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Tag Archives: Pep Guardiola

Brothers In Arms

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September 9, 2024
Music, Pop Culture, Rock, Soccer, Sports
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Disclosure: I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time around men directly related to each other recently. To that point, in three out of four recent weekends, I was surrounded by brothers, including my own. I’ve always enjoyed feeding off the fraternal vibe, yet I went to a college without Greek life. The camaraderie, the internal knowledge, the handoffs one can only perform with a certain degree of intimacy: this is what gets me.

From back-to-back bachelor parties through, of all things, a Phish festival, the brotherly tone has been a strong presence for me recently. And then, lo and behold: rumors of an Oasis reunion began haunting my phone on a recent Saturday.

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An Aching Kind of Growing

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December 14, 2017
Soccer, Sports
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Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Some things have a way of shocking you when they have no business doing so. A tyrannical figure of popular culture, bowing at the altar of truths unspoken for years, decades even, on his (always “his”) way out to pasture; an airline bumping your flight up two minutes, giving you reason to engage in cognitive dissonance between “What difference does that make?” and “Time in travel is everything”; a disgraced senator riding near-hilariously antiquated fantasies to a too-slim loss of his seat and, as far as everyone is concerned, his relevance.

While the mountains that moved to make some recent changes refused to rattle in the English Premier League to the extent that they once did for the likes of Claudio Ranieri and company, the stars keep dressing themselves up and shivering just enough for a once-beleaguered and tormented club. With its 4-0 win over Swansea City on Wednesday, Manchester City established a new record for consecutive league wins. At the center of this triumphant firestorm is one Pep Guardiola, the ex-“Next-Greatest Manager Ever” and a man of footy demons both external and internal.

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The Ones Who Live Forever

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April 17, 2015
Soccer, Sports
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Bear surprise

On Wednesday, FC Porto, last year’s third-place Portuguese club who only made it into the UEFA Champions League by virtue of the Play-off round, beat reigning Bundesliga kings Bayern Munich, with noted machinist Pep Guardiola at the managerial helm. The German giants had lost only three games all season coming into the match, depending on when you started counting, and looked poised to similarly dismantle the ostensibly outmatched Porto. But a funny thing happened on the way to the semi-final.

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On Spain, Barcelona and the “death” of Tiki-Taka

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July 8, 2013
Soccer, Sports
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Credit: Victoria and Albert Museum

Credit: Victoria and Albert Museum

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying.

–Robert Harrick, “To The Virgins, To Make Much of Time”

For the better part of the last five years, at least since Euro 2008 signaled the dawn of a Spanish renaissance in the sport, the Spanish men’s national football team has ridden a possession-heavy, triangular passing-based game to great success and historic heights, and not only by Spanish standards. The style they have made their own, affectionately dubbed tiki-taka for its quick passing, had its roots in the Ajax/Netherlands “total football” system of the 1970s. When the greatest Dutch player ever, Johann Cruyff, became FC Barcelona’s manager in 1988, he brought the total football mentality with him and placed the greatest burden in the field on his most talented midfielder, Josep Guardiola. Guardiola ascended to the throne at Barcelona in June 2008 and left it four years later having put together perhaps the greatest list of accomplishments in any four-year span in the history of club soccer.

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