Manchester City rival is also a Pepa fan
Arteta looks at his time with Guardiola a little differently: he worked with Pep as a coach rather than a player. The City coach has fans of the highest caliber even inside Manchester – United coach Eric ten Hague watched Pep’s work at Bayern for two years, helming the Munich reserve team.
“I was able to become intimately familiar with his approach and learned a lot. Soccer in Germany has changed because of Pep, the whole league is different under the influence of his ideas. I watched almost every training session and watched how he transferred his philosophy to the field,” the Red Devils coach said.
It wasn’t just about tactics. Ten Hague stressed Guardiola’s contagious enthusiasm, which allowed the players to give their all, even at training. The Dutchman also highlighted Pep’s total dislike of convention and openness to experimentation: for example, the Spaniard used David Alaba and Philipp Lahm as inverted full-backs for the first time. By the way, the same thing Arteta did at Arsenal with Aleksandr Zinchenko and Ainslie Maitland-Niles, Kompany with Burnley uses the same trick in the attacking phase.
Guardiola teaches uncompromising courage
Another striking trait of Guardiola is total uncompromising. At City, the first thing he did was kick out Joe Hart, the club’s pupil and England’s main goalkeeper – the keeper did not meet Pep’s standards for kicking. The coach also sidelined one of the leaders of the dressing room, Yaya Toure, and Sergio Agüero was harassed by the coach at press conferences: the Argentine could not get into the philosophy of the coach.
Guardiola had just started at Barcelona, but he already had grit and agility: on his first day with the Barcelona managerial team he told his bosses that he wanted to get rid of Ronaldinho, Deku and Samuel Eto’o. “We will move on without them. It’s time for a reset,” the defiant Spaniard said. Eto’o eventually helped Guardiola win the Champions League, but left the following summer.
Guardiola has always had guts – the same can be said of coaches vying with him for Premier League and FA Cup trophies. Arteta made it clear who is in charge at Arsenal when he decided to part ways with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. Ten Hague, already at the stage of acquaintance with Old Trafford, dealt as calmly as possible with Cristiano Ronaldo’s slip-ups, disregarding the Portuguese’s huge ego and the number of Golden Balls.
