Made in Manchester: Guardiola vs Mourinho, Part II

SUCCESSES AND FAILURES

Jose Mourinho and Pep Guardiola have not been brought to Manchester to boost the English Premier League (EPL)’s box office appeal, even if the presence of modern football’s two greatest coaching masterminds holds an attraction far beyond what happens on the pitch.

They are there because they are serial winners, entrusted to revive the flagging fortunes of Manchester United and Manchester City, and while they have very different theories on how success should be achieved, the pair are united by a fierce will to win and an acceptance that both may have just taken on their biggest challenges yet.

Mourinho must make sense of the muddle left by his former boss, Louis van Gaal, in Old Trafford’s distressed post-Alex Ferguson landscape; Guardiola must drag City out of their curious slumber, make them more, not less, than the sum of their expensive parts and, in the process, elevate a club with an ingrained inferiority complex to the next level.

Mourinho is coming off the back of the biggest failure of his career, sacked by Chelsea last December with the club 16th in the EPL. Guardiola will be working with players less gilded than the groups he had at Barcelona and Bayern Munich, in a league that offers a level of competition far removed from the two-horse races he encountered in La Liga and the Bundesliga.

In that sense, Mourinho believes Guardiola’s achievements at Barcelona and Bayern, where he won a total of 21 trophies, including six titles and two Champions Leagues, in seven years, do not compare favourably to his own haul of 22 trophies over a 13-year period with Porto, Chelsea, Inter Milan and, of course, Real Madrid, where his rivalry with the Catalan turned toxic.

Guardiola’s crowning glory probably remains Barcelona’s spellbinding destruction of Manchester United in the 2011 Champions League final. Mourinho’s tour de force involved eliminating Guardiola’s Barca in the Champions League semi-finals with Inter the previous year, en route to completing a treble for the Italian club in the process.

Guardiola has won seven of his 16 meetings overall with Mourinho, including a 5-0 thumping in the Portuguese’s first Clasico in November 2010. But Mourinho achieved with Real what many thought impossible by beating Guardiola’s Barcelona —arguably the greatest club side ever assembled — to the Spanish league title in 2011-12.

MAN-MANAGEMENT, TACTICS, PLAYING STYLE

Pragmatist versus purist is the default setting for any discussion of Mourinho and Guardiola’s footballing philosophies. It is not quite as simple as that, but their sharp deviation in outlook is all the more fascinating given their shared coaching origins at Barcelona, where Mourinho was an assistant coach in the late 1990s while Guardiola was still playing but destined for a career in management.

Whereas Guardiola has remained a devoted disciple of the late Johan Cruyff and his “Total Football” philosophy, Mourinho rebelled against and ultimately rejected the possession-based model. “The more the ball circulates in midfield,” Mourinho once said, “the more likely it is that the other team will dispossess us.”

Some have wondered whether Mourinho, after losing out to Guardiola for the Barcelona job in 2008, began to define himself in opposition to Barca with a style of football far removed from tiki-taka.

Inter’s aforementioned triumph over Barcelona had come despite Mourinho’s side having just 19 per cent of the ball in the second leg. Yet allegations that Mourinho’s methods are incompatible with the attacking, expansive football he is expected to serve up at Old Trafford are invariably undermined by the statistics. In three years in Spain, his Real team twice outscored Barca. In a dozen seasons at Porto, Chelsea, Inter and Real, his sides were leading scorers on seven occasions and figured outside the top two in the goals-for column just once.

A strong advocate of counter-attacking, speed on the transition is a Mourinho doctrine. Ferguson would often talk about Chelsea’s “relentless efficiency”. Guardiola, by contrast, evolved the core concepts of “Total Football” and ball domination to the point of seldom-seen beautification. Winning alone is not enough — it has to be done in style.

But, like Mourinho, Guardiola inspires fierce loyalty in his players, albeit with a less-confrontational approach than his rival.

POWER STRUGGLES, ROWS AND CONTROVERSIES

There are few more divisive figures in football than Mourinho.

His rap sheet is deplorable, from sticking a finger in the eye of Tito Vilanova, Guardiola’s assistant, at the end of a Spanish Super Cup game to being branded an “enemy of football” by Uefa after scandalous criticism of referee Anders Frisk and subsequent claims as Real coach that Uefa effectively fixed it for Barcelona to reach the 2011 Champions League final.

In June, a settlement was reached in the sex discrimination case brought against Mourinho by Eva Carneiro, the former Chelsea doctor he was accused of calling a “daughter of a whore”.

“I do not like watching myself do some things, my wife is very critical — she really does not like who I am as a coach,” Mourinho once said.

The Portuguese is often characterised as the sinner to Guardiola’s saint.

While Guardiola’s dispute with highly respected and influential Bayern doctor Hans-Wilhelm Muller-Wohlfahrt did not plumb the ugly depths of Mourinho’s fallout with Carneiro, it did highlight the Spaniard’s ruthless, demanding and selfish streak. Muller-Wohlfahrt quit after he and the club’s medical department were allegedly blamed for Bayern’s 3-1 Champions League quarter-final, first-leg defeat to Porto last year.

As other usually mild-mannered figures, from Arsene Wenger to Manuel Pellegrini, will attest, Mourinho is capable of ruffling just about anyone’s feathers. Whether he routinely revisits such psychological strategies in Manchester remains to be seen, but Guardiola vs Mourinho II promises to be a must-see sequel. THE DAILY TELEGRAPH