‘I had the best years of my life at La Masía,’ Pep recalls. ‘It was a time focused upon the singular most non-negotiable dream that I have ever had: to play for Barça’s first team. That anxiety to become good enough for Johan Cruyff to notice us cannot be put into words. Without that desire, none of us would be who we are today. Triumph is something else. I am talking about loving football and being wanted.’
Even though Pep managed to overcome his lack of physical strength and got himself noticed, the final step was missing: the call-up to the first team. But when Johan Cruyff needed a number four, a player to direct the team in front of the defence, the Dutch coach wasn’t deterred by Pep’s slight physique. He called him up because he sensed that he could read the game and pass the ball.
On that day in May 1989, Pep had to drop everything, including a girl he was just getting to know, grab his kit and travel with the first team to a friendly in Banyoles. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he had made his senior Barcelona debut. He was eighteen years old. If he’d hoped that the girl would be impressed with his new status, the same could not be said of Cruyff who was distinctly underwhelmed by Pep’s debut performance. ‘You were slower than my granny!’ the coach told him at half-time; but Pep grew to understand Cruyff’s methods when it came to chastising his players: ‘When he attacked you most and when you were at your worst was when he helped you most. But since it was my first experience with a coach, who was so important to me, that affected me enough for me never to forget it.’
‘Slower than my granny’ – those words marked the beginning of one of the most enduring and influential football relationships in history.
A training session. Nou Camp. Late morning, winter 1993
According to the principles Johan Cruyff introduced to Barcelona, coaches should lead by example: play football, be on the field during training and teach, because there is nothing better than stopping the game, correcting and instructing, explaining why someone needed to pass to a certain player, move to a particular position or change an element of their technique. That’s how Carles Rexach, Cruyff’s assistant for eight years at Barcelona, explains it: ‘One word from Johan during a training drill is worth more than a hundred hours of talks at the blackboard.’
It is a training style that Pep emulates and applies today in his training sessions; but for a young player, Cruyff could be so imposing that it was difficult to talk to him. His iconic status and his absolute conviction in his methods and ideas often created a near-authoritarian way of communicating.
On a sunny but cold day on the pitch sandwiched between La Masía and the Camp Nou, Cruyff decided to target Guardiola. ‘Two legs!’ he shouted at his pupil. And Laudrup and the others laughed. ‘Two legs, two legs!’ The coach was trying to get Pep to lose his fear of his left foot. If he received the ball with his left foot, he could, with a slight touch, switch it to the right one, then hit a pass. And vice versa. The problem for Pep was that he didn’t feel comfortable. ‘Two legs, kid!’ Cruyff kept shouting.
Johan Cruyff was the person who had the greatest influence on Guardiola: as the coach who was with Pep the longest (six years), and the one for whom Pep has the greatest affection and respect. Cruyff was also the man who gave him the opportunity to play in the Barcelona first team, the one who believed in him at a time when he was looking for exactly the kind of player that Pep came to be – a passer of the ball positioned in front of the defence who could provide the platform from which every Barcelona attack would begin. He also taught his players how to mark an opponent, teaching them to focus on a rival’s weaknesses – while accentuating what you were good at, to fight the battles you could win, in other words. It was a revelation for Pep, who lacked the physique to beat a tall, powerful, central midfielder in the air – so he learnt, under Cruyff, to avoid jumping with his rival, but to wait instead. Cruyff’s theory was: ‘Why fight? Keep your distance, anticipate where he’ll head the ball and wait for the bounce. You’ll be in control while he’s jumping around.’
But it wasn’t all that easy for Pep, not in the beginning. After making his debut against Banyoles, eighteen months passed before Guardiola had the opportunity to play with the first team again although his performances with the B side were not going completely unnoticed. Then, in the summer of 1990, Barcelona were looking for a central midfielder as Luis Milla, who regularly filled that role, signed for Real Madrid – and Ronald Koeman was injured. Cruyff and his assistant Charly Rexach proposed that the club move for Jan Molby of Liverpool. The president asked for alternatives and Rexach suggested Guardiola. Cruyff had little recollection of Pep’s disappointing debut and decided to go and see him play.
Unfortunately, on the day Cruyff dropped in on the B team, Pep spent the entire match on the bench. ‘You tell me he’s good; but he didn’t even play!’ he shouted to Rexach. ‘I asked who was the best in the youth team. Everyone told me it was Guardiola but he didn’t even warm up. Why not if he is the best?’
Cruyff was incensed. They told him Pep wasn’t that strong physically and that other, bigger or more dynamic, quicker players were occasionally preferred in his position; to which Cruyff replied: ‘A good player doesn’t need a strong physique.’
That argument led to the type of decision that has helped shape the recent history of the club.
The first day he was summoned again to train with the Dutch coach, Pep arrived early, eager. He opened the door of the changing room where he found a couple of players alongside the boss and Angel Mur – the team physio who was also an inadvertent conductor of the Barcelona principles, history and ideas. Pep kept his head down as he walked in. He stood still and waited for instructions. ‘This is your locker. Get changed,’ Cruyff told him. Not another word.
On 16 December 1990, Pep, then nineteen years old, made his competitive La Liga debut against Cádiz at the Camp Nou – in a match for which his mentor, Guillermo Amor, was suspended. Minutes before kick-off Pep suffered an attack of nerves: sweating profusely, his heart racing at a thousand miles an hour. ‘My palms were sweating and I was really tense.’ Thankfully it didn’t occur on this occasion, but on other occasions his body had been known to betray him completely and he’d even been known to throw up before a big game. ‘He really lived it, too much, even,’ remembers Rexach. At nineteen, Pep Guardiola lined up alongside Zubizarretta, Nando, Alexanco, Eusebio, Serna, Bakero, Goiko, Laudrup, Salinas and Txiki Beguiristain – a collection of names that would soon become synonymous with one of the most glorious periods in the club’s history. The players who would come to be remembered for ever beat Cádiz 2-0 that day.
That competitive debut marked some kind of a watershed moment for the club: a before and after in Barcelona’s history. Although Laureano Ruíz was the first coach to take the steps towards the professionalisation of grass-roots football at Barça, it was Cruyff who really went on to establish the big idea, the philosophy – and no player epitomises that transition better than Guardiola. Pep was the first of a legacy who has become a quasi-sacred figure at Barça: the number four (derived from the number five in Argentina, the midfielder in front of the defence who has to defend but also organise the attack). It is true that Luis Milla played that role at the beginning of the Cruyff era, but it was Guardiola who elevated it to another level.
Pep only played three first-team games in that debut season but the following year Cruyff decided to position the lanky Guardiola at the helm of this historic team and, in doing so, established a playing model and defined a position. The figure of Barcelona’s number four has evolved at the same rate as global football has edged towards a more physical game, and La Masía has gone on to produce players like Xavi, Iniesta, Fàbregas, Thiago Alcantara and even Mikel Arteta, proving that Guardiola’s legacy endures.
‘Guardiola had to be clever,’ Cruyff says today. ‘He didn’t have any other choice back then. He was a bit like me. You must have a lot of technique, move the ball quickly, avoid a collision – and to avoid it you must have good vision. It�
�s a domino effect. You soon get a sharp eye for detail, for players’ positions. You can apply this when you are a player and a coach, too. Guardiola learnt that way – thanks to his build – and he was lucky enough to have had a coach who had experienced the same thing.’
Once established in the first team, the best piece of advice Rexach gave Pep is one that he likes to repeat to his midfielders today: ‘When you have the ball, you should be in the part of the pitch where you have the option of passing it to any one of the other ten players; then, go for the best option.’
Guardiola has said on numerous occasions that if he was a nineteen-year-old at Barcelona today, he would never have made it as a professional because he was too thin and too slow. At best, he likes to say, he’d be playing in the third division somewhere. It might have been true a decade ago and perhaps even true at many other top clubs today, but not at FC Barcelona; not now. His passing range and quick thinking would fit wonderfully into the team he coached – and his leadership skills must not be forgotten either; as it soon became evident in his playing career; he didn’t just pass the ball to his team-mates, he talked to them constantly.
‘Keep it simple, Michael!’ shouted a twenty-year-old Guardiola on one occasion to Laudrup, the international superstar. The Danish player had tried to dribble past three players too close to the halfway line, where losing the ball would have been dangerous. ‘That was simple,’ Michael replied with a wink. But he knew the kid was right.
Just seven months after his debut, Pep was not only one of the regulars, but also a leading player with immense influence in, at least up until recent times, the best Barça team in history: Cruyff’s Barcelona won four consecutive La Liga titles between 1991 and 1994.
In the 1991–2 season, Barcelona had qualified for the European Cup final to be played against Sampdoria at Wembley, something that for Pep, both as a culé and player, represented the culmination of a dream. The club had never won that trophy.
The night before, in the last training session in London before the game, striker Julio Salinas and Pep were arguing about the number of steps up to the famous balcony where the cup was collected at the old stadium. ‘There’s thirty-one steps, I’m telling you,’ argued Pep, for whom accuracy was important as he has a weakness for football mythology and rituals. Salinas, who loved winding Pep up, got a kick out of disagreeing with him. Zubizarreta, the keeper, couldn’t bear to hear them squabbling any longer: ‘The best way to resolve this is to win the game tomorrow! When we go up the steps to collect the cup, you can bloody well count them then, OK?’
Seventeen months after his debut, on 20 May 1992, Guardiola, as expected, found himself in the line-up of the European Cup final. Before heading out on to the pitch, Johan Cruyff gave his players a simple instruction: ‘Go out there and enjoy yourselves.’ It was a statement that embodies an entire footballing philosophy and was central to Cruyff’s principles; yet for others, its simplicity, ahead of such a key game, might be considered an insult to the coaching profession.
As Barcelona fans, players and directors were celebrating wildly after Ronald Koeman fired home a free kick in the final moments of the second half of injury time, at least one person wearing a Barça shirt had something else on his mind amidst the chaos and euphoria. As the stadium erupted while one by one the Barcelona players held aloft the trophy known as ‘Old Big Ears’, Zubi sidled up to Guardiola and said: ‘You were wrong, son, there’s thirty-three of them. I just counted them one by one.’
‘Ciutadans de Catalunya, ja teniu la copa aquí’ (Catalans, you have the cup here), cried Pep Guardiola from the balcony of the Generalitat Palace in Barcelona that houses the offices of the Presidency of Catalonia. It was no accident that Barcelona’s returning heroes presented their first European trophy to the city on the exact spot from where, almost fifteen years earlier, the former Catalan president Josep Tarradellas had used a similar expression to announce his return from exile (‘Ciutatans de Catalunya, ja soc aquí’, ‘I am finally here’). Guardiola, a Catalan referent of the team, of the club, understood the significance of FC Barcelona’s coronation as a European superpower and its role now clearly established as an iconic symbol of the nation.
‘That night at Wembley was unforgettable: my greatest memory. It turned into a party that carried on through the following Liga matches,’ remembers Guardiola. Just a few days later, Barcelona, led in midfield by the young Pep, won an historic league title in truly dramatic fashion. On the final day of the season, Real Madrid travelled to Tenerife as league leaders needing a win to secure the title, something that many saw as a foregone conclusion. Yet after taking a 2-0 lead in the first half, a shambolic second-half collapse saw Madrid lose the match and, with it, surrendered the league trophy to their rivals in Barcelona.
Cruyff was transforming a club that had, before 1992, been successful on the domestic front yet had failed to impose itself upon the European stage and established Barcelona as a genuine international power. In fact, Cruyff did more than set a unique footballing model in motion: he challenged Barcelona fans to confront their fears, to overcome the sense of victimisation that had been a constant feature of the club’s identity since the beginning of the century. This team, a collection of brilliant individual talents such as Ronald Koeman, Hristo Stoichkov, Romário, Michael Laudrup, Andoni Zubizarreta, José Mari Bakero and Pep Guardiola pulling the strings in midfield, combined to become synonymous with beautiful, yet effective, fast and free-flowing football that became universally known as the Dream Team.
The year 1992 continued to be a magical one for Pep as a footballer and, not long after the European Cup success, he found himself celebrating a gold medal win at the Barcelona Olympic Games. Yet, Guardiola has bitter-sweet memories of the experience with the national team: ‘It passed me by like sand slips through your fingers,’ he recalls.
The Spanish Olympic football squad convened almost a month before the tournament at a training camp some 700 kilometres from Barcelona, near Palencia in northern Spain, where, according to Pep, he behaved ‘like a complete idiot. I say it that clearly because that is just how I feel when I remember that I was distant and made myself an outsider from the group. I didn’t show any intention of integrating, nor sharing in the solidarity that team members who have a common objective must show. My team-mates, despite being kind, would have at the very least thought that I was full of myself: a fool. In the end, when I woke up from my lethargy, I ended up enjoying playing football with a team full of excellent players: guys with whom I managed to forge strong, consistent friendships that have lasted until this day. The friendship, a triumph, as much as the gold medal we won.’ Some of the players in that Olympic Spanish side – Chapi Ferrer, Abelardo, Luis Enrique (then at Real Madrid), Alfonso and Kiko – would go on to form the backbone of the senior national team throughout the following decade.
That summer Guardiola earned a reputation for being a little strange, a bit different from your average player: a label that, within certain football circles, he has been unable to lose. If the distance he placed between himself and the rest of the national squad upset some, his intensity in games and training frightened others, distancing him even further from those who had little interest in understanding the game. José Antonio Camacho, his national coach for three years, shares that view. ‘I saw Guardiola as a mystical type of person. The way he dressed – always in black – he was sometimes very quiet, constantly analysing things, thinking things over: why we won, why we lost, why he’d lost the ball. Sometimes his obsessiveness was excessive.’
That same year, his talent for making the right pass, for setting the rhythm of a game, touching the ball a thousand times a match and never for more than a second each time, his belief in the style of play Cruyff had imposed, did not go unnoticed internationally and he was awarded the Trofeo Bravo for the most promising European footballer in 1992.
His rise had been meteoric: he had become recognised as a world-class player in the two years since making hi
s debut. Even more league trophies immediately followed, one after another, but then came the first big slip-up, one that would teach him something more than any victory. It was 18 May 1994: the all-powerful Dream Team was the bookmakers’ favourite in the European Cup final against Fabio Capello’s Milan in Athens. The 4-0 defeat served up a slice of humble pie for Barcelona, a lesson in the dangers of becoming overconfident, complacent even, and made all the more bitter because the reason for the defeat was neither defensive nor tactical – it was mental, it was down to a lack of preparation: ‘All of us thought that we were playing against a gang. We went out there convinced that we were the better team and they put four past us. Their superiority was so great that I just wanted the game to be over,’ Pep wrote years later.
After the golden era of 1990–94, Cruyff found it increasingly difficult to find new solutions and motivational tools to counter the team’s problems, leading to the Dutchman making some strange decisions during his last two seasons at the club. One in particular revealed Pep’s sensitivity. When the goalkeeper Zubizarreta, a captain, a leader, a man whom Guardiola considered a brother, was told by Cruyff he had to leave the club, Pep was devastated. He held it together until the night the squad gathered in a restaurant to pay tribute to the man they knew fondly as ‘Zubi’. Pep disappeared and was found, tucked away in a corner, in tears. Only Zubi was able to console him.
By 1994, Guardiola was established as the figure who orchestrated Barça’s play. ‘My role was to move the ball around the pitch for my team-mates to finish off the move,’ he says. The departure of Zubizarreta had made Guardiola the new leader, in charge of carrying out Cruyff’s instructions on and off the pitch.
Even if sometimes, albeit rarely, he forgot what his role involved. He understood football as a team sport, but his genuine appreciation of the game made him an unconditional admirer of the best. His adoration was particularly reserved for the magical players capable of transforming a game into a spectacle. When Romário joined the club, Cruyff wanted the Brazilian to accompany him and Pep, the captain, for dinner. The coach was stunned by the admiration, the reverence even, that Pep showed towards the newcomer. In fact, such was his fawning adoration of the new star that when Romário disappeared to the bathroom, Cruyff had to remind Pep to stop acting like a star-struck fifteen-year-old.
Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography Page 6
