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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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With Big Goals and Gambles, Paris Aims to Reset the Olympics with Audacious Games and a Wow Opening

Paris 2024 Olympics - Beach Volleyball Training - Eiffel Tower Stadium, Paris, France - July 24, 2024. General view as the Olympic Rings and the Eiffel Tower are seen during training. (Reuters)
Paris 2024 Olympics - Beach Volleyball Training - Eiffel Tower Stadium, Paris, France - July 24, 2024. General view as the Olympic Rings and the Eiffel Tower are seen during training. (Reuters)
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With Big Goals and Gambles, Paris Aims to Reset the Olympics with Audacious Games and a Wow Opening

Paris 2024 Olympics - Beach Volleyball Training - Eiffel Tower Stadium, Paris, France - July 24, 2024. General view as the Olympic Rings and the Eiffel Tower are seen during training. (Reuters)
Paris 2024 Olympics - Beach Volleyball Training - Eiffel Tower Stadium, Paris, France - July 24, 2024. General view as the Olympic Rings and the Eiffel Tower are seen during training. (Reuters)

Paris has long been a city of dreamers: Just look at the Eiffel Tower, for decades the world's loftiest structure. Audacity also underpins the French capital's plans for its first Olympic Games in a century, which open Friday with an opening ceremony for the ages.
The most sprawling and elaborate Olympic opening ever — a gala spectacular Friday evening on the River Seine that even French President Emmanuel Macron says initially felt like “a crazy and not very serious idea” — kicks off 16 days of competition that promise to be ground-breaking, with nearly every corner of the city hosting some aspect of competition, The Associated Press said.
After two toned-down, pandemic-hampered Olympics, expect a bold celebration. The heady marriage of sports and France's world-renowned capital of fashion, gastronomy and culture could also help secure the Olympics' longer-term future.
Olympic organizers were struggling to find suitable host cities for their flagship Summer Games when they settled on Paris in 2017, enticed by its promise of innovations and the potential for the city of romance to rekindle love for the Olympics, especially with younger audiences that have so many other entertainment options.
But Paris' challenges are huge, too.
Past and present sorrows hang over the Games. The city that has been repeatedly struck by deadly extremist attacks has to safeguard 10,500 athletes and millions of visitors. The international context of wars in Ukraine and Gaza add layers of complication for the gargantuan security effort. French elite special forces are part of the security detail for Israel's delegation.
Still, if all goes well, Paris hopes to be remembered as a before-and-after Olympic watershed.
The first Games with nearly equal numbers of men and women, an advance that's been a long time coming since 22 women first got accepted as Olympians 124 years ago, also in Paris, will take another step toward aligning the Olympics with the post-#MeToo world.
Paris also hopes to reassure climate-conscious Generations Z and beyond by staging Games that are less polluting, more sustainable and more socially virtuous than their predecessors. Many of the sports venues are temporary, because Paris didn't want to repeat the mistake of previous Olympic host cities that built new arenas and then had no use for them.
With iconic Paris monuments as backdrops — beach volleyball in the Eiffel Tower's shadow — and breakdancing added to a growing list of Olympic sports that target young audiences, expect plenty of viral moments on Instagram, TikTok and elsewhere.
Crowds will be back for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic forced Tokyo to push back its Games to 2021 and keep spectators away, and the Beijing Winter Games in 2022, when China was locked down.
Prize-winning French theater director Thomas Jolly is turning central Paris into an open-air stage for the opening ceremony that will run through sunset and showcase France, its people and their history. The 330-meter-tall (1,083-foot-tall) Eiffel Tower will surely feature prominently.
Hundreds of thousands of people, including 320,000 paying and invited ticket-holders, are expected to line the Seine's banks as athletes are paraded along the river on boats.
During the extravaganza, a no-fly zone extending for 150 kilometers (93 miles) around the capital will close Paris' skies, policed by fighter jets, airspace-monitoring AWACS surveillance flights, surveillance drones, helicopters that can carry sharpshooters and drone-disabling equipment.
Helping Parisians move past the attacks of 2015 Showcasing and celebrating Paris could be joyously cathartic for the city that was plunged into mourning by extremist attacks in 2015.
Guesses about the identity of the person or people who might get the honor of lighting the Olympic cauldron include soccer icon Zinedine Zidane and other French sporting heroes, but also survivors of ISIS group gunmen and suicide bombers who killed 130 people on Nov. 13, 2015.
Paris is also taking gambles in hopes of leaving an indelible impression on the Olympics’ global audience of billions.
The decision not to stage the opening ceremony in the traditional setting of France's biggest stadium — the Stade de France that was among the 2015 attackers' targets and is now the venue for Olympic track and field and rugby sevens — and to host skateboarding, archery and other sports in temporary arenas in the heart of Paris have made safeguarding the Games more complex.
Rights campaigners and Games critics worry about the broad scope and scale of Olympic security, including the use of AI-equipped surveillance technology.
Paris’ reach stretches to the Pacific The furthest venue is on the other side of the world in the French Pacific territory of Tahiti, where Olympic surfers will compete on famously giant waves that first form in storm belts off Antarctica.
Up to 45,000 police and gendarmes, plus 10,000 soldiers, are safeguarding Paris and its suburbs that together are hosting most of the 32 sports that will crown Olympic champions in 329 medal events. The gold, silver and bronze medals they’ll hand out are inlaid with a hexagonal, polished chunk of iron taken from the Eiffel Tower.
The Seine's banks and riverside roads and more than a dozen of its bridges were fenced off nine days ahead of the opening ceremony, creating a no-go zone for people who haven't applied in advance for passes and making it tough for Parisians and visitors to get around and see the sights in the city of 2 million. Owners of restaurants and other businesses inside the security fence are howling about fewer customers.
Leaving an Olympic legacy for Paris Limiting new construction has saved money and, Paris organizers say, contributed to their goal of halving the Games' overall carbon footprint compared with London in 2012 and Rio in 2016. Among the new venues, an Olympic aquatics center in Seine Saint-Denis is expected to help that underprivileged suburb of northern Paris teach more children to swim.
French organizers argue that the Games will leave positive impacts on Paris long after the Olympians and Paralympic athletes who follow from Aug. 28 to Sept. 8 have departed.
A costly and complex cleanup of the long-polluted Seine, sped up by the deadline of the Games, is expected to reopen the river to public swimming next year, after Olympic marathon swimmers and triathletes have competed in it. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo took a dip this month to demonstrate that its waters are safe.
With estimated overall costs of around 9 billion euros ($9.7 billion), more than half from sponsors, ticket sales and other non-public funding, Paris’ expenses so far are less than for Tokyo, Rio and London.
Once opening ceremony fireworks have become memories, the City of Light will then become the playground of Olympians.
American gymnastics superstar Simon Biles is back. French-born basketball phenom Victor Wembanyama will carry home hopes on his 7-foot-4 (2.24-meter) frame. Ukrainian and Palestinian athletes have points they want to prove about conflict, resilience and sacrifice that go beyond the realms of sport.
The lucky few will win medals. Many will wish they had gone higher, faster and stronger.
But, together, they'll always have Paris.