Sean Dyche: Copying Pep Guardiola Is Ruining Football

Sean Dyche is out of the game by choice - “fun employed”, as he puts it - and he has a theory about why modern football has stopped making sense to him.

It isn’t Pep Guardiola. He’s clear about that. Guardiola never told anyone to copy him, does it with exceptional players, and Dyche rates him. The problem is everyone else.

He watches League One and League Two sides being pressured into playing out from the back, goalkeepers who want nothing less than the ball on the edge of their own box, and games where both teams try to play for forty-five minutes, it finishes goalless at half time, and the goals only arrive once somebody abandons the plan ⚽️

Then they go up, they get relegated, and they say they played the right way 🤷‍♂️

His answer to that, which he has been shouting at radios since his playing days: stay up playing the wrong way 🙌

He tells Jeff Stelling that supporters have been brainwashed into believing there’s only one acceptable style, and that brand has become more important than getting the job done. His example of good management is Mikel Arteta - not for the philosophy, but for ripping it up when it wasn’t going to win him anything. He’d love Arteta to admit it out loud 🏆

Also in this episode: the 6-0 at Chelsea that was the lowest moment of his management career, and the two weeks that took him from there to beating Liverpool. Being nominated for manager of the month for Nottingham Forest on a Thursday and told he should be sacked on the Friday. Why he says he instigated his own exit at Everton. The three free transfers that built Burnley, a training ground promised standing on a bridge, and a community department that grew from one person to 110.

Plus a penalty in an FA Cup semi-final having not scored in four years, Elton John introducing him from the stage, and a working theory on how to get anyone into curry 🍛

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