If someone gave me a really intensive driving course and then handed me the keys to Lewis Hamilton’s car I could make it drive fast round a track.
Likewise, if someone gave me a billion pounds to spend on a football team, the odds are I could make it function well.
So if Pep Guardiola were to win the Champions League with Manchester City this season it’d simply be par for the course.
And if he were to leave the Etihad on the back of it next summer then he still wouldn’t have done anything in England to convince me he is the greatest manager of all time, as some under-30s would try to have me believe.
In a decade or two, I don’t think we’ll even look back on Guardiola as one of the top 10 managers in football history.
Top 20? Yes. But top 10, no. No.1? Absolutely nowhere near.
To be considered the best you have to have taken a sleeping giant that has been swamped by its rivals and turned them into a club which dominated domestically for nearly two decades and won two Champions Leagues, as Sir Alex Ferguson did at Manchester United.
Or taken a provincial club and players, and turned them into English champions and two-time European Cup winners, as Brian Clough did at Nottingham Forest.
What Don Revie did with Leeds would arguably put him in the top five, as would Jock Stein’s achievements with Celtic, and we’ve not even mentioned Bill Shankly or Bob Paisley.
Nor have we got to Arrigo Sachhi, Udo Lattek or Johan Cruyff.
Lest we forget, Guardiola hasn’t reinvented football, he has just applied his interpretation of what Cruyff did at Barcelona.
He has produced some stunning football with City, Bayern and Barca, yes, but the latter was his club in his town, and he inherited one of the greatest midfield pairings in the modern game and arguably the greatest player ever to play football.
At Bayern, he won three Bundesliga titles but the Champions League eluded him and they won it before and after his time there.
It wouldn’t surprise me if City didn’t win it for the first time after he has gone and not necessarily in his style.
When I’m judging managers, I like to see how they get on when the chips are down, as they are at City right now with their injuries.
And what we’re seeing from Guardiola’s side is one brilliant performance, one average and one not so good, which is less than you’d expect from a so-called super-motivator.
If Guardiola is as good as people tell us he is then, with the back-up players he has got, his side would still be beating teams left, right and centre.
But they haven’t, and that’s why I can only go so far as to say he is a very, very good modern manager.
But he's someone whose legacy, right now, does not compare with those of Clough and Ferguson.
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