Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

by Balague, Guillem

  As we say in Spain, with the arrival of Guardiola the sky opened for Xavi and the sun shone through. The midfielder regained his sense of security and self-esteem and was about to embark on the four most enjoyable years of his whole career. The manager would insist throughout that period that he was nothing without the players, that it was they who made him good. But the footballers identified him as a leader and were thankful that he was showing them the way.

  There were still many others, a whole squad, to win over.

  In the first speech he gave to the whole team in St Andrews, Guardiola put forward the master plan. But he demanded mostly one thing: the players would have to run a lot, work, and train hard – every team, he believes, plays as they train. He was referring to the culture of effort, of sacrifice, and it surprised many. That was Pep; the football romantic was asking Barcelona never to stop running!

  He wanted to implement a system that was an advanced version of what they had been playing, with football starting with the goalkeeper, a sort of outfield sweeper who would have to get used to touching the ball more with his feet than with his hands. Even though everybody realised the style could improve the side, the risk was immense.

  ‘That is, by the way,’ insisted Pep, ‘non-negotiable.’

  Goalkeeper Víctor Valdés demanded to talk to him straight away. If the new system didn’t work, he was going to be the first one to be blamed. It would leave him exposed and in the firing line both on and off the pitch and he needed to be convinced: was it such a good idea to move the defensive line right up to the midfield line and ask the centre backs to start the moves? Football without a safety net? Are we sure this is the way forward? Valdés, outwardly shy but with a trademark inner blend of cheekiness and directness that has made him popular in the team, felt brave enough to see Pep a few days after the St Andrews speech:

  Víctor Valdés: Can I talk to you, boss?

  Pep Guardiola: My door is always open ...

  Valdés: I need to ask one thing: all that you are talking about is fine, but only if the centre backs want the ball ...

  Pep: I will make sure they want the ball.

  That was it. End of conversation.

  Valdés had zero tactical knowledge before Pep arrived. For the keeper the following four years would be like working his way through a degree in tactics.

  In those first few days in Scotland, Guardiola asked Carles Puyol, the captain, to join him in his hotel room in St Andrews. The manager showed him a video: ‘I want you to do this.’ In it, different centre backs received the ball from the goalkeeper in a wide position outside the box; they connected with the full backs and positioned themselves to receive the ball again. It was stuff that defenders have nightmares about because a simple mistake can mean conceding a goal. Puyol started his career as a right winger, but was converted into right back because his skill was limited. Once, he even came close to being loaned out to Malaga when Louis Van Gaal was the Barcelona manager, but an injury to Winston Bogarde kept him at the club. Now, at thirty, he was asked to add a new string to his bow.

  Pep told Puyol: ‘If you don’t do what I need you to do, you are not going to play in my team.’

  Pep’s warning was probably not necessary but it was another indication of where his priorities lay.

  Puyol accepted the challenge. So did Iniesta.

  ‘When I found out Pep was going to be the manager,’ says Andrés Iniesta, ‘I was excited. He was my hero. I knew something big was going to take place.’

  The benefits of Pep having been a top-flight player could be seen straight away. Training in front of the old Masía, near the Camp Nou, with journalists and fans watching, cameras picking up on little arguments or discussions, was far from ideal. So Guardiola, who had advised on the latest designs to the new facilities at Sant Joan Despí, a few kilometres away, pushed for the first team to move there as soon as possible. The training ground then became a fortress where they could practise, relax, eat, rest and recover in seclusion, away from the gaze of probing eyes. The footballers, surrounded by professionals dedicated to looking after them, appreciated these layers of protection and the many other necessary details that only a former professional could have forseen.

  Allowing them to stay at home until just hours before a home game or travelling away on a match day, thus avoiding the almost sacred hotel stay and abrupt removal from family life, was another welcome decision. Pep thought there was no need to think about football every minute of the day and players, dining with their families the night before a match, could even begin to forget that there was a game the next day. Guardiola felt that switching them on only a few hours before kick-off was more than enough.

  Little by little the press was distanced, too, with individual player interviews being reduced or banned entirely for long periods. Anything to keep the group sheltered. Not necessarily isolated, but cosy, strong in its unity. He wanted to mother them, nurture them, but not control them. Once, he himself had been denied such protection and it had left an indelible scar after the lone battle to clear his name of doping allegations.

  He knew Deco and Ronaldinho had lived in disorder, and that had spread among the squad. From the moment of his arrival at the club, Pep sought to monitor his players’ nutrition, timetables, preparation. Most of his team were footballers of slight physique so they needed careful attention. All kinds of attention. If need be, he would even change identities, switch roles, on a regular basis, from manager to friend, brother, mother ...

  In fact, Pep’s emotional investment in his players sets him apart from most managers. While José Mourinho or Sir Alex Ferguson would get to know players’ relatives or partners to find out more about their pupils; where the Portuguese manager would invite his most influential footballers and their families for private meals with plenty of wine mainly to ‘casually’ discover if a child had been ill or if the wife was unhappy with a new house, Guardiola established a more blurred line between the personal and the professional.

  Pep knew he could not treat an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old in the same way as the superstars and he would chat to those younger players one to one in his office whenever he felt he needed to. With the star players, when necessary he’d take them for a meal. Thierry Henry was one of the first he decided to take aside.

  ‘Henry isn’t a problem,’ Guardiola kept repeating at press conferences, but during the difficult start to Guardiola’s first season the French forward was criticised more than any other player. His price, wages and prestige – along with his lack of empathy with the press – took their toll. And even though the team improved, the former Arsenal star was not producing his best. Two factors influenced Henry’s poor form: his back injury and the position in which he was forced to play. In the summer that Eto’o was on the market, after Pep had told him as well as Deco and Ronaldinho that they were not wanted, Guardiola promised Henry, who under Rijkaard played uncomfortably on the left wing, that he would be moved into the central striker’s position. However, when it transpired that Eto’o was to stay at the club for another season, Thierry had to carry on playing wide, a position in which he found it difficult to impress as he was lacking the pace and stamina of his earlier years.

  When Henry was at his lowest, Pep took him out to dinner to cheer him up and tell him that he had every faith in his ability. Henry appreciated the gesture. In the following game against Valencia, ‘Tití’ was unstoppable and scored a hat-trick in the 4-0 victory. In the end, together with Messi and Eto’o, he formed a devastating front line during what would be an historic treble-winning season (Copa del Rey, Spanish League and Champions League). The trio scored 100 goals between them – Messi 38, Eto’o 36 and Henry, who ended up playing fifty-one games, 26. At the end of that campaign, Henry went into the 2009 summer break knowing that he had had a spectacular season.

  But the following summer, after a personally disappointing campaign, unable again to return to the lead striking role in the centre – or to the form that had terr
ified so many Premier League defences – at thirty-two and with an offer from the MLS, Henry left Barcelona.

  Samuel Eto’o and the lack of ‘feeling’

  Pep had given his affection, time and effort to his players in a process that began during pre-season at St Andrews. Most of it was intuitive and came naturally to him. In exchange he demanded very high standards of work but something else too, something much bigger, something we all look for: he wanted them to love him back. And if they didn’t give him that love, he suffered immensely.

  It was the boy in Pep who, logically, never entirely went away, that kid who wanted to impress during his trials for La Masía. The kid who, once accepted by the youth academy, needed to be liked, selected by his coaches, approved of by Cruyff. The youngster who would respectfully decide to follow the politics that came with the Barcelona philosophy because he believed in them, but also to take up a role that helped him get close to the majority of the fans: leadership with emotion again.

  That need to be liked might doubtless lie dormant for a while, perhaps hidden under the shield that elite football forces you to arm yourself with. But the little boy doesn’t disappear, along with the fragilities that lie at the core of every human being and which can so often be the bedrock upon which genius is built.

  That kid in Pep the man found it very difficult to accept rejection, disapproval, from the people close to him, from his players. In fact, there is nothing that hurt him more than one of his footballers not looking at him or not talking to him when they crossed paths. It killed him. And it has happened.

  ‘The most unbearable drama: I try and manage a group where everyone is a person; that comes before everything. I demand them all to think something in common, if not, you can’t win it all. And that common feeling is like that of any human being: being loved. Having a job that we like and to be loved for having it. For example, how do I convince a player whom I don’t love and whom I don’t pick to play, that I love him? That is where the drama lies: ups and downs, ups and downs. Or do you think that all the players love me?’ Dealing with the footballer and with the person behind the player, is for Pep the hardest job.

  He knows that his decision-making is invariably a barrier to everyone’s affection. It is certainly easier to handle this build-up of feelings when you’re winning, but you don’t always win. And when you lose, players tend to look for scapegoats. And in football, the guy who always gets the blame in the end is sitting on the bench.

  Asked if he regrets having let Samuel Eto’o, young Catalan Bojan Krkić or Zlatan Ibrahimović go, Guardiola let his guard down and admitted the difficulties of dealing with it. ‘Every day I regret a lot of things. The sense of justice is very complicated. Those who don’t play feel hurt and you need them to have a lot of heart in order to avoid arguments. The closer I get to players, the more I get burned, I need to distance myself.’

  On the day he announced to his players he was leaving Barcelona, he was clear: ‘If I had continued we would end up hurting each other.’

  But, irrespective of the emotional implications, the decisions regarding those three particular players, all strikers, were taken for the good of the group, especially to stimulate Messi’s relentless progression. Guardiola’s admiration for ‘la Pulga’, and his further decision to organise the team so as to benefit the player, was something that increased with time. It wasn’t just a romantic question; it had its foundations in the laws of football. Guardiola remembers that, shortly after taking over the team, during the fourth training session, Messi subtly approached him and whispered in his ear: ‘Mister! Always put Sergio in my team.’ La Pulga was instantly taken with Busquets’s tactical sense and he wanted him on his side in every practice, every game. Guardiola was pleased that Messi read football in the same way that he did and his faith in the Argentinian was renewed.

  Pep Guardiola’s players often talk highly of their coach, but still, every rose has its thorn. Eto’o, Ibrahimović and Bojan left Barcelona and not happily. All three had the same role at the club and all three ended up leaving Barcelona in order for Messi to improve. The ‘number nine topic’ is an extremely sensitive one in Guardiola’s plan. In the Cameroon forward’s case, he came within an inch of winning the Pichichi (the award for the league’s top goalscorer) and was a decisive player in the League and Champions League, where he scored the first goal in the final in Rome. At the end of the season, Pep decided he wouldn’t continue with him the following season. What went wrong?

  After Pep effectively put Eto’o up for sale in his very first press conference, the forward completed a very impressive pre-season and once again quiet, friendly, almost unnaturally modest, had won the respect of the dressing room and of Guardiola, who spoke about him with his captains (Puyol, Xavi and Valdés): the decision was reversed; Samuel Eto’o was staying at Barça.

  As the season progressed, Samuel was back to being the untameable lion, the footballer with a hunger for titles; a player who on the pitch pushes his team-mates in a very positive way and, as happened against Atlético de Madrid at the Nou Camp, is capable of body-slamming his coach to celebrate a goal. Guardiola was shocked but ‘Samuel is like that’.

  That version of the Cameroonian didn’t last all season.

  Eto’o could be inspirational at times, in training and in matches, but with the occasional temper tantrums, his impulsive nature and his inability to wholeheartedly accept Messi’s leadership, led Guardiola to conclude once again that for the sake of balance among the group it would be better to move him on. An incident in training at the start of 2009 confirmed Pep’s intuition. And another event later that same season, made the decision to sell Eto’o non-negotiable.

  This is how the Cameroonian explains the first incident, an insight into a brief moment that exposes what both men stood for and precisely what separated them. It is one of those instances that brought to Pep, with a rush of blood, the sudden realisation that their relationship was never going to work: ‘Guardiola asked me to do a specific thing on the pitch during practice, one that strikers are not normally asked to do. I was neither excited nor aggressive, but I always think like a forward, and I saw that I was unable to do what he was demanding. I explained to him that I thought he was wrong. So then he asked me to leave the training session. In the end, the person who was right was me. Guardiola never played as a forward and I always have. I have earned the respect of people in the world of football playing in that position.’

  The day after that incident, Pep asked Eto’o to go for dinner. Eto’o didn’t feel he needed to discuss anything with his manager and rejected the invitation. There is a switch in Guardiola’s mind that clicks on or off – if you are not with me, you shouldn’t be here. Loyal, devoted, when on the same wavelength, and the coldest, most distant person if the magic disappears, if someone switches the light off. It happened with Eto’o. And later with others.

  Guardiola regularly started asking him to play wide right while Messi was accommodated in the space normally occupied by a striker. During one game with those tactics, Samuel was replaced and afterwards Pep broke with his rule to give the players their sacred space in the dressing room to explain to the Cameroon striker his thinking behind the decision. Eto’o refused even to look at Pep. He ignored the coach and carried on talking in French to Eric Abidal, whom he was sitting next to.

  There was no way back for him after that. The team was going to progress giving freedom to Messi, a battle lost by Eto’o. Following that clash, the forward even began celebrating the goals on his own.

  Three matches before the end of the domestic season, Barcelona won the title and Pep decided to rest players from the usual starting eleven in the run-up to the Champions League final. This collective need went against Eto’o’s individual interests to play in every game in order to have a chance of winning the Ballon d’Or for the best European goalscorer of the year. Samuel Eto’o pressured the coach to play him against Mallorca and Osasuna. Pep didn’t like his attitude and had to bite hi
s tongue when Samuel complained that, with Iniesta injured, and Xavi and Messi being kept away, who could make passes and set up goals for him? Eto’o was slowly losing it, his rage confusing the real targets of that season. In his mind, the explanation was simple: if Messi had been in need of those goals, the decisions would have been different.

  Samuel started the game against Osasuna. During half-time, he had a heated argument with Eidur Gudjohnsen, almost leading to an exchange of blows: the striker thought the Icelander hadn’t passed to him for a clear opportunity on goal. In the end, scoring was becoming an obsession that prevented him from winning the Spanish League’s and Europe’s top scorer trophy for the second time, the same thing that happened to him four years earlier in the last game of the campaign.

  Despite Eto’o’s decisive contribution in the Rome Champions League final in 2009 – with a goal that gave Barcelona the lead against Manchester United – and the words of Guardiola at the end-of-season lunch he organised for the squad, in which he thanked Eto’o for his commitment to the club, the Cameroonian was traded for Ibrahimović that summer.

  Pep had to admit he didn’t have much coaching expertise in dealing with strikers of that magnitude. Each player has a personal goal, a dream – and the coach didn’t forget that. So Pep tried to find the right balance to accommodate the individual’s ambitions within the team. Thierry Henry dreamed of winning the Champions League and signed for Barcelona to do so; and after he won it, his level dropped and he was happy to move on. Eto’o’s vision was not just the Champions League but also the Ballon d’Or. He had sacrificed some personal goals in order to continue helping the team, but, like every striker in the world, he had the need to satisfy his ego. To a point set by the manager.