As Pep Guardiola enjoyed success after success in charge of Barcelona, we repeatedly found ourselves asking when his team would be considered better than that of his predecessor, Frank Rijkaard.
Then, all of a sudden, the comparisons stopped. Eventually they just *were* better. Comparison over. One day it stopped being a matter of debate.
And then they went on to be lauded as probably the best team to ever play the game.
But now, as Luis Enrique scales new heights at Camp Nou, we’re hearing similar rumblings once more.
And it certainly feels fair to start asking the same sort of questions. Are the current crop better than Guardiola’s two-time Champions League winners? And if not, how far away are they?
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In football, there is always a tendency for one’s memories to be biased towards the present.
It seems preposterous, given the climate of nostalgia in which aspects of the game exist, but there are a few factors at play which make this weighting more understandable.
When people reminisce about the black-and-white images of British football’s emergence on the European stage, broadcasting’s relative infancy meant you were only seeing the best of the best.
Even the sepia-tinged FA cup memories of Ronnie Radford and the like are imbued with a significance which – in practical terms – couldn’t exist today.
The dilution of English cup competitions via wall-to-wall coverage of domestic and European league action and the relative loss of football as event television means even if non-league Hereford did beat top-flight Newcastle today, it would likely take pride of place in news cycles for a matter of days at most. At the very least, few outside Shropshire or Tyneside would be reflecting on it 40 years later.
Hereford fans chase Ronnie Radford round the Edgar Street pitch as they celebrate a shock win over Newcastle in 1972 pic.twitter.com/uQZLf94FeV
— Terrace Images (@TerraceImages) July 5, 2015
The only difference nowadays is that the predominance of live coverage (not to mention inescapable online reports, rumours and video content) means everything is condensed. Five years in football feels like an age (and when you look at managerial lifespans, there’s an argument for saying it is an age), while the game has been divided by some fans into pre and post 1992, even if some residue of the former slipped through the cracks and infiltrated the Premier League and Champions League in their respective first decades.
That’s why shows like Football Italia (and Gazzetta) will always be reminiscent of a simpler, more innocent time when terrestrial television had a share of club football, and another dividing line can be drawn which has more relevance to the Barcelona question.
For the entirety of Guardiola’s tenure at Camp Nou, a selection of Champions League games were still available on terrestrial television. And not just any match, but the first choice of live match every Wednesday, meaning we got to see Barça eviscerate Arsenal in back-to-back seasons before seeing off a domestically dominant Manchester United in the 2011 final. But we also saw them eliminated from the 2012 competition at the hands of Roberto di Matteo’s Chelsea, with the 1-0 Stamford Bridge defeat coming in front of terrestrial viewers.
When it comes to Luis Enrique’s side, we get a lot more and a lot less. You’ll struggle to find a La Liga or Champions League game that isn’t being televised somewhere, at least when Barcelona are involved, so there’s inevitably opportunity to watch MSN and the rest on a stream if not on TV. But the same goes for plenty of other teams, to the point where oversaturation tempts many to be more selective.
The contrast between now and 2009 can be summarised in the trade-off people make between watching their game against a Getafe or a Deportivo La Coruña just because it’s on versus a much higher-quality mobile or tablet stream of any other fixture of your choosing. So, while there may be a recency bias, that bias doesn’t exist within a vacuum – in fact, beyond a point, it serves to replace the recent with the super-recent like those ‘forget-me-now’ pills in Arrested Development.
It would, of course, be irresponsible to compare the respective dynasties without looking at…y’know…the actual players.
There are a few obvious trade-offs here. Víctor Valdés for Claudio Bravo and/or Marc-André ter Stegen. Xavi for Ivan Rakitić. Samuel Eto’o followed by David Villa for Neymar and Luis Suárez at the same time. People will have their favourites, and there will be more of a consensus on some than others.
But the personnel changes aren’t the only ways in which the teams are different. While Guardiola got some of Xavi’s best years, the Messi at his disposal was football genius Messi rather than football genius and superhuman goal machine Messi. A Messi with arguably two of the world’s top five strikers in the same team as him.
Villa was great, as was Eto’o (let’s not dwell on the one year they got out of Zlatan), and both played some of the best football of their careers in Catalunya, but both flourished alongside Messi rather than being able to regularly run the show in his absence.
Oh, and another thing to consider when comparing those two to the current supporting cast: there’s f**king two of them at the same time.
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The David Villa comparison brings up another consideration which – to a point – shapes many people’s perceptions of Guardiola’s squad.
That Barcelona didn’t just succeed domestically and in Europe, but they formed the core of the Spain squad that won three international tournaments in a row from 2008-2012.
The highs were higher, especially as their adaptation of possession football was being introduced to people coming off the back of the predominance of a more brute-force attacking approach of Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United and alongside Carlo Ancelotti’s mechanically attacking Chelsea outfit (a reductive appraisal, yes, but that’s the way in which it was presented to enough of the UK audience to make the description valid).
A particular example came in November 2010, with Barça’s 5-0 demolition of José Mourinho’s Real Madrid, en route to one of the most complete title runs in recent memory.
Back then, no one put five past a Mourinho team. But equally, no one was supposed to crush Guardiola’s Bayern Munich by three goals to nil, especially not a manager in his first season in charge, and especially not when the Bavarians were coming off the back of 30 goals in eight games in the competition. Yet Barça did just that, mere months after people were beginning to question whether Luis Enrique was even a suitable long-term manager for the club.
It seems counter-intuitive to think of the more recent incarnation of the club as the one capable of mechanically grinding down opponents when it was Pep who is seen by more people to have introduced death by a thousand passes to the popular psyche. However, where it was previously a case of ‘yes, they’ll win, and they’ll do it like this‘, the class of 2014-16 can be characterised better with the line ‘yes, they’ll win, and it doesn’t even matter how’.
And while it might not quite be as efficient as the controlled demolition of the previous phase (thanks, Diego Simeone), there’s undoubtedly a case for saying Guardiola’s former teammate has expanded on his vision and produced a product with more capabilities within what ought to be a more crowded marketplace.
While Luis Enrique’s charges might not exist without Guardiola’s previous generation laying the foundations – just as Frank Rijkaard’s entertainers set that generation up for success – the current outfit are a more terrifying prospect in the sense that they have more ways to chew you up and spit you out.
