The Manchester City boss isn’t exactly pulling his hair out.
Who would be a football manager?
Endless stress, high expectations, temperamental players, demanding owners, vocal fans, financial responsibilities and a constant demand for success. Hell, that’s only speaking about the trials and tribulations that a game of Football Manager can entail!
In the real world, we imagine that the life of a manager/head coach is a stressful one, but there’s no denying that Pep Guardiola has had more good times than bad ones in the dugout.
At Barcelona, the ’09 season will go down in history as his side won everything that was humanly possible. Since then, Guardiola added countless more trophies at the Nou Camp before dominating the Bundesliga with Bayern Munich.
This being said, there have been low points.
The Catalan coach failed to bring Europe’s biggest club prize back to Bavaria while his first season in Manchester wasn’t as groundbreaking as some hoped.
Still, there’s no denying Guardiola’s credentials and ability to play attractive football, but in a career that has seen more wins than defeats, why does he always seem to appear stressed or in search of an answer?
Basically, why is he always rubbing his head?
Allow Dani Alves to answer that.
In a recent interview with The Players Tribune, the Juventus right-back said: “The funniest thing was if we came in at half-time and the game wasn’t going well. Pep would sit down and rub his forehead. You know how he rubs his head? You’ve seen it, right? Like he’s massaging his brain, searching for the genius to come to him. He would do this right in front of us in the dressing room. Then, like magic, it would come to him. Bang! ‘I’ve got it!”
Alves adds: “Then he would jump up and start barking out instructions, drawing maths and figures on the board We will do this, this and this, and then this is how we will score.’ So we would go out, and we would do this, this and this. And that’s how we would score. It was crazy.”
There you have it. Here we were thinking that Guardiola is still contemplating why he spent €25 million to sign Dmytro Chygrynskiy for Barca from Copy and Paste FC.
