Jon Mackenzie

speaker

464 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 30 Aug

Jon Mackenzie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The Athletic FC Podcast · What If… Guardiola never became a manager? · 30 Aug 2026 podcast

And on the one hand, I kind of feel as though those are just sort of easy.

Whenever he loses, you can be like, well, he overthought it.

But actually, there's a kind of interesting phenomenon, which is when he comes up to these big games in Champions League finals, he has so much longer to prepare.

that he does, I don't think overthink it, but I think he has more time to actually make elegant tactical solutions to the problems that he's going to face.

And often on paper, I think, I understand why he's made the decisions he's made, but because he changes things so much from what the players are used to doing in the rest of the season, the players just feel a little bit out of whack.

The great example of that is the game against Inter, which they ended up winning 1-0, but in that game, they'd been playing with a double pivot all season with John Stones jumping into that pivot spot.

And so they were building with a double pivot.

And a lot of the angles and the ball receptions all happen in a very similar way.

In that game, they went to just a single pivot with Rodri on his own, with John Stones actually playing in midfield further up the pitch.

And it changed all the angles.

And you could see that Rodri, he seemed quite uncomfortable playing in that way, having played a different way the whole season.

And I think that's a fair criticism potentially of Guardiola, that when he has more time to prepare...

And you can understand why he did it.

There's solutions on the pitch which are like, I understand why he's done it from a theoretical point of view.

But football is more than just the theoretical.

It's about whether or not the players can enact it as well.

Sometimes I felt that those games were good examples of him having more time to think about it because it was a more important game.

And so it took longer and therefore it felt a bit clunkier, weirdly.

the

So we both get a guess at this

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