Routine striker Claudio Pizarro looks back on numerous coaches during his career. He still raves about one of them today and he would have loved to play for one of them.
A great career is coming to an end, time to look back.
So also with attacker Claudio Pizarro of Werder Bremen. The Peruvian is one of the faces of the Bundesliga and has now looked back on the coaches who have accompanied him throughout his career.
Pizarro raves about Guardiola
As he revealed in the Weser-Kurier: “Pep (Guardiola; editor’s note) has indeed broadened my horizon in football once again, he has a completely different vision of football than other coaches. He is the best I had.”
Pizarro played under the Catalan for two years in Munich. And even though he mostly came into the game as a wild card during that time, Pizarro praised: “He is always far superior to the opponents in his thoughts. I believe that, purely tactically and of all the dimensions of how he thinks about football, there is no better coach than Pep Guardiola.”
With Guardiola’s predecessor Jupp Heynckes, Pizarro took the triple in 2013. Heynckes is a “really great person”. “He has helped the whole club enormously, and you can see how well he has done by how often they brought him back to FC Bayern,” enthused the 41-year-old.
“I think Klopp is really exciting from a player’s point of view.
However, the attacker made his first steps in the Bundesliga in 1999 at Werder Bremen under Thomas Schaaf. “He really has always supported me, and feeling that is immensely important for a player. We had a relationship of trust,” said Pizarro, describing his relationship with his first coach in the Bundesliga.
Despite his long career, “Pizza” was unable to fulfil one wish: a collaboration with current Liverpool coach Jürgen Klopp. “Without a doubt, I would have enjoyed working with such a coach. I think Klopp is a great coach from a game perspective.