Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

by Balague, Guillem

  A good student in his days at the village convent school, Pep was known as a tros de pa – a bit of bread, as they say in Catalan,‘a well-behaved child’ – soaking up knowledge, always willing to help in church. Just about the closest Guardi came to rebellion was disappearing early on the odd occasion his dad asked him to help out with some bricklaying. He always looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, an asset on the occasions he was asked to play the role of an angel in the village nativity plays.

  Pep moved to a Catholic school a few miles from home, La Salle de Manresa, when he was seven: his first exodus. It was a strict environment and he had to adapt quickly to his new surroundings and teachers – Brother Virgilio was responsible for teaching him his first words in English, a language he now switches to with ease whenever questioned at a Champions League press conference in front of the world’s media. As well as Italian, and, of course Catalan and Spanish. Oh, and French, too.

  At La Salle his personality traits continually emerged and developed: self-demanding, blessed with a natural charm and obsessed with football; but, above all else, Pep proved to be an excellent listener and, like a sponge, absorbed knowledge from everyone around him, especially his elders. He was a bit taller and thinner than most, perhaps a consequence of the fact that he never stood still – or so his mother thinks – and he was still the first player to be picked by the football captains and frequently the sole participant in one of his favourites games: keepy-uppy. He played that by himself, because there was no point in competing: he couldn’t be beaten.

  During one of those games at La Salle he was spotted by a couple of scouts from Club Gimnàstic de Manresa – the ‘wiry lad’s’ leadership and passing ability easily caught the eye. With the blessing of his dad, Valentí, he began training at Gimnàstic two or three times a week and some key principles were quickly instilled in him: ‘Don’t stamp on anybody but don’t let anybody stamp on you; keep your head high; two-touch football; keep the ball on the ground.’ If the golden thread to success is coaching, Pep had started off in the ideal academy.

  Perhaps it was only natural that a kid from Pep’s village would support Barcelona, considering there was only one fan of Espanyol, their rivals from across the city. That Espanyol fan also happened to be Pep’s grandad and there was even an Espanyol poster hanging on the walls of the family home in his honour. But his elder’s preference didn’t influence Pep’s sporting allegiance: ‘My grandad was the nicest person in the world and had such a huge heart that burst out of his chest. He had an enormous sense of compassion so he almost felt compelled to support the smaller team, the underdog. In our village there was not a single Espanyol fan apart from him.’

  A team-mate of his at Gimnàstic had a relative who was a season-ticket holder at FC Barcelona and Pep asked him if he could borrow it to see a game at the Camp Nou one day. In 1982 a ten-year-old Pep set foot in the imposing stadium for the very first time to watch FC Barcelona take on Osasuna in La Liga. The street leading up to it was a river of people waving Barcelona flags and Pep experienced ‘an incredible feeling’ of joy, of excitement, of being a part of something big, an epiphany. As he sat in row seven of the north stand, just off to one side behind the goal, he muttered to his friend, as thousands of kids before him must have done: ‘I would pay millions to play on that pitch one day.’

  In fact, while he was with Gimnàstic, Pep played in a few friendlies against the FC Barcelona academy sides, which provided him with some valuable lessons regarding his own and his team’s limitations: he was the best player in that Gimnàstic side but he sensed there were many more kids like him, or even better, wearing the blue and red shirt of FC Barcelona.

  It was around this time, and without his eleven-year-old-son knowing it, that Valentí filled in a form published in a sports paper offering kids the opportunity to take part in trials organised by Barça.

  ‘Barcelona want to see you,’ his dad told him few days later, to his son’s amazement. Of course, he went to the trial: nervous, still very lightweight. He played badly. And he knew it. A sleepless night followed. He was asked to return for a second day but he was no better. At the trial, Pep was played in an attacking wide position and he lacked the pace and strength to excel. He was given one more chance, invited back for a third day. The coach moved him into central midfield where, suddenly, Pep was a magnet for the ball, directing the forward play and dictating tempo. He’d done enough. Barcelona decided they wanted him to join them.

  His dad kept that information to himself until he was sure it was in his son’s best interests. Valentí, and Pep’s mum, Dolors, were worried that those daunting and stressful trips to Barcelona were unnerving their son, who returned home quieter than usual, apprehensive and unable to eat properly. After discussing it with his wife, Valentí decided to reject Barcelona’s offer. They believed that Pep was too young to move to La Masía, too naïve to live on his own away from his family, not yet strong enough to compete or to cope.

  In the years following that trial with Barcelona, football remained a key part of the Guardiola family routine with constant trips to Manresa and throughout the region for league games and friendlies with Pep promoted to captain of the Gimnàstic side. The dream of Barça, it seemed, had been forgotten.

  A couple of years later, FC Barcelona made another phone call to the Guardiola household. Valentí picked up the receiver and listened to their offer.

  ‘We have to talk,’ he told his son after a training session with Gimnàstic. The family gathered around the dinner table, Valentí, Dolors and their thirteen-year-old son, Pep. Dad tried to explain, as best he could to a young teenage boy, that there was life beyond the village and the Catholic school; he tried to prepare him for what he should expect if he left home; that his studies were a priority; that a move to Barcelona would expose Pep to an entirely new level of obligations, responsibility and expectation. Up until that moment in Pep’s life, football had been little more than a game, but, as Valentí told his son, he now had the opportunity to transform his life and make a living out of the sport he loved at the club he adored.

  Pep took his father’s words on board and understood what was at stake: he had already made up his mind that if Barcelona didn’t come back for him, he would abandon his dream of becoming a professional footballer because he couldn’t take any further rejection. But Barça had called. The decision was made. Pep Guardiola was going to leave home and all that was familiar behind him: he was going to move to the big city, he was going to give his all to become a professional footballer, he was going to pursue his dream of playing for FC Barcelona.

  A kid jumping on a bunk bed in La Masía, Barcelona. An early August evening, late 1980s

  Soon after receiving the call, Pep, together with his parents and brother Pere, visited Barcelona’s facilities at La Masía, the old farm that housed the young academy players from outside Barcelona. Lying on top of one of the bunk beds, Pep opened the window of the room he would share with four other lads and could barely contain his excitement as he shouted, ‘Wow, Mum, look! Every day I’ll be able to open this window and see the Nou Camp!’

  When he moved to La Masía he left behind the Platini poster that adorned his room – consciously or not, football had moved into another dimension. Yet, for Pep, it was still a game. He doesn’t look back on his early days at the club as a time of emotional hardship, although he admits it was difficult to leave behind everything he knew, including all his friends, at just thirteen years old. From one day to the next, family ties were broken, new relationships had to be forged. Occasionally, at night, he would go down to the ground floor of the old farmhouse to use the payphone to chat with his parents, but, unlike many of the kids who suffered terrible homesickness because of the distances separating them from their families, Pep’s calls were less frequent because most weekends he would return to his village, just an hour away. He describes it now as an eye-opening time, full of novelties and discoveries and some absences that helped him matur
e: he grew up and developed quickly. The distance separating him and his team-mates from family and friends was going to make them resilient.

  His father doesn’t remember it like that: ‘The lad phoned us up in tears; he used to break our hearts.’

  Memory likes to play tricks. His life as a manager, tense, exhausting, created a curious effect: his young life seems to have been rewritten and Pep has started to look back on those days with a mixture of melancholy and envy for the lost innocence of it all. Clearly he has now forgotten the most painful parts, the good memories blotting out the bad, but a decade ago he wrote that he sometimes felt ‘helpless’ at ‘The Big House’, which is how the Barça headquarters was known to the kids. The club had given him and the other youngsters everything they required, but ‘especially the affection and peace of mind to know that whenever I needed them, they were always nearby to stop my problems getting in the way of my dreams. And that fact – that they’re there for us – is so important to me that I’ll always be grateful to them and I’ll never be able to repay them.’

  Their day started with a breakfast that consisted of yogurts, cereals, toast, jam and milk. Unlike other kids of their generation, the youngsters at La Masía shared a television with an automatic timer that clicked off at eleven o’clock every night. Apart from daily training sessions, there were distractions far more eye-opening than anything their TV was showing before the watershed. After dark, and despite the curfew, Pep and his room-mates would gather at the window to be entertained by one of the rituals of the residence: spying on the nightly comings and goings of the prostitutes who plied their trade up and down the street that leads to the gates of La Masía. With time, their presence became ‘part of the furniture’.

  The bedtime tears of some of the kids also became a part of the nightly soundtrack, but Pep quickly grasped that crying didn’t make him feel any better; they were living the dream after all. Far better to focus on the job in hand, which in his case included a programme of physical improvement as his mentors could see the potential, but were worried about his slight frame.

  He talked and talked football during the long coach journeys travelling to games all over Catalonia, the homeland that he got to know so well in those teenage years. He continually learnt from everything he saw around him, from other teams, from coaches, from older team-mates. On one occasion, he asked a couple of his colleagues to repeat a free-kick routine he had seen the B side perform the previous weekend. The move led to a goal and their coach asked, ‘Whose idea was that? And where did you pick that up?’ ‘From the grown-up players,’ responded a fifteen-year-old Pep Guardiola. La Masía: a footballing university campus where players and coaches mixed.

  ‘The kids only want to play football, live football, and La Masía allows you to do it,’ Pep recalls. ‘Any time of day was ideal to get the ball and have a kickabout or to go and see how the others trained. Occasionally, when I’m asked to do a talk in La Masía, I use the following example: each night when you are going to sleep, ask yourselves if you like football or not; ask yourselves if right then, you’d get up, grab the ball and play for a bit.’ If ever the answer is ‘no’, then that is the day to start looking for something else to do.

  There were other benefits to living in the football school. The Masía kids had the opportunity to become privileged spectators in the Nou Camp by handing out club leaflets on match days or, after a long waiting list, becoming ball boys. There is a picture of a young Pep on the pitch, gleefully clapping alongside a couple of Barcelona players with Terry Venables carried aloft on their shoulders in celebration after the final whistle the night FC Barcelona beat Gothenburg to reach the European Cup final in 1986.

  Pep learnt an unexpected lesson as a ball boy when the teenager waited for his idol Michel Platini to come out for the warm-up before a Barcelona–Juventus game. He had been dreaming about it for weeks, his first chance to see his childhood hero in the flesh, and he had a cunning plan to secure Platini’s autograph: pen and paper tucked away in his pocket, Pep planned to pounce on the French star as he walked across the pitch to join his team-mates in the warm-up on the far side – he knew it was the only chance he was going to get without getting into trouble. Cabrini, Bonini, Brio jogged out, then Michael Laudrup. But no Platini. It transpired that the French superstar didn’t always come out with the team to do some stretching. ‘Ah,’ Pep thought, ‘so not all players are treated as equals; it turns out they’re not all the same.’ The pen and paper stayed in his pocket, unused.

  The Platini poster that hadn’t accompanied him to La Masía stayed on the wall of his bedroom in Santpedor for a few years, but gradually another player, this one far more accessible, took centre stage: Guillermo Amor, future midfielder of the Johan Cruyff side, four years older than Pep and also resident at La Masía.

  ‘At the time, when I started to pay attention to everything that you did, I was thirteen years old,’ Pep wrote a decade ago in reference to Amor, in his autobiography My People, My Football. ‘I didn’t just follow every one of your games, but also the training sessions; I paid attention to your attitude, because you faced everyone as if your life depended on it. I used to have my practical football lessons at 7 p.m. on an adjacent pitch; but I used to turn up two hours earlier, so I could listen in on the theory class on pitch number 1: seeing how you carried yourself, how you encouraged your team-mates, how you asked for the ball, how you listened and how you earned the respect of everyone around you. I pay tribute to you today for every one of those moments you gave us back then at La Masía on pitch number 1, during mealtimes, in the dressing room, throughout the holidays, away at hotels and even on television.’

  When Amor returned from away games with the B team – a side that also included Tito Vilanova, Pep’s future assistant and successor in the Camp Nou dugout – Guardiola would pester him for the score and details of how they’d got along. ‘We won,’ would be the standard answer. Over the next few years, Amor, who embodied all the values instilled in players at the club right through to the first team, became like a big brother to Pep, who intuitively understood that the club is not only about the bricks and mortar of the stadium or training facility, but mostly about the footballing DNA shared by Guillermo and others like him. So when Pep took his first major decisions as a Barcelona manager, selling Ronaldinho and Deco or approving Amor’s appointment as director of youth football, he did so with a desire to return the focus of influence in the dressing room to home-grown players.

  Guardiola remained a lanky teenager with little muscle mass, the opposite of the ideal footballer’s stature. But great art is always born of frustration and since he lacked the pace and strength to overcome the opposition, he substituted physical power with the power of the mind: instinctively developing a sense of spatial awareness that was second to none. He was capable of leaving behind three players with one pass, widening or narrowing the field at will, so that the ball always travelled more than the player. Usually when children start to play football, they want to learn to dribble. Guardiola didn’t: he learnt how to pass the ball.

  La Masía, a word also used to generically describe the Barcelona youth system, was and still is rich in talent – the product of promoting, for more than three decades, a style of football now celebrated around the world. ‘Some think it is like the Coca-Cola recipe,’ says the Catalan journalist Ramón Besa, ‘some sort of secret, winning formula.’ In fact, it’s no secret at all; it is, simultaneously, a simple yet revolutionary idea: possession, combining, defending by attacking and always looking for a way to the opposition goal; finding the best talent without physical restrictions as the key element of the selection of players. Add to that the commitment to technical quality and ensuring that the kids develop an understanding of the game. It is a philosophy based on technique and talent: nothing more, nothing less. ‘I have never forgotten the first thing they told me when I came to Barça as a little boy,’ says the Barcelona midfielder Xavi Hernández. ‘Here, you can never give the ball
away.’

  The Barcelona model is the consequence of a club that always favoured good football (in the 1950s the Catalan club recruited the Hungarians Ladislao Kubala, Sándor Kocsis and Zoltán Czibor, key members of the best national team in the world at that time) and also of the revolutionary ideas brought to the club by two men: Laureano Ruíz and Johan Cruyff. Laureano was a stubborn coach who, in the 1970s, introduced a particular brand of training to Barcelona based upon talent and technique, and by his second season at the club had managed to convince all the junior teams follow suit. Under Cruyff, dominating the ball became the first and most important rule. ‘If you have the ball, the opposition doesn’t have it and can’t attack you,’ Cruyff would repeat daily. So the job became finding the players who could keep possession and also doing a lot of positional work in training.

  On top of that, La Masía, as all good academies should, develops players and human beings and instils in them a strong sense of belonging, of identity, as Xavi explains: ‘What is the key to this Barcelona? That the majority of us are from “this house” – from here, this is our team, but not just the players, the coaches too, the doctors, the physios, the handymen. We’re all culés, we’re all Barça fans, we’re all a family, we’re all united, we all go out of our way to make things work.’

  Despite the fact that, since 2011, the old farmhouse no longer serves as a hall of residence, the revolution that started there three decades ago continued and reached its zenith with the arrival of Guardiola as first-team coach as he put his faith in La Masía’s finest ‘products’. It is, as the Catalan sports writer and former Olympian Martí Perarnau puts it, ‘a differentiating factor, an institutional flag and a structural investment’ – and it is one that pays dividends as well. In 2010, it became the first youth academy to have trained all three finalists for the Ballon d’Or in the same year, with Andrés Iniesta, Lionel Messi and Xavi Hernández standing side by side on the rostrum.