Dating back to December of 2004, it’s been a miserly stretch of 13 games for Arsene Wenger against his old nemesis, Jose Mourinho. It’s not just the inability to defeat the former Chelsea manager that must irk Wenger, but the style with which Mourinho has gone about stymying his Arsenal sides.
Apparently Pep Guardiola has forbidden his players from having sexy time after midnight, for fear that they won't get enough sleep.
This information comes from Samir Nasri, who spent a little time with Guardiola at Manchester City before being shipped off on loan to Sevilla.
This quote from Nasri, via the BBC, is beautiful:
There's a certain aura that surrounds great icons in professional sports. Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth and many others have carved a legacy for themselves that will live on forever. But whilst the players do the dirty work, behind all their success is a manager or coach that guides them towards glory. For more than 26 years, that man for Manchester United was Sir Alex Ferguson.
A non-league coach in England has been banned for three years for gambling, including betting on his own team to lose.
Nick Bunyard, former manager of Frome Town, is either not very good at managing, or not very good at gambling, or both.
Here is an actual quote from Bunyard in the Western Daily Press:
Sore Loser: Someone who loses in a fair competition, but then continues to whine, complain and blame everyone around them for their loss, everyone besides themselves.
Andre Villas-Boas has never lasted more than two seasons at any particular club, but he’s just landed another monster paycheck out in China with Shanghai SIPG, becoming the third highest paid manager in the world.
The Chinese club will pay him almost $14 million a year for two years, and that’s following a contract with Zenit Saint Petersburg that earned him over $23 million for two years of service.
There is one individual rivalry in soccer that has stuck out from the rest over the last few years: Jose Mourinho vs Pep Guardiola.
The managers met for the first time in September 2009 when Guardiola’s Barcelona team traveled to the San Siro to take on Mourinho’s Inter Milan side, ending in a 0-0 draw. They met four times during the 2009-2010 season, with Pep’s team winning twice, but it would be Mourinho getting the last laugh when Inter Milan eliminated Barcelona in the semifinals of the Champions League that season, leading to their first European title since 1955.
The sharp decline in Jose Mourinho’s career over the last 12 months is undeniable. As a measure of his drop-off, consider the following: In the Portuguese’s first 130 games as a Premier League manager, he lost just a dozen times. It’s taken him just 25 further matches to double that tally.
Inter sacked Frank de Boer on Tuesday morning. He had been the manager for 85 days, right up until the moment a conference call confirmed that his services would no longer be required.
It is obvious to note that De Boer’s tenure was doomed from the start. Even putting aside the notion that Dutch coaches are somehow the ideological opposite to their Italian counterparts, the way he swept into the club so late in the transfer window was an early indication that everything was not quite right.