"Everything you can imagine is real." Pablo Picasso.
Three Basques and a Catalan traveled to England one day and... No. It's not the beginning of a joke. It is a true story, a celebration of the triumph of intelligence, whose context is that the Spanish League is little today and the English Premier League has gone from relative mediocrity to being the most powerful club competition in the world.
The three Basques and the Catalan are currently the most powerful coaches in the Premier. Two of them are fighting for the title in what promises to be an exciting season finale; the other two have gone on heroic rescue missions, saving their venerable clubs from relegation.
Manchester City's Pep Guardiola and his disciple Mikel Arteta of Arsenal face off in a terrific game next week that will surely decide which of them will be crowned English champions. Unai Emery was signed by Aston Villa in October last year with the club looming over the abyss. A couple of weeks later Julen Lopetegui arrived at Wolves, whose situation was even more precarious. Today Emery's Villa is sixth in the table and it is not ruled out that they will compete in the Champions League next season. Wolves are safe in 13th place.
The exploits of all four have not gone unnoticed in England. On Sunday I received a message on my mobile from an editor in the sports section of the London Times. "How good are the Spanish coaches!" He told me. "How is it that they are so superior to the English?" .
I replied that the Spanish were smarter, more serious and more imaginative than Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard and company. They had a better idea of how to manage the three necessary virtues to succeed as a coach: the tactical intelligence of a chess player, the empathy of a psychologist and the motivating capacity of a Napoleon. The success of one and the failure of the other can be easily assessed, I told the Times man. Just ask one simple question: are your teams more or less than the sum of their parts?
The answer in the cases of the three Basques and the Catalan is that they are clearly getting the most out of their players as individuals and as members of a collective. The answer in the cases of Chelsea's two English coaches so far in 2023, to give an example, is that the team has offered much less on the field than it has in the dressing room. In January Chelsea, coached by one Graham Potter, spent 360 million euros on transfers, more than the Spanish, Italian, German and French leagues combined. Potter was fired and replaced by Lampard on 6 April. Since then, Chelsea have played three games and lost three – the first against Lopetegui's Wolves – and are 11 points behind Emery's Villa, 31 behind Guardiola's City and 35 behind Arteta's Arsenal.
Arteta has turned the youngest squad in the Premier into a machine capable of competing with the well-oiled locomotive that Guardiola drives at City. The Catalan is the most influential coach of the 21st century: for football what Ferran Adrià has been for gastronomy. He never stops inventing or squeezing the best out of his raw material.
The most recent case is that of their once feeble English defender John Stones, suddenly turned into a Sergio Busquets-style midfielder who simultaneously plays – in the same game – right-back and center-back. Jack Grealish, who looked like the worst €112m investment ever made last season, has gone from a headless chicken to a groundbreaking winger who knows exactly when to attack and when to defend, and hardly ever turns the ball over. And so the whole team.
Arteta, Lopetegui and Emery follow the same line: the mental versatility of the coach is reflected in the versatility of his players on the pitch.
English coaches, on the other hand, are defined by the rigidity of their thinking. One possible explanation is that they get stuck in the notion that English football is the best because the Premier is the best league. No. The Premier League is the best league because the vast majority of its players are not English and because the vast majority of its coaches, of which the best today are the three Basques and the Catalan, are not English either.
