AEK's chase of Guardiola-esque football

The blog you’re about to read was written in May 2019, shortly after Manolo’s departure and before Cardoso’s name was even mentioned, but at the end I decided against posting it. In this blog I laid out my objections with the club’s decision to throw Jimenez under the bus and predicted another managerial failure in the pursuit of “attacking and exciting football”. Fast forward 3 months later and AEK is out of Europe and endured a horrible start to their league campaign thanks to none other than Cardoso, Lyberopoulos and to an extent Melissanidis.

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Manolo Jimenez has been called to get AEK out of trouble numerous times in these past few years.  During his second stint at AEK he didn’t only get AEK out of trouble but he also gave them the best season in the club’s history in decades. He managed to get a limited squad, assembled with limited funds and make them unbeaten in Europe for 14 games and champions of Greece while also participating in a third consecutive cup final. After the end of that highly successful season though, AEK wanted something better. AEK were pleased with Manolo’s good results and trophies but they also needed the club to play “good and entertaining football” with Jimenez making way for Marinos Ouzounidis. 

Its May 2019, exactly one year after AEK deemed Jimenez to be “not enough” for the club they are about to make the same mistake yet again. The Ouzounidis experiment didn’t work out as intended (surprise surprise). As it turns out, in order to play good, expansive, entertaining and breathtaking football you need great investments, scouting and recruiting. That’s exactly why in February 2019, Ouzounidis stepped down and Manolo Jimenez came back to get the team out of trouble yet again. He never complained about inheriting a mediocre squad, loosely assembled by the club’s own mastermind Nikos Lyberopoulos, and he got to work again to improve AEK’s performances as much as humanly possible to get them to a 4th consecutive cup final which they ultimately lost to a much better team. 

The season ended on a bad note but Jimenez was eager to work harder and build a squad from scratch in order to make AEK competitive again. While out on holidays though, AEK’s owner Dimitris Melissanidis hosted a dinner for AEK’s journalists so he can give them his take on all things AEK related. He was asked 3 times if Jimenez is going to stay and he never said yes. The result being that the next day, the press and fans alike all knew that Manolo’s third stint at AEK was coming to an end sooner rather than later. But the question remains, why cant the club trust Jimenez? Why is Nikos Lyberopoulos, a man that couldn’t sign an avid AEK fan if he wanted to, deemed a successful member of the AEK hierarchy while Jimenez is constantly frowned upon?

So now we wait for the new AEK manager to be unveiled. I personally doubt the quality of a manager that will say yes to the AEK job as it is now. Who in their right minds would say yes to an employer that asks you to do the same -if not a better- job than your rivals while also having half the funds to do so? The next AEK manager will surely know that he will be thrown under the bus as soon as some bad results come because as we all know, its never the club’s fault, its always the manager or the players that are not good enough.

 I will be waiting for the new AEK manager to give us the beautiful guardiola-esque football we all deserve while Lyberopoulos constructs a perfectly balanced team as always. Down with Manolo’s ugly and uninspiring football. Long live the Dellas, Ketspaya, Ouzounidis expansive football!

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Thankfully, 3 months later and both Lyberopoulos and Cardoso are now gone. The club is taking steps forward by picking Ilija Ivic to replace Lybe and Melissanidis has hopefully learned his lesson. We need people like Ivic to transform the club so it can meet modern standards. We are talking about good scouting, recruitment, marketing, manager picks etc. I am not a prophet, I cant tell the future and that’s the problem at AEK. Anyone could see what was about to happen after Jimenez left, anyone could see Lyberopoulos was at the very least extremely bad at his job (maybe even criminally neglectful) and yet no one inside AEK seemed to be worried. I am really confident that Ivic will be a success story at AEK, hope I am right again! By Chris for Hellas Football.