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Originally Posted by thenry
agreed he did have extremely good players at hand and he did buy some highly fee'd players on big contracts. what i see is Pep fine tuned Barca bringing back roots of the club.
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The process that led to the current Barcelona generation pre-dates Guardiola's stint as manager and actually dates back to when he was a player at the club under Rijkaard and Louis van Gaal. That's when Barcelona decided to focus a lot on their youth players. This was in large part to their upper management included their President, Laporta. All this sort of started in 2002 and since then they focused a lot more on their academy and ensuring players like Inestia were considered the future of their team as opposed to big, strong, fast players.
Guardiola arrived as the first generation of this new era Barcelona team came to their peak. However it was the product of 10 years of work. He had all that going for him as well as a bigger budget in a less challenging league.
I think he is still a great manager. His team play good football and it takes a certain strength to cope with the pressure he was under. You may have the best players in the world but you still need to manage them. However we have no idea how Guardiola will do outside Barcelona, a team he knew well, a culture he understood and the organisation he grew up in.
Importantly we haven't seen how he would cope in a set-up and scenario that would meet him at Arsenal. He has one real job in management and it wasn't one that had the challenges he would face in England or at Arsenal.
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with regards to buying big and i mean big, does it really always have to be that? no in my opinion. its up in the air whether or not Pep could work with a budget smaller than Barcas and lack of Messi but can you doubt he'll get a squad playing how he wants? joining Arsenal would be a big challenge for Pep. Not only would he have to sign within means but get the squad playing. everything else including stability is here. plus HE would be turning round yet another club like Barca hitting snags.
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Remember it's not playing how he wants. It's playing how Barcelona want. The kids in the youth team are taught to play in that way from the day they join. You can't export that style of play and impose it on other players. Arsenal want to do the same, Wilshere being our best product of that system so far, but it's difficult.