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Premier League 2019-20 Review: Managers of the Season

Burnley Sean Dyche, Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp, Villa’s Dean Smith, Sheffield United’s Chris Wilder and Wolves’ Nuno Espírito Santo have all impressed this season. Composite: NMC Pool/Reuters; NMC Pool/AFP/Getty; Reuters
Burnley Sean Dyche, Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp, Villa’s Dean Smith, Sheffield United’s Chris Wilder and Wolves’ Nuno Espírito Santo have all impressed this season. Composite: NMC Pool/Reuters; NMC Pool/AFP/Getty; Reuters
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Premier League 2019-20 Review: Managers of the Season

Burnley Sean Dyche, Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp, Villa’s Dean Smith, Sheffield United’s Chris Wilder and Wolves’ Nuno Espírito Santo have all impressed this season. Composite: NMC Pool/Reuters; NMC Pool/AFP/Getty; Reuters
Burnley Sean Dyche, Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp, Villa’s Dean Smith, Sheffield United’s Chris Wilder and Wolves’ Nuno Espírito Santo have all impressed this season. Composite: NMC Pool/Reuters; NMC Pool/AFP/Getty; Reuters

As the latest Premier League campaign ends, "The Guardian" has nominated some manager of the season contenders.

Jürgen Klopp
Last season Liverpool missed out on the league title by 11.7mm, this season they won it by a country mile. As with his Champions League success, Jürgen Klopp ensured that painful disappointment translated into improvement. Liverpool played with consistency and authority that no one came close to matching. They played with panache but also with relentless control, even amid the pressure of ending their 30-year title quest. Klopp used to be accused of being too emotional and idealistic. That seems ridiculous now, yet he has never lost his charisma.

Chris Wilder
Most people said Sheffield United were certainties for relegation but they were safe long before the end of the season and did not switch off, going on to challenge for European qualification. This was achieved with cleverness and style, with players who had either never played at Premier League level, or been there already and made no mark. To top it off, the Blades were terrific to watch, an intelligent and innovative team in the true sense. It was not just their overlapping center-backs that amazed. Not only were they difficult to penetrate, there were matches in which they put three goals past Chelsea, Tottenham, and Manchester United. That is not normal for a newly-promoted side.

Nuno Espírito Santo
You know the way qualifying for the Europa League is supposed to be a curse in disguise for clubs with small squads? Well, Wolves don’t know what you’re on about. Nuno Espírito Santo’s team took it all in their stride, reaching the latter stages of the Europa League while surpassing last season’s points tally in the Premier League. And what a pleasing team they are to watch thanks notably to Adama Traoré, a player who is spectacularly fulfilling his potential thanks to Nuno’s coaching. Traoré joined players such as Romain Saïss and Leander Dendoncker in learning to excel in a variety of roles under Nuno, who has formed a special bond with his players and the Wolves fans.

Dean Smith
Teams who get promoted through the play-offs are expected to struggle, especially if they lose half their squad straight away. Dean Smith had to adapt to the top flight while blending in over a dozen new arrivals, promising talents recruited at an average price of around £9.5m each, which is small beer in the Premier League saloon. Then, halfway through the campaign, he had to cope with the loss of the spine of his team, with goalkeeper Tom Heaton and main striker Wesley suffering long-term injuries and John McGinn sidelined for several months. Smith showed his skills by successfully changing his approach and tightening up a defence that had been leaky, and he helped newcomers such as Douglas Luiz and Trezeguet to grow into very good Premier League players. Before the season ended it was clear that Villa would be wise to keep Smith irrespective of whether they stayed up or went down.

Sean Dyche
Some people are bored of Burnley. Sean Dyche might be one of them, in so far as he’d like to be given the financial latitude to expand his squad and embellish his style. In the meantime, he makes sure his team keeps beating others. Burnley won more matches than ever in the Premier League this season even though they lost one of their main strikers, Ashley Barnes, to injury halfway through. They won at Old Trafford and were the only away team to take a point at Anfield. They kept more clean sheets than everyone but Liverpool and Manchester City. Players such as James Tarkowski and Nick Pope have developed into England internationals and Dwight McNeil is one of the most exciting young talents in the league. Burnley may not be fashionable, but they are going to be a force in the top flight for at least as long as they have Dyche.

(The Guardian)

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Men’s Olympic Soccer Remains Stuck in the Game’s Second Tier

The last five champions have all been Latin American, largely because of the willingness of Argentina and Brazil to send major stars such as Lionel Messi and Neymar. (file photo/The AP)
The last five champions have all been Latin American, largely because of the willingness of Argentina and Brazil to send major stars such as Lionel Messi and Neymar. (file photo/The AP)
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Men’s Olympic Soccer Remains Stuck in the Game’s Second Tier

The last five champions have all been Latin American, largely because of the willingness of Argentina and Brazil to send major stars such as Lionel Messi and Neymar. (file photo/The AP)
The last five champions have all been Latin American, largely because of the willingness of Argentina and Brazil to send major stars such as Lionel Messi and Neymar. (file photo/The AP)

The Poststadion still stands, about 10 minutes’ walk north-west of Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof. It’s set up for American football these days and this summer it was the centre of Berlin Pride. But in 1936, it was there that Adolf Hitler, for the only time in his life, attended a football match.

Hitler, like a lot of dictators, was suspicious of football. It was too unpredictable, the crowds that followed it too large and anarchic. But Germany had been impressive in beating Luxembourg 9-0, and nobody thought much of Norway, so Hitler, along with several other senior Nazis including Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess went to the quarter-final.
Germany’s assistant coach was Sepp Herberger, who would later lead West Germany to victory at the 1954 World Cup. He had been sent to watch Italy v Japan, the winners of which would play the winners of Germany’s quarter-final, so he was not at the Poststadion. He returned to the team base and was tucking into a dinner of knuckle of pork and sauerkraut when he saw one of the other coaches, Georg Knöpfle, return. He knew from his face it had all gone badly wrong, pushed his plate away and never ate knuckle of pork again. Germany had lost 2-0.

Italy beat Norway in the semi-final and went on to overcome Austria in the final, adding Olympic gold to the World Cup they had won two years earlier. They would add another World Cup in 1938. But their coach, Vittorio Pozzo, always said that 1936 was arguably his greatest achievement given he was in effect leading a team of students (albeit five of them subsequently turned pro). In Germany, by contrast, there was no professional football and so the host’s squad was a full-strength one.

That’s always been the problem with men’s Olympic football. Unlike the women’s game, which has no limitations on who is eligible to play, the men’s tournament has dealt with restrictions and questions of amateurism. And different countries have interpreted amateurism in different ways, with a huge bearing on results. The Uruguay team that took gold in 1924 and 1928, for instance, was undeniably brilliant but very few of their players would have met more stringent European definitions of amateurism; Jules Rimet, the president of Fifa, essentially waved them through to enhance non-European participation and to give the competition a more global feel.

That’s why from 1952 to 1988, every Olympic football gold (bar 1984 when the eastern bloc countries boycotted the games) was won by a team from a communist nation. Their players were technically state employees working in the army or the interior ministry or for various factories or unions and so were deemed amateur as they were not officially paid for playing sport. That’s not to say none of them were great teams – the Hungary of 1952 went on to reach the final of the 1954 World Cup; the fine Soviet Union team of 1956 would be devastated before the next World Cup by the conviction of their centre-forward Eduard Streltsov for rape; the Poland side of 1972 eliminated England in qualifying for the 1974 World Cup at which they finished third – but neither were they competing against the cream of the rest of the world.

After the collapse of communism, the men’s tournament has been for under-23 players, with three overage players permitted from 1996. Spain in 1992 were widely regarded as one of the great home successes of the Barcelona Olympics, and their squad did include Pep Guardiola and Luis Enrique. At its most generous interpretation, there was evidence there of the beginnings of the superiority of Spanish youth development, but it would be a long time before that manifested as a major international trophy.

There were thrilling victories for Nigeria in 1996 and Cameroon in 2000, which seemed part of a more general process of improvement in African football. Since then, though, at least in terms of getting closer to challenging seriously for a World Cup, African football has largely stagnated.

Philadelphia Union midfielder Cavan Sullivan looks on during Wednesday’s game against the New England Revolution at Subaru Park in Chester, Pennsylvania.

The last five champions have all been Latin American, largely because of the willingness of Argentina and Brazil to send major stars such as Lionel Messi and Neymar. Kylian Mbappé seemingly wanted to play this time but after competing in the Euros, his club Real Madrid refused to grant him a waiver to play this summer. France’s overage players are Loïc Badé, Alexandre Lacazette and Jean-Philippe Mateta. Argentina are sending Gerónimo Rulli, Julián Álvarez and Nicolás Otamendi. Spain haven’t named a player over 24 and only two of their squad have ever won a full cap, suggesting how they regard the competition. The US, meanwhile, have named only one uncapped player, with their roster featuring 114 combined senior caps. Mali will lead the African challenge, while there will be obvious symbolism to Ukraine’s participation.

But the truth is that in men’s football, the Olympics doesn’t really matter and hasn’t done so since the advent of the World Cup, providing a tournament for all players, amateur and professional, in 1930. At best, it offers a snapshot of a political mood or provides evidence of promising young players who may develop over the decade to follow. No Olympic gold is entirely worthless, but few mean less than that in men’s football.

The Guardian Sport