Surely it would place a massive asterisk on all the trophies won during his time at Man City? In future discussions on the greatest manager would this be a talking point which stains our perception on him? Or will he still be lauded as the greatest by some despite the wider context?
It wouldn’t. He would still be the best manager in the history of the sport. No serious person would stop rating him, because that doesn’t even make sense. Are De Bruyne and Haaland suddenly invalid too? Only people who already hate him, like r/soccer and r/PremierLeague, Brits, Prem fanboys and Madrid fanboys, they would obviously be happy and say his legacy is now gone and nonsense like that. That’s expected, that’s how team sports and humans work. Rivalry and tribalism and so on.
There’s a reason why idiots and experts have the opposite opinion on everything. Because they’re idiots lol. All the actual football experts in football like the millions of managers, coaches, assistants, players, football directors, scouts, analysts, journalists, etc already consider him the revolutionary best manager of all time, because they’re extremely knowledgeable on football and his coaching and tactical mind. They’re not going to change their opinion at all. They don’t care about stuff like this.
If you’re actually that level of stupid however then you also have to stay Messi’s legacy is gone because of the Barca ref case. Which would expose how silly your opinions are. Messi has already showed the world he’s the best player of all time, just like Pep has already showed the world he’s the best manager of all time.
If you cheat as a player, then later on in your first proper managerial job, then go onto a club that cheats and say publicly “if we are found guilty, I will leave to have no association with this”, and yet, they have been found guilty by uefa (the only reason they did not see punishment is 5 years period, technicality, but they were found guilty) and yet stay there for several years…
He was always shady, always lying, and if out of your 4 jobs 3 of them are tainted with cheating scandals, bribing, doping and so on… I would say its pretty safe to say that he knew or orchestrated most of those things. There were several managers at both City, Barca or other big clubs, managers like Mourino who have almost triple the length of their managerial career and did not see any cheating scandal, Pep in his “legacy” is since he stopped playing in some sort of cheating scandal. Thats not a “bad luck he was in bad teams”, thats being the driving force to encourage that cheating.