Pep Guardiola caused a storm in a teacup with his celebrations on Saturday. How ridiculously puritanical is football in 2023?
As Kieran Maguire tweeted this weekend about the Graham Potter sacking, ‘In what other business would you recruit an executive from a competitor, paying £21.5 compensation million in the process, give him a £10m a year five year contract, and sack them just over six months later?’
Football’s managerial culture is off-the -cale insane. The granular scrutiny on every manager’s words, behaviour and results is ridiculous. Mere mortals are instantly held to account for not being gods. We saw it at the weekend with the Manchester City manager.
On Sunday the headline in the Mirror read: ‘Pep Guardiola slammed for lacking class with celebration in face of Liverpool substitute.’ Poor Kostas Tsimikas and Arthur Melo; they had to tolerate a middle-aged man doing strange stompy dance moves in front of them.
There was disapproval from Rio Ferdinand on BT Sport: “That celebration there, I don’t know how Tsimikas hasn’t pushed him out of the way…”
Well, here’s how, Rio. He’s a grown man, not the sort of superannuated child you seem to think he should be. Only in the most hysterical, infantalised corners of football culture could someone be so annoyed by such a thing as to lay hands on the perpetrator. Clearly, the Liverpool player just didn’t care much and rightly so. And Arthur later shook the City manager’s hand, similarly showing the sort of grown-up behaviour that seems to escape the former Manchester United man’s imagination.
Of course, there were questions about it at the post-match press conference by a journalist nakedly desperate to drum up a story for the Sundays. The celebration police are everywhere trying, for some bizarre reason known only to their warped minds, to dictate exactly how someone on a football pitch should behave in very specific circumstances.
The two recurring words in this inflated story were ‘class’ and ‘respect’ and Guardiola was accused of having neither. Pep, clearly seeing the way the questioning was going, did a sarcastic ‘sorry not sorry’ and newspapers ran stories based on some negative things some people had said about it on Twitter – the shamefully lowest form of journalism – all of which also used ‘class’, ‘classy’ and ‘respect’…
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