Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

by Balague, Guillem

  Even though the subjects of potential transfers were never publicly disclosed to bolster the electoral campaign, Guardiola was planning to build a side that would include the likes of Iván Córdoba, Inter Milan’s Colombian centre back; Cristian Chivu, Ajax’s captain and defender; Emerson, Roma’s Brazilian midfielder; and Harry Kewell, Liverpool’s Australian winger.

  In the end, Joan Laporta won the elections, with the support of Johan Cruyff and the promise of bringing David Beckham to the Nou Camp – the use of the Beckham name was no more than a marketing ploy, but one that worked for Laporta. The Manchester United website announced that his candidacy had made an offer for Beckham, a leak orchestrated by agent Pini Zahavi which included an agreement that Barcelona would sign one of his players, the goalkeeper Rustü Reçber, which did indeed happen a month later.

  When Bassat’s campaign defeat was confirmed, Pep told him, ‘I know we approached things differently, but ... we would do it again the same way, wouldn’t we?’

  The decision to side with Bassat would come back to haunt Pep several years later, as there were those, Laporta among them, who would not find it easy to forgive him for ‘betraying’ Cruyff, his mentor, by siding with an opponent.

  After the failed electoral campaign, the decision to play in Qatar was just about the only step in Guardiola’s career motivated by money: the move would earn him US$4 million in a two-year contract. The journalist Gabriele Marcotti travelled to Qatar to interview Pep in 2004, and encountered a player in the wilderness at the end of his career, sad, but not bitter. ‘I think players like me have become extinct because the game has become more tactical and physical. There is less time to think. At most clubs, players are given specific roles and their creativity can only exist within those parameters,’ he told Marcotti.

  Pep was only thirty-three.

  The game had been transformed, reflected in the European football landscape of the time that was dominated by a powerful Milan side, a physically strong Juventus, the Porto–Monaco Champions League finalists, the arrival of Mourinho at Chelsea and his faith in athletes as midfielders. Pep was correct: ‘pace and power’ was the dominant footballing ideology of the day, but it was soon to be challenged, firstly by Rijkaard’s Barcelona and, latterly, by Guardiola himself.

  After playing eighteen games for Qatar’s Al-Ahli and spending most of his time lounging by the pool in the complex where he lived alongside Gabriel Batistuta, Fernando Hierro and Claudio Caniggia, and after asking the former Santos winger and now coach Pepe Macia hundreds of times about the Brazil of Pelé, he went for a trial at Manchester City, spending ten days under Stuart Pearce’s eye in 2005.

  Eventually Pep turned down a six-month contract in Manchester, wanting a longer deal than the City manager was prepared to offer. In December 2005, he signed for Mexican side Dorados de Sinaloa, taking the opportunity to be coached by his friend Juanma Lillo. There, he learnt a new type of football, but also deepened his knowledge of other aspects of the game, especially in terms of administration, physical preparation and diet. Pep’s managerial education would often continue into the early hours of the morning, as he and Lillo sat discussing tactics, training and techniques throughout the night.

  Late at night in an apartment in Culiacán, north-west Mexico, 2005

  After dinner over a glass of wine, Pep and Lillo would stay up until the small hours of the morning discussing the beautiful game even if they had training the following day. Pep sometimes worries that he can bore his friends to tears with his one-track conversations about football, football and more football. He had no such fears when it came to his relationship with Lillo, who had always been at the end of the phone to discuss the finer details of the game and had been a frequent visitor to Pep’s house while he played in Serie A. Pep hasn’t talked football anywhere near as much as he has done with Lillo – who, along with Johan Cruyff, represents the biggest influence upon his evolution as a manager.

  Pep used to feel unprepared when it came to certain topics like defensive concepts or particular training methodologies. When he needed answers he would turn to Lillo at any time of day: ‘How do you solve this type of situation?’ ‘If I do this what will happen?’ According to Pep, Lillo is one of the best prepared coaches in the world and a leader in his field when it comes to developing a vision of the game, despite the fact that the world of elite sports hasn’t been kind in rewarding him.

  Guardiola’s Mexican adventure finished in May 2006 when he returned to Spain, to Madrid, to complete a coaching course, and in July of that same year he had earned the right to call himself a qualified football coach. So, on 15 November 2006, Guardiola confirmed via a radio interview on the Barcelona station RAC1 that he had retired from professional football. He was thirty-five years old.

  Unlike many former professionals, Pep had no desire to walk straight into the role of first-team coach at a big club and, as he said at the time, he felt he still had a great deal to learn. ‘As a player, the fuses have finally blown,’ said Pep, ‘but sooner or later I will be a coach. I’ll train any level offered to me, someone just has to open the door and give me the chance. I’d love to work with the youth side, with the kids, because I’ve no pretensions that I’m ready to work at a higher level yet. You have to respect the fact that this is a process, a learning curve. The first steps are vital and there are no second chances once you step up.’

  In that public and emotional farewell as a player, he paid homage to what football had given him. ‘Sport has served me as my influential educational tool; I learnt to accept defeat; to recover after not having done things well. It has taught me that my team-mate could be better than me. Taught me to accept that my coach can tell me I’m not playing because I’ve behaved badly.’

  Pep may have finished his playing career but he wanted to continue learning about the game. It wasn’t enough for him to have had first-hand experience of the methods of Cruyff, Robson, Van Gaal, Mazzone or Capello, so he travelled to Argentina to deepen his knowledge. There, he met Ricardo La Volpe (a former Argentine World Cup-winning goalkeeper and the former coach of the Mexican national team), Marcelo Bielsa (the much admired former Argentina and Chile national coach, and Athletic de Bilbao manager) and ‘El Flaco’, César Luis Menotti (the coach who took Argentina to the World Cup in 1978) to talk at length about football. Menotti said after his visit, ‘Pep didn’t come here looking for us to tell him how it was done. He already knew that.’

  With his friend David Trueba, Guardiola drove the 309 kilometres from Buenos Aires to Rosario to meet Bielsa. The meeting between the two football men took place in the Argentinian’s charca, or villa, and lasted eleven intense yet productive hours. The pair chatted with wide-eyed curiosity about each other. There were heated discussions, searches on the computer, revising techniques, detailed analyses and enactments of positional play which, at one point, included Trueba man-marking a chair. The two men shared their obsessions, manias and the passion for the game – and emerged from the charca declaring eternal admiration for each other.

  Pep and Bielsa have much in common: they love teams that dominate, that want to be protagonists on the pitch, to seek out the opposition goal as the main priority. And they can’t stand those who resort to excuses when they lose: even though losing is, for both of them, a debilitating sensation that depresses and isolates them because they cannot bear the shame that comes with defeat – they feel they have let the whole group down when they don’t come out with the points. Bielsa’s teams ‘can play badly or well, but talent depends on the inspiration and the effort depends on each one of the players: the attitude for them is non-negotiable’, Marcelo, ‘el loco’, told him, adding that his sides cannot win if he cannot transmit what he feels. Pep agreed, taking notes all the time.

  It is no mere coincidence that Pep used many of Bielsa’s ideas, methods, expressions, philosophical nuggets in two key moments of his own career as a coach: in his presentation as a Barcelona first-team manager in front of the press and also
in the speech he gave on the Camp Nou pitch in his last home game as manager. ‘Do you think I was born knowing everything?’ he answered when someone pointed out those coincidences.

  Before leaving the villa, Bielsa posed Pep a challenging question: ‘Why do you, as someone who knows about all the negative things that go on in the world of football, including the high level of dishonesty of some people, still want to return and get involved in coaching? Do you like blood that much?’ Pep didn’t think twice – ‘I need that blood,’ he said.

  At the end of his spell in Argentina he felt that he was better prepared than ever before; not totally, because Pep will never allow himself to be completely satisfied, but he felt ready enough to start putting everything he had learnt to the test.

  Upon his return to Spain, Pep was linked with a position at another Catalan club, Nàstic de Tarragona, then struggling in the first division, where he would have been Luis Enrique’s assistant. The names of both Pep and Luis Enrique were discussed by the Nàstic board but both were ultimately considered too inexperienced, with neither having managed at any level before, and a concrete offer never arrived.

  Instead, another opportunity arose: FC Barcelona wanted to talk to Pep about bringing him back in some capacity to the club he had left seven years earlier.

  Monaco. UEFA Club Football Awards. August 2006

  While Pep Guardiola was trying to discover himself, learn new tools for his managerial career, his beloved Barça had become the fashionable club of the era. The 2006–7 season kicked off with a show of appreciation for Frank Rijkaard’s side, which in a couple of seasons had won two league titles and a European Cup in Paris against the Arsenal of Arsène Wenger, Thierry Henry, Robert Pires and Cesc Fàbregas. Many felt in fact that that team was on the brink of becoming the greatest in the club’s history. At the UEFA Club Football Awards ceremony, on the eve of the European Super Cup, Barcelona captain Carles Puyol won the award for best defender, Deco the award for best midfielder, Samuel Eto’o the award for the best forward and Ronaldinho was recognised as the best player of the competition.

  Yet that coronation of the team’s achievements paradoxically heralded the beginning of the end for Rijkaard’s Barcelona, as the first signs of indiscipline became apparent.

  The Monaco trip had been a case in point.

  Back at the hotel where Barcelona were based before the European Super Cup final against Sevilla, the coach had, to the astonishment of many, invited a Dutch pop group to join him at his table for dinner the evening before the game. After the meal, instead of enforcing a curfew, Rijkaard allowed the players the freedom to go to bed at a time of their choosing, inevitably resulting in a late night for the usual wayward suspects. The following day, on the morning of the match, Ronaldinho was authorised to leave the hotel to attend a photo-shoot with one of his sponsors, while the rest of the squad were left to their own devices, effectively given the morning off to wander the designer boutiques of Monaco. It was in stark contrast to Sevilla, their Super Cup opponents, who, under the direction of Juande Ramos, spent the day preparing for the game according to the Spaniard’s usual discipline and order. The end result of the respective teams’ preparations was self-evident and reflected in the scoreline at the end of the match: a 3-0 victory for Sevilla. That defeat served as the first warning sign of the many that were to surface throughout the following season.

  In that summer of 2006 the dynamic had shifted in the Barcelona dressing room, triggered by the departure of assistant manager Henk Ten Cate, who left for the job of first-team coach at Ajax. With a reputation as Rijkaard’s sergeant major, Ten Cate’s absence served as the catalyst for a complete breakdown in discipline within the Barcelona dressing room. The Dutchman had always kept Ronaldinho on a tight leash and every time the Brazilian star put on a few pounds – something that happened all too often – the outspoken Ten Cate would not mince his words, letting him know exactly what he thought of his expanding waistline, putting him in his place in front of the rest of the squad and yelling that he was showing a ‘lack of respect towards his colleagues’. Ten Cate had maintained a love-hate relationship with Samuel Eto’o, but the Cameroonian remained determined to win his respect and prove his worth. Rijkaard and Ten Cate made the perfect double act; the ultimate good cop/bad cop routine, but without Henk banging his fist on the table, Rijkaard’s nice guy routine led to chaos.

  Johan Neeskens followed Henk as Rijkaard’s new assistant, but didn’t have it in him to play the tough guy and, consequently, it was difficult to control the process that was causing the team spirit to disintegrate. In fact, nobody suffered more as a consequence of Ronaldinho’s subsequent drop in standards than Ronaldinho himself. Here was a player who in the space of nine months went from being applauded off the Bernabéu pitch by Real Madrid fans in appreciation of his unforgettable performance in a Barcelona 0-3 victory on their rival’s turf, to a figure of ridicule for the press who grew more accustomed to seeing him ‘perform’ in his own personal corner of a nightclub in Castelldefels than on the Camp Nou pitch. It was his waistline, rather than wonderful football, that caught the eye these days. Meanwhile, Eto’o suffered a knee injury and, in a decision that was to have serious consequences, was allowed to recuperate away from the club, distancing himself from the day-to-day life of the team.

  Rijkaard was aware of the stars’ behaviour, but indulged them, ever the optimist that the players were mature and responsible enough to know when to draw the line. It was a mistake. And, by the middle of the 2006–7 season that started poorly in Monaco, it was a trend far too late to reverse as Barcelona’s results and their performances reflected the breakdown in discipline. The December defeat in the World Club Cup to International de Porto Alegre (featuring a magnificent seventeen-year-old Alexander Pato) was symptomatic of the declining standards among players and staff – Rijkaard had not even shown a video of the opposition to the players when preparing for the match. After Christmas, the South American players (Rafa Márquez, Deco, Ronaldinho) were given a few extra days off but, even so, the three of them arrived late for training. There were no sanctions.

  The director of football Txiki Beguiristain faced a conundrum: halfway through that season, going into the Christmas break, Barcelona were second in the table, just two points behind Sevilla and three above Madrid in third. Txiki was aware of the indiscipline behind the scenes, but felt reluctant to intervene when the team was fighting for the lead at the top of the table and, like everyone else, hoped that it would rediscover some of the old magic.

  After four months recuperating in isolation, Eto’o returned to an undisciplined dressing room, and was so appalled by what he found that he informed president Joan Laporta, his main ally at the club. Laporta sided with Eto’o and even offered him a captaincy role, so he felt reassured but, not long after, Rijkaard accused him of not wanting to play against Racing de Santander (the player was warming up but looked as if he didn’t want to come on after being instructed) and Ronaldinho suggested in the mixed zone after the game that Eto’o had let them down because he should have been thinking of the team. Eto’o, impatient and not known for being diplomatic, exploded a couple of days later at a book presentation: ‘He’s a bad person’ – in reference to Rijkaard: ‘This is a war between two groups: those that are with the president and those that are with Sandro Rosell.’

  Rosell, the former vice-president, who also happened to be a close friend of Ronaldinho and was responsible for persuading the Brazilian to sign for the club, had recently resigned following a number of disagreements with Laporta. Eto’o also sent a message to Ronaldinho, without mentioning his name: ‘If a team-mate comes out saying that you must think of the team, the first person who should do so is himself.’

  Given the less than harmonious atmosphere in the dressing room, the team went into a downward spiral towards the end of that 2006–7 season, resulting in their failure to win any of the titles or cups they had been competing for in the new year. Madrid finished the season lev
el on points, but secured the title courtesy of their superior head-to-head results: the unanimous verdict was that Barcelona had thrown their title away as a consequence of complacency and lapses in concentration.

  Those twin vices were never more evident than when Barcelona threw away an opportunity to reach the final of the Copa del Rey after inexplicably throwing away a 5-2 semi-final first leg lead over Getafe. Thinking that the game was won, Rijkaard left Messi in Barcelona for the second leg in Madrid. Barça were soundly beaten 4-0.

  Despite the pressure for a change within the first team, Laporta thought that the protagonists of that historic Rijkaard side deserved another season. After all, at the peak of their powers this had been a magical and mesmerising group of exceptional talents that had secured the club’s first Champions League trophy in over twenty years. The Dutch coach assured Laporta that he was strong enough to take control of the situation and recover the best of Ronaldinho, whom the club were considering offloading. In a visit by Laporta to Ronaldinho’s home in Castelldefels, the Brazilian, who admitted to having been distracted, promised a return to the player he had been before. He begged for the opportunity to prove that he could change his ways.

  Meanwhile, Pep Guardiola, recently returned from his trip to Argentina, received that phone call from FC Barcelona.

  A beach in Pescara. Just before lunchtime, beginning of summer 2007

  Watching a match with Pep is an enlightening experience, a football master class. If you are lucky enough to be sitting next to him while a game is on it becomes apparent that he cannot help sharing everything he sees. ‘The ball runs faster than any human, so it’s the ball that has to do the running!’ which, in seventeen words, just about encapsulates his philosophy.

  ‘Look at him! Him, that one there! He’s hiding! Your team-mates need to know that you are always available!’ he’ll shout, pointing a finger at the culprit. ‘Before passing the ball, you need to know where you’re passing it to; if you don’t know, it’s better to keep it; give it to your goalie, but don’t give it to your opponent’; it’s simple common sense, yet at the very core of a successful doctrine. ‘Football is the simplest game in the world – the feet just have to obey the head,’ explains Pep, yet he is more aware than anybody that it is anything but simple. And one more thing that Guardiola started saying while watching football: ‘One day I will be the coach of FC Barcelona.’