Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

by Balague, Guillem

  After his final match at the Nou Camp, the return leg of the semi-finals of the Spanish Cup against Celta that saw Barcelona knocked out, Pep waited until everyone else had left the stadium. Cristina, his partner, came to support him, just as she had done from the day they first met when he walked into her family’s store in Manresa – when a simple shopping trip to try on a pair of jeans led to a relationship that would become a source of strength and comfort to Pep throughout the toughest moments of his career. Moments like this. The couple, alongside his agent, Josep María Orobitg, made their way from the dressing room, down the tunnel and up the few steps that lead to the Camp Nou touchline; where he stood, for the very last time as player, to say goodbye to the pitch he’d first laid eyes on as a ten-year-old boy sitting behind the goal in the north stand some two decades earlier. He soaked up the silence in the empty stadium, but he didn’t feel like crying. The overriding emotion was that of a great weight being lifted from his shoulders.

  An Italian village, the dining room of a house. Luciano Moggi sits down to lunch surrounded by bodyguards. Midday, summer 2001

  ‘When Pep left, it was a difficult time,’ recalls Charly Rexach. ‘They called him everything imaginable, he got a lot of stick without being to blame for anything that had gone on. The home-grown players were always on the receiving end. He was burned out and he suffered a lot. Guardiola suffers, he’s not the type of person who can shake these things off. He was overloaded, he felt a sense of liberation when he moved on.’

  Pep was thirty years old when he played his last game for the club and was still in good shape, so it was inevitable that people expected him to move to one of Europe’s leading clubs. Offers started pouring in. Inter, AC Milan, Roma, Lazio, all came calling from Italy. Paris Saint-Germain and even a couple of Greek clubs expressed an interest. In England, Pep’s availability aroused the interest of Tottenham, Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester United, Wigan, West Ham and Fulham. But Pep wanted to play for the team that had captured his imagination as a small boy kicking a ball around the village square. He wanted to sign for Juventus, just as Platini had, his idol on the poster on his bedroom wall in Santpedor.

  According to Jaume Collell in his excellent biography of Guardiola, Pep’s negotiations with Juventus played out like something from a mafia movie. The tale begins with a phone call to the player’s agent, Josep María Orobitg, informing him that somebody from Juventus wanted a secret meeting with him. Consequently, a car arrived to collect the agent in Barcelona and took him, via a number of B roads, to Turin. Barely a word was spoken in the car until they finally arrived at a modest hostel in a remote spot. ‘Orobitg went up the stairs and Luciano Moggi came across, the general director of Juventus,’ Collell explains. ‘He was sitting at a round table, surrounded by shaven-head bodyguards, wearing the typical dark glasses. A chubby waitress served abundant amounts of pasta but said little. Suddenly, the bodyguards left together. Alone, Moggi and Orobitg reached an agreement in less than three minutes.’ Orobitg says it took forty-five minutes but agrees with the description of the scene. The fact of the matter is that nothing was signed on paper.

  Manchester United had been interested in him while he was still at Barcelona, but his agent could only listen to what they had to say at that time because Pep refused to allow him permission to negotiate with another club while he was still wearing a Barcelona shirt. Sir Alex Ferguson put a lot of pressure on the agent, as he was planning for the season ahead and saw Pep as a key player in his plans. Ferguson even presented them with an ultimatum: he wanted a face-to-face meeting with the Barcelona midfielder. Guardiola was hesitant and he turned Sir Alex Ferguson down. That was the end of the matter. Ferguson was angry but Pep had no regrets. ‘Maybe the timing I chose was wrong,’ Sir Alex says now.

  In the press conference ahead of the 2001 Champions League final at Wembley, when Pep said Ferguson had done the right thing in not signing him, he was really hiding the reality of that failed transfer: after six or seven months of negotiations, meetings with Ferguson’s son and the agent Francis Martin, and after the player rejected huge financial incentives, Manchester United moved on. In his place, Ferguson signed Juan Sebastián Verón along with Ruud Van Nistelrooy and Laurent Blanc. And United went on to finish third in the Premier League that season.

  Inter, Arsenal, Liverpool and Tottenham pressed on with negotiations. Inter showed considerable interest, but Juventus remained Pep’s preferred club. Yet, three months after the aforementioned trip to Turin and continuing contact between the Juve president, Umberto Agnelli, Moggi and Pep’s representatives, something strange happened: the Italian club denied that the secret encounter – even the pasta, the bodyguards and car ride from Barcelona – had even taken place and that no agreement had ever been reached.

  The logical explanation for Juve’s U-turn was that Moggi had just dismissed the coach Carlo Ancelotti, who had given the thumbs-up to Pep’s signing, and replaced him with Marcello Lippi. Juventus sold Zinedine Zidane to Real Madrid and suddenly their objectives changed: with the €76 million from Zidane’s transfer fee – then the most expensive in history – the Italians decided to build a younger team, bringing in Pavel Nedved, Lilian Thuram, Marcelo Salas and Gianluigi Buffon.

  As the summer passed, opportunities and options from some surprising corners emerged. Real Madrid even sounded him out in a meeting in Paris. ‘Have you gone mad!?’ Guardiola replied in a conversation that lasted all of two minutes.

  The deadline for Champions League registration came and went, making it increasingly difficult for Pep to join one of the biggest clubs. He had even come close to signing for Arsenal, but, the day before the deadline, Patrick Vieira’s proposed move to Real Madrid broke down and the deal taking Guardiola to north London collapsed.

  It was a difficult time for Pep, not least because the Catalan press were asked by some enemies of the player to publish that no other club wanted him so the club would be protected from criticism that they had lost a good player.

  With the possibility of playing in the Champions League now no longer an option, Pep accepted an offer from Serie A side Brescia. The team coach, Carlo Mazzone, made a point of telling Pep as soon as he arrived that he was there because of the president, not because he wanted him. Guardiola was determined to prove his worth with his work on the pitch and accepted the premise. He signed a contract when the season had already started, on 26 September 2001, but his debut wasn’t until 14 October against Chievo Verona.

  A month and a half after joining Brescia, the Italian team was already playing the way Pep, rather than the coach, wanted but Mazzone was shrewd enough not to object to the ideas Pep introduced to the squad. One day, Pep asked for videos of the forthcoming opposition for the players and staff to analyse, something that had never before been done at the club. The fact is, instead of viewing the move to Brescia as a step down in his career, Pep saw it as a way of getting to know a new style of football and consequently a way of enriching his tactical knowledge: at this stage he had decided he wanted to continue to be involved in the game when his playing career ended. Football was his passion, his obsession, the thing he knew best, and Serie A was considered the league that practised the most advanced defensive tactics since Sacchi. His Milan of the eighties were regarded as having set the benchmark in terms of work rate and defensive strategy over the previous two decades – and Pep was determined to learn as much as he could from his time in Italy.

  Brescia training ground. A cold November morning, 2001

  The lengthy periods of injury, his departure from Barcelona or sporting defeats pale into insignificance compared with the emotional ordeal Pep suffered after failing a drugs test during his time at Brescia: firstly, after a game against Piacenza on 21 October 2001 and then, a week later, against Lazio on 4 November. The results of further analysis of the samples sent to a laboratory in Rome supported the accusation that Pep had taken nandrolone, an anabolic steroid that is said to improve an individual’s strength and endurance
and has similar properties to testosterone.

  Guardiola received the news about the supposed positive result while practising free kicks in a training session. ‘I saw Carletto Mazzone speaking with the team doctor. That moment, that conversation, changed my life, but I only knew that later,’ Pep recalled recently. ‘They came over to me and told me the news. When I went back to the changing room I knew from the missed calls on my phone that the world had already judged me.’

  That same day, Pep called Manel Estiarte, in his day the Maradona of water polo, Olympic champion and friend who played in Italy and with whom he had forged a close friendship. ‘Do you know a lawyer? I’m going to need one,’ he asked Manel. His friend went to see him the next day and he expected to find the footballer depressed, in need of a hug, and he had already prepared some reassuring words; but when he arrived, he found Pep to be his usual self: stoic, pensive, obsessive. Guardiola had been up all night, researching every other incident similar to the situation he now found himself in: reading the legal arguments and poring over case studies. Pep threw himself into finding a solution, rather than rolling over and accepting his fate. He was going to fight, and he wasn’t just going to leave it in the hands of the lawyers. In typical fashion, Pep was taking this personally and he was determined to be in control of his destiny rather than leave it to others to decide his fate.

  Despite Pep’s determination to fight back, there were always going to be moments that would test his resolve, and Manel Estiarte was there to support him and help him avoid sinking into despair, as Pep himself explains in the introduction to All My Brothers, the former water polo player’s autobiography: ‘For seven years I simply maintained that I had never done anything wrong. From the first day when someone pointed me out and told me “Guardiola is a bad person”, you were on my side and stayed with me. When these things happen to people, they don’t forget. It was you and your blessed luck that pressed that button on teletext and showed me the way to go so that, seven years later, the person who had pointed the finger at me would change his mind and would say that “Guardiola is not a bad person”, that I was a good person. Yes, it was fate, I’m sure it was, but you believed in me and that’s why I was lucky. You brought me luck. Much needed luck. That good fortune is a gift, the best title that I have ever won in my sporting career. I will never achieve another quite as important, I can promise you. I held myself in too high esteem to take substances that could do me harm.’

  What, you may be wondering, did teletext have to do with any of this ... ? Pep Guardiola is referring to a call he received from his friend Estiarte one Sunday, months after the Italian National Olympic Committee had announced the positive result in the nandrolone test. Pep was dozing on the couch when Manel called, shouting down the line, excited. Estiarte went on to explain that on Italian teletext he had accidentally stumbled upon a story referring to a new discovery related to positive testing in nandrolone cases. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) had ruled that a result of less than two nanogrammes per millilitre of urine sample was an insufficient quantity to indicate substance abuse, because, they had now discovered, the human body is capable of producing up to the nine nanogrammes per millilitre they had found in his body (in contrast, the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was found to have two thousand nanogrammes per millilitre). It was a coincidental yet key moment, part of a long judicial process that was a test of Pep’s mental strength.

  ‘I am convinced I will win,’ Pep said many times during that process to the Italian press. He was hit with a four-month suspension, but from the moment that the National Olympic Committee sentenced him, Guardiola launched a legal battle that went on until he proved his innocence. He never accepted the allegations, nor any consequent sanction. He even said ‘The Italian justice system cannot look me in the eyes. I am innocent.’

  In May 2005, the Tribunal of Brescia fined him €2,000 and sentenced him to seven months’ imprisonment. The verdict was suspended because he had no criminal record but it was a tremendous setback for Guardiola. ‘Do you think I need an illegal substance to play against Piacenza?’ he repeated to everyone.

  For Pep, this was an issue related to human values, truth and lies. They were accusing him of something he hadn’t done and he was prepared to spend every penny fighting to prove his innocence. The lawyers could indeed take every penny, but he would never give up his reputation. His allies, including Estiarte, saw him as being fixated by the issue. Perhaps obsession is his most natural state, but it took him to the point of exhaustion. ‘Leave it, it’s done, no one remembers it,’ his friend told him afterwards. ‘I remember it and I know that it was a lie, that it’s not true,’ Pep would answer. He had to persevere until he had cleared his name.

  Collell explains an incident in his biography that illustrated the farcical nature of the process. In the spring of 2005, Guardiola’s agent, Josep María Orobitg, excused himself from a judicial hearing relating to the case to go to the toilet. A mature gentleman entered the bathroom and took his place alongside him, then muttered mysteriously: ‘Sometimes the innocent have to die to win the battle.’ It was a very senior person involved in the process.

  Finally, on 23 October 2007, an Appeals Tribunal in Brescia acquitted Pep Guardiola of any wrongdoing, after it was scientifically proven that the test results upon which the accusations were based lacked credibility, a development that had started with Estiarte’s chance discovery on teletext. ‘I have closed the file and will leave it in a box. I don’t want to talk about it but if one day someone wants to investigate, it’s all filed and it can be checked out,’ Pep told his good friend the journalist Ramón Besa.

  The overwhelming feeling was a mixture of relief and happiness, of course, but much more than that. Guardiola had been carrying a huge burden on his shoulders and now felt suddenly weightless. We are never far from the glare of public scrutiny, from the feared question, ‘What will people say?’ Suspicion and doubt assailed him during that period, and he wanted them gone. He just craved confirmation of his innocence and demanded that the judicial system admit its mistake. A mammoth task which was inevitably doomed to failure – no one embarks upon a judicial case without the stigma of suspicion remaining, without a trauma of some kind enduring. It’s the accusation that’s remembered, not the final judgement.

  Yes, he had proved his innocence, and had fought hard to do so. He was cleared finally, and his reputation and integrity restored, but he was determined to ensure that no one close to him would ever undergo a similar ordeal. So, in a way, the battle continued.

  The captain of the Barcelona B team he was coaching at the time came to his office on behalf of the whole squad to congratulate him on the tribunal’s decision. While he was listening to him he realised that he had, unconsciously, developed a very close bond with his players, a safety net he applied to his pupils and one that would eventually become all-consuming, a fatherly feeling that probably originated from the isolation and sense of abandonment he had felt during that long legal process.

  The Italian federation took until May 2009 to officially accept the tribunal’s acquittal ruling, when Pep was already enjoying success as manager of FC Barcelona. The beginning of the doping case had been a front-page story, but was only a brief side note when he was cleared.

  After a season at Brescia and while the court case was in progress, Guardiola signed for Roma in the summer of 2002, motivated less by the opportunity to play for a bigger club than to be coached by, and to learn from, Fabio Capello, a manager he greatly admires despite their differing approach to the game. Pep was eager to experience Capello’s defensive rigour and discover his secrets in terms of how to apply pressure upon an opponent. While he played little during his time at Roma, he learnt a great deal. ‘He didn’t play much because, by then, he was coming to the end of his career,’ says Capello. ‘He was a very well-behaved player. He never asked me for explanations as to why he didn’t play. He knew what my idea of football was, but he was slow, he had some physical problems.
He was a quick thinker, he knew what to do before the ball reached him and was very clever with positional play. And he was a leader.’

  A lack of playing time in Rome eventually saw Guardiola return to Brescia in January 2003, where he shared the dressing room with Roberto Baggio and Andrea Pirlo.

  As his second spell at Brescia was coming to an end that same year, Pep received a call from Paul Jewell, the Wigan manager at the time. ‘He’d always been one of my favourite players,’ Jewell says. ‘I got his number from his English agent. I called and left a message, “Hello, Pep, it’s Paul here”, something like that. About ten minutes later he called back. He knew all about us. He’d watched us on TV and talked about our midfield short passing. He knew [Jimmy] Bullard and [Graham] Kavanagh. His wages were £10,000 a week. Then he got this mind-blowing offer from Qatar. He could have played for the mighty Wigan, but ended up in some poxy job in Barcelona.’

  In the meantime, before his move to the Qatari side Al-Ahli, Pep was presented with an opportunity to work alongside Lluis Bassat, a candidate in the 2003 FC Barcelona presidential elections with the backing of some of the most influential political and financial Catalan powers. Bassat approached Guardiola, asking him to become the sporting director of his project and Pep agreed under the condition that they would not use the names of potential signings to win votes, as so often happens in Spain – instead he wanted to sell a vision for the club to the fans.

  Ronaldinho was offered to Bassat and Guardiola as a potential signing, but Pep wanted to focus upon a football project that could have included his former Dream Team colleague Ronald Koeman as coach, or, if Ajax refused to release their Dutch manager, Juanma Lillo.