Claims Newcastle United’s Eddie Howe Is Pep Guardiola’s Equal Are Lunacy

Watchers of soccer perhaps more than any other sport suffer from recency bias.

All most all the popular narratives which dominate the discourse around the sport are based on sample sizes of barely a year.

Occasionally, certain ideas persist, but it is nearly always because they are twisted to fit with a more current set of events.

No more so is this true when it comes to comparisons between players or managers.

Last season, one such match-up began to gain serious momentum, the performance of Newcastle United’s Eddie Howe versus Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola.

The consensus, within the British media at least, was that the former Bournemouth manager had achieved an improvement last season the Catalan could not better.