides attempted to use replica tactics against one another. Just a quick insert here from me to say, what we just did, puts poo to this idea, puts paid, not just poo. It puts paid to this. All the coaches that we just mentioned have also evolved their own styles as well. This is referencing a time in the past. Yeah, we're talking about, I think, as well, you know, the mid-table clashes you get in the Premier League where, you know, you see two coaches who now no longer are at the fall. This out into the ball. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Yeah. And there was one final loss, perhaps the ultimate loss, the loss of competition. Up until the 2324 season, Manchester City had one six out of the last seven Premier League titles, including with a previously unmatched series of four consecutive titles. The journalist and tactical historian Jonathan Wilson noted the tension here. Superiority of that kind is unhealthy for a league that has historically prided itself on its competitiveness. By the time that season drew to a close, to reappropriate the old adage variously attributed to Frederick Jameson or Slavoj Gizek, it seemed easier to imagine the end of football than it was to imagine the end of Pep Guardiola. But almost as soon as this point was reached, it seemed as though Guardiola's influence began to recede. Where previously his haunting of the modern game had taken the form of a ubiquitous ghostly presence, slowly but surely the specter of Pep started to fade away, or at least take a different form. And as is so often the case, this gradual shift passed many of us by until it announced itself through catastrophe. In the 2425 season, Guardiola experienced something previously unseen in his career, and Anos Horribilis, a disaster year. Yes, Joe. Now I just want to point out to possible readers that although it might seem like, hang on, is this guy about to use a lot of Latin? It's really only two phrases, and although they do appear an annoying number of times, it's not throughout the book, okay? So don't be put off by his intellectual bullshit. Anyway, carry on. And although he emerged relatively unscathed from this disaster year, the world that he emerged into seems somehow different. In fact, he did not win another Premier League title with City before departing in the summer of 2026. It wasn't that Guardiola had lost his touch as a coach. If anything, his route through his disastrous period showed that he was worthy of the respect he had earned up to that point. What had changed was that it seemed as though Guardiola's grip on the tiller had begun to slip. Now, rather than steering the ship, it had begun to feel as though the ship was steering him. Yes, his team was still competitive, but it was as if he was having to relearn how to exist in the world, a strange new world that had replaced the one where he had once held complete dominion. In the wake of this shift, European football found itself being haunted by a very different specter. The ghost of a Guardiola who is still very much present, but who has started to feel increasingly absent in spite of this presence. Now, this is the sort of key theme of the book right here. You know, a lot of people I'm sure have already asked you, why is it called the specter of what does that even mean? You know, and I will admit when I read the intro for the first time, I had to go over this bit a couple of times to really understand what it was that you met. Do you want to just say now, why is it the specter of Pep? Why does it matter that it's a ghost of Guardiola that's haunting the league, rather than the real Guardiola? Because you wrote this before he left Manchester City. Yeah, I think the reason I chose to use that metaphor is because in many respects, like the ideas that he had left him and then sort of took on a new life of their own almost. And I think that was what was so interesting for me is it wasn't, yes, this was, I wanted to tell the story of Guardiola from a tactical point of view. But at the same time, this is also the story of other coaches and what they did with that legacy and how they responded to it. And I think for me, I wanted to get across that point that this isn't just, whenever I'm talking about the specter of Pep, it's not just him being there and having these conversations with these coaches. It's these coaches almost having him at the back of their mind when they're considering what they're doing. Responding to a world creative by him, but maybe he doesn't live in. Yeah. And I think also with that metaphor, what you get really nicely is the fact that, you know, with ghosts, sometimes they appear and sometimes they disappear, right? And I feel as though we had that period where he was just constantly there, right? He was like the poltergeist in the Premier League, he was just, whatever was happening, there was people were trying to respond to it. He was always **** up your ****. Yeah, right. And then, and then it got to a point where it was like, ah, you know, the poltergeist and the addicts been quiet for a few years, like what's going on there? And again, I wanted to sort of tell that story, like why was it that suddenly Guardiola just felt less scary, right? At some point. And that was a kind of interesting. Again, I think maybe to a point where people over exaggerated how less scary felt. Yeah. But again, I think that was the interesting, that was the interesting narrative framework through that 15 years was that at the high point of Guardiola's career, it just felt like this guy's never going to go. He's never going to lose his influence. He's going to ruin for some people football for good. But then it just happened so quickly that that reversal occurred. And now we're in a world where he's not in the league. And no one really knows where football's going. And we've suddenly just very quickly just sleptwalked almost into actually football's changed quite a lot. Yeah. Well, and you sort of go on to explain some of this now. You can pick up from the next part. Yeah. So this is the story that this book seeks to tell. This is a very dramatic paragraph. Yeah. Make sure you sell it with meaning. such it might be tempting to view it as a purely biographical endeavor. A story about a real person, but it is not. This is a ghost story. Oh, I love it. I love it. Do you know there's a great line in the Pirates of the Caribbean, the Curse of the Black Pearl. It's a, it's a, what's his name? Jeffrey. Oh, yeah. The Australian. Yeah, I forget his events. Jeffrey, Jeffrey, something. Anyway, he says, yeah, your best start believe in and ghost stories, my dear. You're in one. You know, it's a, it's a really great line reading. Your best start believe in and ghost stories, Mr. Turner. You're in one. Yeah, and I, you know, I wanted this to be a shocking paragraph, right? Because I think so often when we read books about football, it's just kind of like this guy came along and he did this and, and then he did that and he did this. And, and we don't ever really think about like what's it's stake in the idea of like relaying a narrative. Sure. I wanted to really nail home. This is a story about the ideas and the influences and the fact that they often like escape us as, as being so compelling. I was very scared when I read this paragraph because I realized there were 350 more pages to read. Of course, every ghost is a shadowy version of a real person, but a ghost has the ability to do something that a real person cannot. It has the ability to be present despite being absent. It has the ability to haunt. In Guardiola's case, this haunting took the form of a complete revolution in the way that people thought about the sport, whether they liked it or not. Anyone living through the last few decades of European football has been subject to this haunting. We think about the game in a way that is almost impossible to separate from his influence and only now are we starting to extricate ourselves from this experience. In telling the story of the specter of Pep then, we're not just interested in the man himself. We are also interested in how his ideas about the game were formed, how they reach their apex, and how they continue to linger even into the presence where their influence begins perhaps to diminish. It's very funny as well because like I wrote the intro right at the beginning of the process. It seemed you were done at the end. Tom Noble, my publisher, contacted me and said if you ever thought of writing a book and sell the whole thing. We talked about writing the next book in the series from Inverting the Pyramid. He was like, if you're interested, let's go to the pub. I'm in London tomorrow. This is almost at the end of play on one day and then the next day we were in the pub in the evening having a chat about it and he was like, just jot down a structure for how you might see the book going. I turned up the next day literally with an envelope with just really crazy scribblings on the back. We pretty much used that structure for the book. It didn't really change much. We squeezed a few chapters together and got rid of a few bits here and there, but the overall structure I think was there. I think this is two and a half years ago. We definitely lent more into the collapse at the end because that happened while we were writing the book. That was Gwadiola's and Horribola's. The point where I suggested why not use the rise of a full of Gwadiola as this narrative arc. They were like, the full of Gwadiola are you sure? Because it hadn't really happened at that point then. You know, you're right to point it out, but I think at that point I was just kind of like, yeah, they'll have a few like, not quite as good seasons and won't win the league. Little did I know that it would collapse quite this scale that it did. You're the luckiest guy in the world. Exactly. I've locked out again. But he said, well, going from here, why not write the introduction and then we'll have a good idea about your writing style and you'll have a better sense of what the book's going to be about. Now, obviously, I rewrote the introduction when I got to the end, change bits, but this part I think is pretty much continuing from what I wrote at the beginning. So when we listen now, we know to listen with that in mind. Yeah. And when you see the perhaps in M dashes there, that you know that that's an editorial that's been put in to be like, let's be a little bit softer. I thought you were going to say it was written by Chatchy PT. Yeah, that's right. So even into the presence where their influence begins to diminish was the original line and we softened it with perhaps, didn't have begins to diminish. Yeah. This is a book about the history of modern football tactics, then, but it is not an exhaustive history. Our focus is on the evolution of the European game, although I have attempted to reference non-European sources where I can. Even within this European emphasis, you may notice that some of the influential coaches from the period remain unacknowledged. For example, I don't think I mentioned Pochettino at all. No, although you do mention what's his name? Fernando Denees? Yes. Yeah, or Denees as I think I called him throughout your book, which is the correct, Brazilian pronunciation. As a reference of a non-European coach, you do talk about a little bit, but as you point out. Especially with someone like Aurego Saki, where, you know, it's quite easy to just put him down as a guy who had this great idea and away from there, when actually a lot of his thought was influenced by South American coaches as well. So I talk a little bit about that. Yeah. In part, this is because our focus is not on the history of modern football as a totality, but the history of Guadialas influence upon it. No doubt, there are a few parts of the history that remain untouched by this influence, but we do not have to touch on every part to tell the story. That's often that just want to point out, oh my god, I'm a good at ringing the bell, are you? You always shout at me for this. Okay, but just say yes. No, it's okay. Yes, Joe. Thank you. This is the part where you talk now, Joe. Yeah, because I rang my bell. I just wanted to point out that what you just read, which was that no doubt there are a few parts of history remain untouched by it. We don't have to touch on every part to tell the story, just a very good advice that I give you whenever you're making a video, you know, when it's 16 minutes long and I go, there's 14 minutes of references here. Why don't you just tell them you know? Yeah, but think of all of the other hours of the three hundred and sixty pages of breakfast. Absolutely. There's also a sense in which I've tried to retain a feeling of incompleteness to reflect the reality of history itself. No. In many respects, this book can be read as a collection of essays, each of which touches upon an important topic in modern football. Any chapter can be read on its own terms, but together they form layers of sediment through which the full story emerges. Yes, Joe. Now, this is a new going to reference. I actually read this book with my wife, because I was preparing to do, to read the audiobook for it. And my wife was interested. She knows you. She wanted to read some of it. And in the end, she read a lot of it loud, allowed to me so that I could hear someone reading it. And she just loved the geological bits. Every time a sediment was mentioned, she was just in floods of tin. She loved it. She thought that the sediment metaphor, which I won't spoil for people, the sediment metaphor, which runs throughout the book, was both an excellent metaphor to use in this scenario and also very funny. And of course, you would do it. Of course, you would use it. Yeah. Anyway, carry on. Of course, I get that from Reinhardt Kostelek. So yeah, I can't claim. You didn't invent it. No, you just used somebody else's sediment metaphor. I chose this approach because all too often the desire of the historian is to smooth off the rough edges of their narrative to attempt to produce a nice neat interpretation of the events. For the most part, however, history itself resists this desire for completeness. At points in the text, I explore the topic of historiography, touching on some of the underlying ideas about what it means to tell a faithful story in the first place. The conclusions we reach there are that history seldom takes the form of a coherent linear narrative, but comprises an often confusing entanglement of different timelines, which interact with one another, making the job of the historian akin to that of the archaeologist, carefully extricating these disparate timelines from one another in a bid to make sense of them. Done well enough, this process will give us the best chance of getting the story right. Now, it may seem counterintuitive to begin from this point of skepticism, but I am confident that the story I end up telling here is the best I can manage about the history of modern football tactics. So let's begin. The best you can manage. The best I can manage. It was pretty good, man. It's very good. Now, one thing I want to point out also, you mentioned that these chapters can be sort of read individually if you want to. I would recommend people read the book from the beginning to the end, but I will say that I think on the Monday after this podcast episode is released, we're publishing a video on TIFO, which is a sort of very shortened version of a bit of one of the chapters about Deserbie, a Roberto Deserbie, who's now the spurs manager, and about how his football, where the inspiration to play in that way came from, how it intersects with Guardiola. I do think that would be quite a fun, you know, to describe it here, but I do think the main context for which I took away, the understanding of how Guardiola thought about the game, is from a Marcelo Bielza approach. It's from this notion of how you see football. I wonder if you would just walk through that just briefly now, because I think that's the good linchpin for then understanding everything else that happens in the book, and that's the thing about attacking big spaces and small spaces, a very simplified way of thinking about football. Yeah. So, yeah, I guess in the first third of the book, it's all about Guardiola's ideas and how he evolves them and the sources that he uses and how his ideas change through time and how that impacts. So, in chapter three, we talk about Jose Maria and Antonio Conte as kind of examples of coaches doing things, maybe slightly differently and maybe slightly less successfully in the wake of Guardiola. But in that first third, the big idea that I really pushes this idea that Guardiola, he wants to control the game by forcing the opponent deep into their own box, because that allows him to control them from a. defensive point of view as much as from an attacking point of view, and that approach goes against the received wisdom, as I call it, up until that point where, in general, the idea was when you're attacking, you want to be attacking big spaces because it's much easier to attack big spaces, and when you're defending you want to defend small spaces, or make the spaces smaller because it's harder for teams to, if so fact, the other way around, if it's easier to attack large spaces, you want to make the spaces smaller when you're defending. That's a common sense approach. Yeah, exactly. And Guardiola flips that on its head, right, because he makes the spaces he's attacking smaller by forcing the opponent deep into their own box, and then he opens out all of this space behind us, high line, which can then be attacked if the opponent wins the ball. Now, obviously there's a trade off there for Guardiola, he thinks that he can possess the ball long enough, and well enough that actually the qualitative differences between the chances you create, so if you're attacking small spaces, the chances you create are probably going to be smaller than the ones your opponents create when they're attacking that big space in behind. But because you're able to control the game well enough, it becomes a quantitative trade off. So you're saying, we're going to have 70% possession, we're going to have 20, 30 shots, the opponent's going to have three or four shots with their 30%, 35% possession. And if you do that well enough over a long period, you're going to get a win percentage of 70%. And that's good enough to win leagues, which is why Guardiola wins so many leagues. So yeah, that's the sort of benchmarks, sort of idea, the big picture idea behind what Guardiola does. And then with Deserbie, that chapter is called re-inverting the pyramid, right? It's a hat tip to Jonathan Wilson's book, but also the fact that actually what you get with Deserbie is he sort of says, what about if we go back to the old way, right? And we make spaces small that we're defending and we make the spaces we're attacking bigger, as big as possible. But he does it in a slightly different way, rather than as it used to be the case, you basically sit in a low block, don't give the opposition any space to attack. And then when you win the ball back, you then transition attack as quickly as you can into those big spaces that have opened out. And that's bad because essentially you're just giving the initiative to the opposition and the ball. And you're saying, you have plenty of time to just try and break us down. That's exactly what Guardiola is trying to achieve. In order to do that, you need to not have the ball. Yeah. Deserbie's like, what about if we can do it with the ball? What if we can create those conditions by possessing the ball deep, making the spaces really small, getting the opponent to press us, by baiting that press in, by provoking a high press, and then have ways of escaping that press and hitting the spaces in behind. So the story about Deserbie is very much that sort of new twist on the old logics. Yeah. Well, people can watch that video. It'll be on the deeper football YouTube channel on Monday, but also it's worth saying that's just like an example of a frontier of coaches who are trying to either reinvest or get all their ideas, find new ideas of how to take down Guardiola, how to destabilise this approach. And Donnie O'Reill is another coach that gets a mention. We mentioned earlier in this episode, Louis M. Ricke and how he's evolved at PSG. There's a section on that too. Pop as well. There's a big chapter on clock. Big old chapter on clock. And that's on sort of chaos versus control. Yeah. And I say that the chapters have this sort of largely a central idea. That's definitely what's going on in that chapter. It's kind of like Guardiola creates a world where control with the ball is everything. And then Yogan clock comes along and says, I'm going to try and make an argument that chaos can be a better approach. So again, that's the sort of underlying idea behind that chapter. Well, people can buy it on Amazon, and they can buy it at waterstones. And they can. And they can buy it at many bookshops. Independent bookshops. Support independent bookshops. Yeah. Also, audible and Spotify have the audio version. Great. And what I'd be interested in personally is if people can go to bookshops and show that there are no copies there with some proof, I would like to see that. That will be quite fun. I mean, to be able to tease John and say, oh, looks like the the waterstones in hay on why doesn't have any of your, I guess there's not a lot of John McKenzie fans in hay on why, although aren't there like 17 bookshops there? There are many, but I don't know if there's many people who live on hay on why. I think it's literally like a little small market town where people go and visit. Right. They live with not many fans in that small place. One final thing to say, a question I get asked a lot is, is the book available in India? In India. Yeah. And the reason why the book isn't currently available in India is because you didn't Indian. That's right. Indian retailers don't do pre-orders, basically. So when the book is available, they will then sell it, but until then you won't be able to see it on their website, so they don't think. So it should be available as of August the 20th, if you've not seen it. And the audio book, of course, is available on the 20th straight away. People would prefer to listen to me read it anyway than read it. It's a fair argument. Yeah. I would say if you can read, you should read it also, you know, you should buy the audio book and buy the book so that you can follow along with some of the tactics. There's not many, and I think there's only one example in the whole book where I was reading it, and I thought, no, I was going to have any fucking idea what I'm saying here. Most of the other stuff is absolutely fine. But there are some nice tactical diagrams, it would be good for people to be able to look at them as well. Yep. There we go. Thanks. No. Great. Well, we're done then, aren't we? We are done. And next week, it'll be back to normal business with me reading as it should be done. Buy my book. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.