It’s fairly common to hear that every sportsperson who’s successful in their field has an incredible appetite for success, but there are different ways of achieving victory too.
Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho will go down as two of the best managers in the modern era, but it’s clear that their styles are very different.
Pep tends to be ahead in a tactical and coaching sense, he sets his teams up in a way that should give them a huge advantage on the pitch, while his players tend to play an attractive style as well.
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Mourinho is more of a “win at all costs” kind of manager, he’s known as being a master of psychology and sometimes his teams have won before they’ve even stepped onto the field, but that’s starting to wear off.
Because of the radical difference in styles there aren’t too many players who have played a major role for both managers, but Samuel Eto’o has at Barcelona and Inter Milan.
Some of his recent comments were picked up by The Mirror, and it’s interesting to hear about their approach:
“The only common point these two coaches have is the desire to win. They are completely different personalities and have a different vision of football.”
They also reported on some previous comments he had made about the two:
“I can’t compare Mourinho to Guardiola, one of them couldn’t win the Champions League with Bayern Munich and the other one did it with Porto,”
“Pep had lived all his life in Barcelona but during the years I was there, he didn’t understand the squad. He didn’t live the life of our group.”
“I told Guardiola, ‘you will apologise to me because it’s me who will make Barca win, not Lionel Messi’. That was the situation at that time. Messi would later emerge, but you could ask Xavi, Andres Iniesta and the others, that was my era.”
It’s clear that he prefers Mourinho over Guardiola, but that may be down to his bitterness at being forced out of Barcelona.