Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

by Balague, Guillem

  Guardiola immediately set about introducing a series of habits, working practices, systems and methodologies acquired after a career working with a variety of different managers. He paid particular attention to detail: from control of the players’ diets, rest and recuperation time; to scouting opponents by recording their matches and using his assistants and staff to compile detailed match reports ... in the third division!! On occasion, if Guardiola felt that he didn’t have enough information on a particular opponent, he would go to their matches himself.

  He became as demanding of himself as he was with his players and staff but, in everything he did, he always made it a priority to explain why he was asking them to do something. He was always the first to arrive and the last to leave, working mornings and afternoons at the training ground. Every aspect of running the team had to be under his control: he demanded daily reports and updates from all his staff. Nothing was left to chance.

  And, if necessary, albeit rarely, he would remind those around him exactly who was boss.

  Midday on 6 December 2007. Barça B were playing at Masnou’s ground and leading 2-0 going into the second half; however, Barcelona threw away their lead and allowed the opposition to salvage a point: ‘The telling-off was tremendous,’ one of the players recalls. Normally, Guardiola gives himself time to analyse the game and talks it through with the players the following day, but that afternoon he made an exception. ‘He closed the dressing-room door and told us that many of us didn’t deserve to wear the shirt – that these team’s colours represented many people and feelings and we hadn’t done them justice. We were terrified,’ the player insists.

  The most severe reprimand the team received was for one particular indiscretion. In October 2007, the daily newspaper Sport revealed what Guardiola had said to the players in a dressing-room team talk. According to the paper, Guardiola referred to the kids competing in Operación Triunfo – the Spanish equivalent of The X Factor – as an example for the players: ‘He told us that the kids are given an incredible opportunity and that they do everything they can, giving their all to make the most of what may be a one-off opportunity – and that we had to do the same,’ explained one of the players. ‘And later, when he saw his words repeated in print, he went mad and said that divulging dressing-room tales to the press was betraying team-mates.’

  On another occasion, Guardiola dropped Marc Valiente, one of the team captains, making him watch the game from the stands, simply for leaving the gym five minutes earlier than he was meant to. According to Luis Martín, Guardiola justified his decision by saying simply: ‘No weights, no games.’

  Sporadically, his players would join Rijkaard’s team for call-ups or training sessions. However, their elevated status did not prevent Guardiola from making an example of them. Just three games into the season he hauled off former Glasgow Celtic player Marc Crosas in the forty-sixth minute of a match. According to one of the players, ‘Crosas got a right telling-off at half-time for not running. As soon as he lost the ball in the second half he was taken straight off.’ Perhaps Guardiola was aware of the effect that this would have upon the junior players in the B team, as one of them explains: ‘We saw him doing that to a first-teamer and thought “what would he do to us?”.’ The senior players, meanwhile, understood perfectly well, and as one recognised: ‘He always used us as an example, but he was always fair with us and everyone else.’

  Pep was finding solutions to the team’s problems, relying on instinct and experience to motivate, inspire and get the best out of the youngsters. When the team qualified for the promotion play-offs, he told them: ‘We’ve made it this far together, now it’s time for YOU to win promotion.’ But one of his motivational methods proved quite expensive. ‘He told us that every time we won three games in a row, he would take us all for lunch. He took us out three times, he’s spent a fortune!’ one player recalls.

  But club lunches weren’t his only expense: Guardiola also had fines to pay for having been shown three red cards. Occasionally the mask slipped from the cool, calm, collected Guardiola. He quickly decided that instead of trying to bottle up his emotions on the touchline, he would let rip in Italian so that match officials couldn’t understand the tirade of four-letter abuse that was being directed at them from the Barcelona dugout.

  His motivational methods frequently took the form of challenges. When Gai Assulin returned from his debut with the Israeli national side, Guardiola, reminiscent of something Cruyff had once said to him, set his player a test: ‘This weekend – go out and score a goal.’ He set up two and scored the third. ‘He does it a lot – he challenges us – if you push yourself you’re rewarded,’ as another player remembers.

  ‘This isn’t the third division, this is the Barça reserve team – not just anyone can be here,’ he told his players once; yet the honour of playing for the club went way beyond pulling on the shirt on match days and, as a consequence, Pep demanded high standards from his players at all times, both on and off the field. He banned the use of mobile phones at the training ground and on the team coach. Players were fined €120 if they were late for training and had to stick to a twelve o’clock curfew – if they were caught breaking it once they were fined €1,500, twice and it rose to €3,000. If you were caught three times you were out of the door. He also had strict policies regarding the procedure leading up to games: team strategy was practised on match days. If it was an away game, the team ate together at La Masía; if they were playing at home, in the Mini Estadi, each player ate at home.

  The reserve team goalkeeping coach, Carles Busquets, was once asked by a former colleague what it was like having Guardiola as your boss: ‘Pep?’ he responded. ‘You’d be scared!’ In fact, only now will Busquets admit that he used to sneak round to the car park for a crafty cigarette as Pep banned everyone from smoking in or around the dressing room.

  One of the reasons that Guardiola had been so eager to test himself and his ideas with a team in the lower divisions was because he wanted to confirm a personal theory: that a reserve team, like any other, could serve as a university of football; because all teams behave, react and respond the same way. Whether superstars or Sunday league, there’s always a player who is jealous of a team-mate, another who is always late, a joker, an obedient one fearful of punishment and eager to please, a quiet one, a rebel ... It was also educational because it helped prepare for the fact that every opponent is different: some are offensive, others timid, some defend in their own box, others counter-attack. Working with the B team gave Guardiola the perfect opportunity to try and find solutions to the kinds of problems he would encounter working with a higher profile team; yet enabled him to do so away from the spotlight and glare of the media.

  At the same time, he was humble enough to recognise that he wasn’t sufficiently trained in certain areas, mostly defensive work. His friend and coach Juanma Lillo saw all the games of the Barcelona second team and, when they had finished, Guardiola would ring him to express his doubts to him, whether they be about the use of space by his players or the behaviour of those off the ball. Rodolf Borrell, now at Liverpool FC, was a coach with one of the Barcelona youth teams at the time, and each week Guardiola went to his defensive training sessions to observe and learn.

  Pep’s enthusiasm proved contagious and his presence a breath of fresh air at the training ground; at the same time he also gave the B team a degree of credibility. After all, if Guardiola was involved then, everybody figured, it must be important. If the B team had been neglected in recent times, then Guardiola’s influence saw it transformed and given a makeover, blowing out the cobwebs and raising its profile, while instilling a new regime of professionalism that was missing even from the first team.

  Especially from the first team.

  The B side may have been the old workshop round the back of the club, but Guardiola was determined that it would lead by example. So when the new Barça B was ready for the season, Pep led them with pride.

  They lost their first fri
endly under him, against Banyoles, on a small artificial pitch. It only took that one defeat and a stuttering start in the competition to herald the first murmurings of dissent in the media. Guardiola ‘had more style than power’, wrote one journalist. It became a popular cliché to say that Pep, who as a player read and distributed copies of The Bridges of Madison County to his Dream Team team-mates, couldn’t possibly possess the strength and authority to mould a winning team on the Astroturf and cabbage-patch pitches of the Spanish third division.

  Pep went to see Johan Cruyff soon after the stumbling start to the season, something that he would repeat frequently whenever he needed advice over the coming years. ‘I’ve got a problem,’ he told his mentor. ‘I’ve got these two guys who I don’t know if I can control, they don’t listen to what I say and that affects how everybody else receives my messages. And the problem is, they’re two of the leaders in the dressing room and the best players. I will lose without them on board.’ Cruyff’s response was blunt: ‘Get rid of them. You might lose one or two games, but then you will start winning and by then you would have turfed those two sons of bitches out the team.’

  Pep got rid of the pair, establishing his power in the dressing room and sending a clear signal to the rest. The team did start playing better and winning, especially after Pep signed Chico, now at Swansea, a player identified by Tito Vilanova as the central defender that the team needed. It was a B team whose line-up also included Pedro and, in the latter half of the season, Sergio Busquets, who worked his way from the bench into the team to become their best player. From four tiers down in the Spanish league, Pedro and Busquets would become household names and world champions within two years under Pep’s guiding hand.

  Txiki Beguiristain was a regular visitor to the Mini Estadi to watch Pep’s B team throughout the season, following more reserve games than he had ever done in his four years as director of football at the club. He believed in Guardiola and realised he was watching the development of something that could be used in the first team: variations in formation, for instance. Instead of playing the most common 4-3-3 system at Barcelona, Pep occasionally used a 3-4-3 that had hardly been used since the days of the Dream Team and subsequently only very rarely by Van Gaal. At other times, Pep would play with a false number nine; even sometimes deploying Busquets, a central midfielder, as a striker with three playing behind him. Pep’s do-or-die attitude from the sidelines (constantly correcting and signalling during games, treating every match as if it were the last, intensely focused on the job, passionate and occasionally over-exuberant) as well as his off-pitch behaviour (making the team eat together, scouting rival players and teams, unheard of at the time in the third division) suggested he was a leader, ready for management. Ready to lead at any level. Any team.

  As the season went on, Txiki became convinced that everything Pep was doing could, if necessary, be applied to the first team. Barça B finished the season as league champions, automatically sending them into the play-offs to be promoted into the Second B division. People were starting to take notice of Guardiola’s achievements, not just within the club, where he was acquiring a rapidly growing legion of admirers, but beyond Barcelona. Juanma Lillo was one of them: ‘What Pep did with Barça B is still of greater merit than what he did later with the first team. You only have to see how the side played at the start of the season in the third division with “terrestrial, earthy” players, and how they were playing by the end. The group progressed as a whole, but also the players as individuals. I still laugh when I remember that people said he was too inexperienced to take over Barça B, let alone the first team.’

  And, of course, while all of this had been going on, as the B team was improving and behaving professionally, the first team had been declining. It wouldn’t be long before FC Barcelona would be looking for a new manager.

  Front seats of a plane taking the first team to China, summer 2007

  For Rijkaard’s team, the 2007–8 season that was witnessing a revolution at the reserve level had started in a similar depressing fashion to the previous, trophyless, campaign. Criticisms were mounting from all quarters and as the season progressed the coach gradually lost the respect of the dressing room.

  Meanwhile, Ronaldinho was becoming increasingly introverted and had ceased taking orders from anyone. Behind medical reports stating that he had ‘gastroenteritis’ the club started to hide his absences from training sessions. By the middle of the season he had been ‘in the gym’ or ‘indisposed’ more often than training.

  Often the Brazilian arrived at the dressing room wearing the same clothes from the day before after being out all night partying. Frequently during training, he could be found sleeping on a massage table in a darkened room at the training complex and, to make matters worse, a relationship between Ronaldinho and one of Rijkaard’s daughters became common knowledge.

  On more than one occasion, Deco turned up to training without having slept because he had taken his sick child to hospital. While prioritising the health of his children over his job may not be the greatest sin, his separation, one of ten marital separations or divorces within the squad, did not help him focus. Rafa Márquez would also nip off and visit his girlfriend Jaydy Mitchell, often after training and occasionally staying over – which wouldn’t have been a problem if she didn’t live in Madrid. Thiago Motta had such a great night out on one occasion that one night became two and the club literally had to send out a search party to find out where he’d got to. On that occasion, the Brazilian didn’t escape punishment – becoming something of a scapegoat for someone else gaining a reputation for his ‘samba’ skills: Ronaldinho.

  After losing 1-0 to Real Madrid at the Nou Camp, Barcelona were seven points behind the leaders halfway through the season and by the autumn there were murmurings among senior board members that drastic action was required, that the best thing to do would be to get rid of the undisciplined Ronaldinho, Deco and Eto’o – shifting the dynamic towards a younger, hungrier, more ambitious generation led by Lionel Messi. They also doubted whether Rijkaard was the right man to lead the new order. The president, however, publicly and privately backed the Dutchman.

  Off the record, Guardiola was being briefed on the situation by first-team players and Laporta’s allies. One even hinted to Pep in October that the prospect of him becoming first-team coach was gathering pace behind the scenes: ‘Your name hasn’t come up officially at a board meeting, and you haven’t heard this from me, but you’re going to be the head coach of Barcelona next season.’ In early November, Pep’s name was eventually raised at a board meeting by one of the directors, proposing that Rijkaard be replaced by the B team coach. However, Txiki Beguiristain was opposed to plunging Pep into the middle of a crisis at the halfway stage of the season: too much too soon for a relatively inexperienced coach.

  Not everyone agreed with Txiki. Johan Cruyff became convinced that there was no way back for the first team and that a change was needed. After ruling out Marco Van Basten – who was about to sign a contract to take over at Ajax – Cruyff met with Txiki to discuss Pep’s potential. The former Dream Team coach then went to see how Guardiola was doing, visiting him at the Mini Estadi to take the measure of Pep and the B team, before having lunch with him to talk football. Later, Cruyff sent a message to Laporta: ‘Pep is ready. He sees football with absolute clarity.’ The president remained uncertain, however, believing, hoping, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Rijkaard could turn it around and resurrect some of the old magic from Ronaldinho and Co.

  As the first team’s complacency and indiscipline became apparent to all, certain directors and a growing press contingent began to insist that there was only one man capable of restoring order at the Camp Nou. Not Pep Guardiola, but José Mourinho. They argued that the Chelsea boss had the unique force of personality and courage to take the necessary but painful decisions. If that meant a shift in the club’s footballing philosophy, some argued, then so be it: drastic times, drastic measures. And, after
all, Mourinho had always dreamed of returning to Barcelona.

  On 27 November 2007, Barcelona drew 2-2 with Lyons, scraping through to the knockout stage of the Champions League in less than convincing fashion, conceding after some shambolic defending at a set piece and giving away an unnecessary penalty. An anxious, agitated Rijkaard was sent off for the first time in his tenure at Barcelona.

  That day the football department reached a significant conclusion, deciding that Rijkaard, with a year remaining on his contract, had to go.

  Laporta continued to dither but, to be prepared, Marc Ingla (vice-president) and Txiki Beguiristain set about drawing up a Plan B. Ingla, a successful businessman with a background in marketing, wanted to approach the recruitment in the same way that any other major corporation would set about hiring a senior executive: utilising a methodical and analytical selection process followed by an interview stage, before finally making an appointment. This was a novel approach in the world of Spanish football.

  A profile of the new manager was drawn up, including a set of criteria that the candidate had to fulfil: he should respect the footballing style inherited from Rijkaard; promote a solid work ethic and group solidarity; supervise the work of the youth teams; place an emphasis on preparation and player recuperation; maintain discipline in the dressing room while being respectful of all opponents and possess a sound knowledge of the Spanish league. Furthermore, the next manager of FC Barcelona would have to have a feel and understanding for the club, its values, significance and history.