Pep Guardiola has been more successful at Bayern Munich than Jurgen Klopp was at Borussia Dortmund. That is a fact. Guardiola has won three Bundesliga titles, Klopp won only two. Guardiola has a chance to win a second DFB-Pokal and with it a second German double when Bayern take on Dortmund on May 21 in the cup final. Klopp only ever won one.
You won't find many people agreeing with you, though, that the Catalan is as big a figure in Bayern's recent history as Klopp is for Dortmund. The affections for Klopp at Dortmund are eternal. Klopp cried on the day he announced he was leaving Dortmund last year. He wasn't the only one. Fans and journalists alike were overcome with emotion when Klopp stood down. It was a seismic moment, the end of a golden age.
Guardiola led Bayern to their fourth successive league title - and his third in a row - with a win over Ingolstadt on Saturday but will depart with scarcely more than a warm handshake.
Bayern are now Germany's only super club in terms of talent, wages and budget. The least the fans expect is the league title every year. The Champions League is what counts to them now and it wasn't delivered. The workmanlike outfit of 2001 is more fondly recalled. Fans quite often don't care how things get done, so long as they get done.
Given Bayern's move into the realm of the super clubs, what needed to get done to make Guardiola's team memorable, eternal and cherished was to win the Champions League.
Guardiola, therefore, is respected but not loved. His domestic achievements will remain unsurpassed but the three semi-final failures in Europe will scuff the esteem in which he's held.
Bayern have always won but chief executive Karl-Heinz Rummenigge jumped at the chance to bring Pep and tiki-taka to Bavaria in late 2012. And so the process began to blend what Guardiola knew with what Bayern needed.
Guardiola never did, and still doesn't, evoke Bayernism, those qualities which make Bayern feared, admired and detested, depending on your allegiance. He evokes only Pepism. Manchester City are not bringing in Guardiola to adopt to their style but to invent them a new one, one of their own.
Those unmistakable qualities which makes teams his own will be apparent sooner or later at the Etihad Stadium. It is relentlessly effective. Starving the opposition of the ball and smothering them with nine or 10 outfield players over the halfway line; it is almost universally recognised as Guardiola's football.
Bayern, historically, have had no great overarching style and so what Bayern's boardroom wanted was the mix of success and sustainability brought by that defined identity. In truth, they only got half of it.
Now Guardiola is about to depart and we know exactly the possiblity that his style of football is perpetuated by Carlo Ancelotti. Remote at best.
Ancelotti is no ideologue. He will come in with ideas of how he'd like the team to play, but he is a people person. He is more about getting players onside and convincing them to do their best man-to-man than he is about implementing any top-down philosophy for people to follow. What worked at Milan is different to what worked at Paris Saint-Germain and that was different to what worked at Real Madrid. He is an elite-level coach with very simple ideas about how to play the game.
Bayern could not be going for a more different coach; one with the magic touch in the Champions League, too.
Guardiola stayed three years; had he stuck around for another contract, the fans might have been inclined to pull behind him more. But he stayed long enough to suit himself and on he rolls. There was no space for legacy, for building foundations.
Bayern wanted Guardiola to preside over a generation's worth of success, talent production and by-rote learning at all levels of the club. He leaves having delivered three Bundesliga titles but nothing like what Bayern imagined he would. He met Bayern's expectations but didn't exceed them.
And perhaps that's the difference between how Guardiola is appreciated in Bavaria and Klopp at the Westfalenstadion. Klopp lived and breathed Dortmund when he was there. It was impossible to disassociate the man on the sidelines from the team on the field.
When it was time to go, Dortmund replaced him with a successor. Thomas Tuchel was the man who came in to Mainz a year after Klopp left for Dortmund and he followed him again last summer. He made Mainz better and the indications are that he will do the same for Dortmund. He is standing on the shoulder of the giant, pushing things further.
Bayern aren't going for a Pep successor, they are going for the opposite. There will be three titles, maybe two cups, but no great love. And when he's gone, it'll be like he was never there at all.
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- Goal