Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

by Balague, Guillem

  Little by little, Zubizarreta was trying to find common ground to get Pep to put pen to paper on a new contract. Then, in November, the director of football proposed Tito Vilanova as Pep’s successor, an almost logical Plan B, perhaps, but also a tactic to get Pep to visualise his departure and, perhaps, make him think twice about it.

  Secretly, the club calculated that Pep’s birthday could be the turning point. Two years before, on his thirty-ninth birthday, Pep went with his girlfriend Cris to see the Catalan band Manel. His lack of renewal had become national news and the band, and the audience, changed the words of a song to wish him a happy birthday and demand his signature. The next day, Pep announced he was staying for another year.

  By 18 January 2012, on his forty-first anniversary, Tito Vilanova had returned to the team, Barcelona had destroyed Santos in the FIFA Club World Cup final in Tokyo and the club thought the conditions were right for Pep to change his mind. But the confirmation wasn’t forthcoming.

  Over the course of the following months, up until 25 April 2012 when he announced that his decision was final, both the director of football and the president Sandro Rosell would subtly introduce the conversation even in private dinners.

  ‘So, how are things going?’ Sandro asked him at an event in February, surrounded by figures from Catalan politics and society, perhaps not the best moment to raise the issue.

  ‘Now’s not the time, President’ was Pep’s blunt response. He never let his guard down.

  Rosell had won the presidential elections in June 2010 after Joan Laporta ended his final permitted term. Months before, Pep had agreed to stay on for a season but wanted the new man in charge to confirm the details. Two weeks after Rosell was voted in the contract had not been signed, agreed, negotiated or even talked about. In the meantime, Dmytro Chygrynskiy, signed the previous season for €25 million, was sold for €15 million back to Shakhtar Donetsk, from where he had originally come. Guardiola was not pleased. He didn’t want his centre back to go but the club, he was told, needed to pay wages, having run out of cash, thus shrewdly proving the point that Laporta had left the club in a poor financial state.

  The response came quickly. Johan Cruyff, Pep’s mentor, returned the medal given to him by Laporta as a President of Honour, a very public gesture that amounted to an official declaration of war between the two presidents. A throwing down of the gauntlet. And Guardiola was going to be placed in the middle of it all.

  It was clearly not the beginning of a mutual friendship.

  Life in the directors’ box had been infernal since Rosell’s arrival: false accusations of doping against Barcelona made on national radio; the Champions League semi-finals against Real Madrid and its implications; the future of the manager. But the new president preferred to keep a low profile in contrast to the loquacious Laporta, partly because he felt out of place. Rosell sensed his hands were tied by a club that had elevated to an idol, whether or not he wanted it, the figure of Guardiola, so he had to follow the coach’s line in many issues he would have argued against if he had had more authority: the vast number of assistants, the resultant cost and, above all, the signing of Cesc Fàbregas.

  When Rosell, who was reluctant to end the feud with his nemesis, brought a civil lawsuit against Laporta for alleged financial maladministration of the club, which could have meant the freezing of Laporta’s properties and assets, Pep met the former president for dinner. He watched as his friend, the man who had given him his first coaching job, cried openly. He was about to lose everything and his personal life was falling apart. A few days later Guardiola admitted in a press conference that he felt sorry for Laporta. That was, according to Rosell’s acolytes, an ‘unpleasant surprise’.

  The situation was defused and the civil lawsuit abandoned, but nothing gets forgotten in the Camp Nou!

  So it is no wonder Guardiola never had the same level of mutual devotion with Rosell as he had with Laporta. But a president doesn’t have to love you. When Rosell was asked in London, after the club had been awarded the Laureus as the World Team of the Year, ‘What would happen if Pep left at the end of the season?’, the president answered, ‘There was life at the club before him and will be after him.’

  No, he doesn’t have to love you, but it would have been beneficial for the club if it hadn’t been so obvious that the two men were on completely different wavelengths.

  ‘Make a list of the things that you would like to do next season. It will help you to reflect and see if what you write down is exactly what you want to do.’ Zubizarreta kept trying. He had thought of a good way to make Guardiola reflect on a decision that seemed to be taking form in his mind. Pep laughed: ‘It’s not the time,’ he repeated.

  The very light pressure was not working, so it was almost better not even to mention it. Zubi’s tactics changed again and the topic hardly ever came up in conversation between the president, the sporting director and the coach from that moment on. It would be up to the manager, whenever he was ready, to tell them what he wanted to do.

  There were occasions during the season when Pep would look through a talkative Zubizarreta, a half-smile on his lips perhaps, and his friend would know that the coach was miles away – and that it was the wrong time to talk about that or really anything significant, that there was no way at that point to communicate with Pep.

  His players will tell you that, like Zubizarreta himself, they feel they know him pretty well. They recognise the guy who jokes with them, the one who has a presence that makes them sit up and pay attention. A coach whose care for the smallest detail improves them, who can see and communicate the secrets of a game. But they would also say that there is a lot they cannot understand about their boss. They see a complex man with so much on his mind, always mulling things over, excessively so sometimes. Players say they are sure he would love to spend more time with his wife and kids, but he can’t, because he dedicates the vast majority of his time to winning games. He lives for that, but sometimes even they wonder: does he overdo it?

  For Pep, that excessiveness is exactly what he needs to find that flash of inspiration: that moment when he realises what the next game will be like or discovers how it can be won; that moment that ‘gives sense to his profession’, as he puts it.

  Despite having twenty-four assistants, he worked longer hours than most of them and although the club offered him a unit of experts who could analyse games, he could never bring himself to surrender control of that part of the job. ‘For me, the most wonderful thing is planning what is going to happen in each game,’ Guardiola has explained. ‘Which players I have at my disposal, which tools I can use, what the opposition is like ... I want to imagine what will happen. I always try and give the players the security of knowing what they’ll encounter. This increases the possibility of doing things well.’

  Moving from task to task, from deadline to deadline, is when he feels most alive, totally immersed or dashing between several projects, addicted to the adrenalin rush generated by it. And that way of understanding his profession fulfils and yet consumes him, but it is the only one possible for him and the one pledged to the fans:‘I promise you that we’ll work hard. I don’t know if we’ll win, but we will try very hard. Fasten your seat belts, you are going to enjoy the ride’ is what he told them at the presentation of the team in summer 2008.

  That work ethic, instilled in him by his parents, is very much part of the Catalan character: saving the soul through industry, effort, honest labour and giving your all to the job. In a suitably symbolic place (the Catalan Parliament), and on being awarded the Nation’s Gold Medal, the country’s highest accolade for a Catalan citizen, in recognition for his representation of Catalan sporting values, he said in his acceptance speech: ‘If we get up early, very early, and think about it, believe me, we are an unstoppable country.’

  But at the same time Pep sets impossibly high standards and is beset by a sense of never being quite good enough. Guardiola might look strong and capable of carrying a club and a
nation on his shoulders but he is very sensitive about the reaction of the team and about disappointing the fans by not meeting their expectations. Or his own.

  He once confided to a close friend: ‘I can imagine the most amazing solution to a problem and then sometimes players come out with something better during the game that I hadn’t thought of. Then that for me it is like a little defeat, it means I should have found that solution earlier.’

  The club, the director of football and the coach try to reduce the element of surprise, of unpredictability, in a game through training and analysing the opposition. Before a game, the manager wants to know which approach to take, but in the end it comes down to the player, it can’t be directed and, what’s more, there are infinite variables on the pitch. How else can Iniesta’s goal at Stamford Bridge in 2009 be explained, when Barcelona seemed to have lost the game? For Pep, that is the wonder of football. And the frustration, too: trying to make something so unpredictable, predictable. No matter how hard he works, he is fighting a losing battle.

  ‘Guardiola loves football,’ his friend the film director David Trueba wrote. ‘And he loves winning, because that is what the game is about – but particularly by doing justice to the approach. He proposes a system and he only asks for you to trust him, that you are faithful to him. The day he notices players who are uncommitted, apathetic, doubtful, even after an irrelevant training session, he is a sad man, demoralised, willing to leave everything.

  ‘No one should be confused about this,’ Trueba continues. ‘He is an obsessive professional, who pays attention to detail, knowing that details can decide a game. He reveres the club he works for and has imposed a rule not to be more than a mere piece in the structure, to earn his salary and never ask for as much as a coffee without paying for it. He doesn’t aspire to be recognised as an indoctrinator, a guru or a guide. He just wants to be recognised as a coach: a good coach. The other things, the good and the bad, are burdens put on him by a society in need of role models. Perhaps everybody is tired of cheats, of profiteers, of villains, people who impose selfish values, opportunism and selfishness, from the privileged platform of television or the media, business or politics. He belongs to that society. But he dignifies it, in a very simple way, trying to do his job well, helping to make common sense prosper from his place in the public eye, with the same quiet dignity with which a good bricklayer, without anyone looking or applauding, lays bricks.’

  ‘A manager’s work is never done,’ Pep was often heard saying. But one morning, following one of those evenings in which Pep (‘a football freak’, enfermo de fútbol, as he has lovingly been called by some of his star players) stayed at the training ground watching videos that had already been dissected and analysed by his colleagues, the coaching staff saw him walk across the training ground looking under the weather. The enthusiastic Pep they had seen the previous day had made way for a silent Pep, whose words said one thing and his sunken eyes another. ‘What’s wrong?’ one of his colleagues asked him. ‘Yesterday I should have gone to see my daughter in a ballet and I couldn’t go.’ ‘Why not?’ his friend asked, surprised. ‘Because I was watching videos of our opponent.’

  ‘Look, every day I think that I’m leaving tomorrow,’ Guardiola said publicly two years into the job. ‘When you’re in charge of something, you always have to bear in mind that you can leave. I work better thinking that I am free to decide my own future. Being tied to a contract for a long time distresses me and this can make you lose your passion. That is why I sign year by year. If I could I would sign only for six months ... I have always thought that everything starts from looking for what you really like, which nowadays is the hardest thing to find. Finding that is the essence of everything.’

  But that essence, in his last season, was eluding him: he was not even enjoying the big European nights, tormented by his worries and indecision. Should I continue? Is it better for Barcelona for me to carry on or should I look for new messages, new solutions to keep people on their toes? How can I find new ways to give Leo Messi what he needs? And Iniesta and Cesc and Alvés? Can I carry on with this for another month, another year? How do young coaches grow old having been successful so early? Wouldn’t it be better to find new horizons?

  Roman Abramovich had been aware of Guardiola’s anxieties for a few years and he wanted to take advantage of the situation. He pursued Pep persistently for two years before he left Barcelona and tried to convince him on many occasions to take the reins at Stamford Bridge. After Ancelotti’s departure from Chelsea in the summer of 2011, the owner’s pursuit gained momentum. André Villas-Boas was the fourth choice candidate to replace the Italian, behind Guus Hiddink, José Mourinho and Pep, who in February of that year had renewed his contract for another season. In June, just before the start of Guardiola’s last season in charge of Barça, Abramovich, working through a middleman, invited Pep to be picked up by private helicopter and whisked away to a meeting on his yacht in Monaco. ‘Stop telling me these things. I don’t want to meet Roman or I might have my head turned by him’ was Pep’s polite answer. But Abramovich was going to come back during his final months in charge of Barcelona. On two occasions, he offered Rafa Benítez a three-month deal to finish the season after the sacking of André Villas-Boas: the Chelsea owner thought he could convince Pep to forget his sabbatical and take over at Stamford Bridge straight after leaving Barcelona.

  The Chelsea owner’s last offer, before Pep Guardiola disappeared from the public eye at the end of the 2012 season, proposed the appointment of an interim manager for one season to leave the Stamford Bridge door open for Pep a year later, wanting him to design the squad for the 2013–14 season as soon as he was ready.

  Chelsea had become the first club to actively try and seduce him. AC Milan and Inter would follow.

  There was a moment earlier on in the season that was to have an impact upon the squad dynamic for the remainder of the campaign. In the third league game, Pep left Messi on the bench for the game against Real Sociedad in San Sebastián: he thought the player would be tired after returning from duties with the Argentine national team. Leo was spectacularly angry, so much so that his contribution during the few minutes he did play was almost non-existent and he didn’t turn up for training the next day. From that day onwards Messi did not miss a game.

  Messi’s role was something to think about. Pep had created a team that revolved around the diminutive, record-breaking Argentinian and there was an abundance of forwards who had come and gone (Ibrahimović, Eto’o, Bojan; even David Villa had to get used to playing on the wing, although upon his arrival he had been told that he would be Barça’s number nine) having been unable to fit in in a style of play that demanded submission to Messi. When the team began to falter, especially in away games, the Argentinian was given more responsibility and Pep selected sides to support him: but that prioritising of Messi reduced others’ responsibilities and terrified the younger players.

  Messi ended up netting seventy-three goals that 2011–12 season in all competitions. In contrast, the next highest goalscorers were Cesc and Alexis with fifteen each. Pep was creating a goalscoring monster but collectively the team was suffering for it – and he knew he was as responsible for this situation as any of his players. As Johan Cruyff said: ‘Guardiola has had to control a lot of egos in the dressing room. It’s not surprising that he has run out of energy.’

  Pep Guardiola rang one of the world game’s leading managers to ask him one question: if you get to a situation where the balance seems broken, what do you do? Do you go or do you change players? He was given the answer that he perhaps didn’t want to hear: you change players. That is what Sir Alex Ferguson has always done, but clearly the United manager feels less beholden to his footballers, both morally and emotionally, than Pep, who invested an awful lot of personal feeling into his first experience as a manager. Too much, in fact. Guardiola needed pills to help him sleep and would go for walks with his partner and their children to help him to find some sort of em
otional balance.

  At one point the team trailed thirteen points behind Madrid. ‘What I have done so far doesn’t guarantee me anything, if the fans have their doubts they will have their own reasons for that,’ he said in one of the most delicately poised moments of the season. The statistics were still impressive, but less so than in the previous three seasons: the team was losing its competitive edge and Pep felt it was his fault. After the defeat to Osasuna in Pamplona (3-2) in February, he said: ‘We’ve made too many mistakes. I didn’t know how to answer the questions before they were asked. I failed. I didn’t do my job well enough.’

  But in fact Pep had one trick left up his sleeve. He followed Johan Cruyff’s example by employing reverse psychology in admitting publicly that Barcelona were ‘not going to win this league’. It had the desired affect. Players, suspicious that the manager was thinking of leaving them, wanted to show that they were still up for the challenge, still hungry. Barcelona clawed back some ground on Madrid, getting to within four points of their rivals but it was too little too late. Defeat to their bitter rivals at the Camp Nou in May effectively handed the title to Mourinho and the old enemy.

  There were uncharacteristic complaints about the referee from Pep in various press conferences during the last few months of the season: a search for excuses that revealed how Guardiola was perhaps losing his focus.

  Pep struggled to accept a fact of life: that after a period of unprecedented success (thirteen titles in his first three years with the first team), there must inevitably be a slump. If you win all the time, there’s less desire to carry on winning. He tried to prevent this inevitable cycle by putting in longer shifts and making huge sacrifices. Even taking care of himself dropped down his list of priorities, and health problems were ignored until they became debilitating, such as the slipped disc that incapacitated him for few days in March.