Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

by Balague, Guillem

  In other words, when Pep understood that his contribution was insufficient, when he saw that the Belarusian didn’t understand what the team needed, he cut him loose before the season had even finished.

  But as with other rejected players, Guardiola’s attempts to build bridges slip Hleb’s mind. ‘I have the English I have because of Hleb,’ Pep has said. He spoke on countless occasions with him because he felt that he was the kind of player who needed the occasional arm around his shoulders. Guardiola thinks now that it was wasted time that could have been spent doing other things. Hleb didn’t ever comprehend what Barça was about and even the player himself admits it. ‘I understand now that it was almost all my fault. I was offended like a little kid. And I showed it: sometimes I would run less in training, sometimes I would pose. The coach would tell me to do one thing, and I’d do something else in defiance. It was like kindergarten, I find it ridiculous now.’

  Yaya Touré, another discarded player, blamed Guardiola for his departure: ‘Guardiola, when I asked him about why I wasn’t playing, would tell me strange things. That’s why I went to City. I couldn’t speak to him for a year,’ he explained. ‘If Guardiola had talked to me I would have stayed at Barça. I wanted to finish my career at Barça but he didn’t show any trust in me. He didn’t take any notice of me until I got the offer from City.’

  Yaya Touré’s agent forced the situation to such an extent, with accusations against Pep Guardiola and the club (‘a madhouse’, he claimed), that the relationship with the player deteriorated. According to his agent, Yaya should play every game, but Busquets’s promotion to the first team prevented him from doing so. Eventually, Pep’s relationship with Yaya became purely professional and the footballer felt marginalised since he could no longer be a part of that cushioned world that Pep builds around his loyal players.

  It was soon very clear to him that the emotional investment Pep asks of his players, an integral part of the group’s make-up, had an expiry date: the affection lasted as long as the player’s desire to be a part of his vision.

  Gerard Piqué, the eternal teenager

  Pep recognised the need to – and indeed did – treat Thierry Henry, for instance, like the star he was, but also like the star who wanted to be treated as one. With Gerard Piqué, though, the relationship took the opposite dynamic. Pep took him under his wing, loved him and cared for him more than perhaps any other player in the side; yet that same devotion to Gerard ended up creating a tension that became one of the biggest challenges of Pep’s final season at Barcelona.

  Initially, Pep had not requested Piqué’s signing. Tito Vilanova, his assistant and Gerard’s coach in the junior sides at La Masía, was the brains behind his transfer. Pep had no problem in admitting so in the first conversation he had with the then twenty-one-year-old former Manchester United centre back when he returned to the Camp Nou: ‘If you’re signing for Barcelona it is because of Tito Vilanova. I’ve only seen you play a couple of times, I don’t really know you that well, but Tito has real faith in you.’

  Tito’s trust in Piqué was reflected in the choice of centre back for the second game of Pep’s first season, when injury kept Rafa Márquez out of the team and the former United defender was selected for the 1-1 draw v Racing de Santander at the Camp Nou that left Barcelona with one point out of a possible six. The day after the game, Pep pulled the player to one side in training and told him, ‘Think about their goal, the one where the shot rebounded, you should have pushed up and played them offside; make sure you’re ready for the game in Lisbon.’ And Piqué thought to himself, ‘Shit, wow, this guy really believes in me.’ Right from the start, their relationship became special because of that immense trust.

  Piqué had really been signed as the fourth centre back (Márquez, Puyol and Cáceres were in front of him, Milito spent the whole season injured) and after getting the nod against Racing came the first Champions League game of the season against Sporting Lisbon. Puyol was moved to left back and Márquez and the new guy were the centre backs. ‘Damn, he must have some faith in me!’ Piqué kept scratching his head. That confidence boost carried him through to April, when he got selected to partner Márquez in the centre of defence against Chelsea in the Champions League semi-final at the Camp Nou. Márquez ruptured a knee ligament in that game and Puyol came off the bench – and that was it. Puyol and Piqué formed a central defensive pairing that became first choice for years to come and went unbeaten for more than fifty games.

  ‘My relationship with Pep is not like the friendship I have with my mates because you cannot have that between player and coach, but it is close,’ Piqué remembers. ‘We’ve only ever met once for a coffee away from training to discuss football matters. A few years ago he asked me to join him after training to chat about the team and my role in it. We met at a hotel close to the training ground and talked for an hour or so, and Pep told me, “come on, you can give us a bit more”. He’s done the same thing with a few players; he did it with Henry once.’

  Piqué’s insight is a clue as to how their relationship developed since that Racing game. Guardiola has not publicly complimented many players the way he has Piqué; but neither has he challenged them to the same extent either, on a daily basis, from day one. After seeing what he was capable of in his first season, Pep was insistent that Piqué did not waste his talent and sometimes you could sense tension in their relationship. Gerard is Pep’s weakness, but he knew that the player always had more to give.

  In his last season, Guardiola didn’t feel Piqué was in the right frame of mind and that was a source of frustration for him. The player didn’t understand why, partly because of injury and partly as a technical decision, he missed six consecutive games at one point, including a Clásico, but the manager knew it was done not only for the good of the group, but for Gerard, too. The centre back had lost those feelings a player needs to have to be a regular in the Barcelona line-up, that sense of being at peace with himself and the team when he entered the dressing room. He had taken too much for granted; he was distracted.

  ‘When someone isn’t giving their all, then I think that maybe something is wrong in their personal life or they have some sort of problem,’ Guardiola explains. ‘So, that’s when I have to step in. When someone isn’t giving everything to the team it isn’t because they are bad or cheeky. If that were the case, either the player goes or I do. I get paid to manage this player, to recover them.’ If they are worthwhile recovering, one might add.

  Pep did everything he could to get Piqué back on track and repeatedly told him he was not making the right choices. Yet it was only at the end of Pep’s final season that the player truly understood what he had been talking about. His performance in the European Championship in Poland and Ukraine was the confirmation the lesson had been well learnt.

  Pep has other ‘niñas de sus ojos’ (‘girls of his eyes’, as we say in Spanish, a ‘soft spot’, in other words), and Javier Mascherano is one of them. Masche swapped Liverpool’s starting line-up for Barcelona’s bench, and in order to get a regular game he had to learn to play as a centre back. ‘What I’ll take from Guardiola is admiration and love for your profession,’ the Argentinian admits. ‘Going to train every day and being happy with what you’re doing. He made sure that in my first six months at Barça, even though I wasn’t playing, I felt like I was learning. I remember that he once showed me a basketball duel to make an example of how two rivals can end up at loggerheads in a game, and that it goes beyond the collective battle, the individual battle you can have can also be special. Learning is constant with Guardiola. That is why he is one of the best coaches in the world, if not the best.’

  Clearly, with the continuous success the legend that preceded Pep kept growing. His aura increased at the same rate as the club’s trophy cabinet. And that would prove to be a seriously inhibiting factor for some of his players.

  Cesc, the return home

  From the outside, Barcelona was the reference point of world football. On t
he inside, players were working a system that benefited them with a manager who understood them. One who revealed his knowledge of the game and his faults, his charisma and his preferences, his football eye and his complex mind. For the Barça players, he was a coach, a very good coach, a special one, even, but a coach first and foremost. Cesc Fàbregas arrived at Barcelona to work with a legend. And there is nothing more potentially emasculating than the fear of failure before the altar of a god.

  That adoration started early. When Cesc was in the junior team, he got a present from his father: a Barcelona shirt signed by his childhood idol, Pep Guardiola. Pep had hardly seen him play but was told by his brother Pere about the talents of the kid. Cesc’s idol wrote in it: ‘One day, you will be the number 4 of Barcelona.’ Ten years later, that prediction became a reality.

  But first Cesc had to emigrate. Fàbregas has always been a home-loving boy and he suffered in his first years in London. He arrived as a sixteen-year-old after realising the doors to the Catalan first team were closed for years to come but with the promise that Arsenal were going to develop him. Wenger was told by one of his assistants, Francis Cagigao, to put Cesc into the first team straight away, and the French coach didn’t argue with that.

  But the return home was always an attractive proposition. The first calls from Barcelona arrived after they had been knocked out of the Champions League by Mourinho’s Inter and before Spain, with Cesc’s help, became World Champions in South Africa. In his third season in charge, Pep imagined a team with Fàbregas in it. In fact, Barcelona went for Silva first but Valencia did not want to get rid of him just yet. Cesc was more than just another option.

  Pep, as soon as he heard that Cesc was willing to sign for Barcelona, got involved in the process. Director of football Txiki Beguiristain was the one talking to Wenger, but the constant conversations that took place between the player and Guardiola helped shape the deal.

  Pep explained to him the reasons why he wanted to sign him: he saw him as a midfielder who could give the side the extra ability to score from deep positions, he would make transitions to the attack quicker and he could eventually take on Xavi’s role as well. But, more importantly, Pep told him, he should relax, focus on working hard for Arsenal because at some point, sooner rather than later, the transfer was going to take place.

  The player desperately needed that reassurance as Arsenal were not willing to sell their asset in that summer of 2010 even after Cesc told Arsène Wenger he wanted to leave. The French coach listened to Cesc but did not promise him anything.

  The then president Joan Laporta had asked Fàbregas to take that step to help the proceedings, thinking Wenger would collapse under pressure.

  During the World Cup, Pep and Cesc kept in touch, and the Barcelona manager insisted he would only go for him if Arsenal wanted to negotiate. ‘Look, Cesc,’ the manager told him. ‘Either it’s you or I get someone from the youth teams to take your place, I don’t mind. For me, I only want you, but Arsenal are keeping us waiting until the end of August for a resolution.’

  Beguiristain talked occasionally with Wenger and told him he was fed up with hearing Puyol, Piqué and Xavi say, each time they came back from playing with the Spanish national team, that Cesc wanted to return to Barça. Cleverly implying that Barcelona were almost forced to get the midfielder, that Arsenal had to let him go – usual negotiating tricks. ‘I’ve only phoned you because they told me to ring you, and because I know you have spoken to the player and you told him we could ring you.’ Beguiristain reminded Wenger that, as it said on the official Barcelona website, the Catalan club would not negotiate till Arsenal were willing to do so. Arsène was still uncommitted.

  Cesc thought this was a once in a lifetime opportunity and felt he had to do as much as he could to avoid them going for somebody else. But then politics got in the way. Barcelona were experiencing a tense change of guard, with Sandro Rosell becoming the new president, replacing his arch enemy Joan Laporta, and Andoni Zubizarreta the new director of football instead of Beguiristain. And a conversation between the new man in charge and Wenger fatally wounded the transfer that summer.

  ‘He is not a priority.’ Those were the words used by Rosell when Wenger questioned the need for Barcelona to sign the player. ‘Not a priority.’ Was the new president negotiating or just giving up on the player, as he perhaps felt his signature would have been considered not his success but the success of the previous president who had started the discussions?

  What was concluded thereafter and in the eyes of everybody involved in the transfer saga was that Rosell was not at all attracted by the possibility of bringing back a former young player at such a huge cost. Or not at that point, as it transpired.

  Wenger, who stopped taking calls from Barcelona from that same moment, seized the opportunity. The French coach told Cesc that Barcelona, or the new chairman, had reduced the pressure, that he didn’t want him that much, that he was not, in Rosell’s eyes, ‘a priority’.

  The transfer was not going to take place that summer.

  Pep was the first person to ring Fàbregas when that became known. ‘Listen, don’t worry,’ he told the frustrated youngster. ‘I know you tried. We will try to make it happen next year.’

  When Fàbregas gave a press conference to confirm he was staying, this is how he described his feelings: ‘It wasn’t possible. I had been interested in going but it didn’t happen. One of the most positive things I got from the summer was that I saw there are people in football who are really worth the effort.’ He was talking about Guardiola.

  As promised, the next year came and Barcelona showed their intent to get him. That gave Cesc the confidence to think the deal was to take place and confirmed his view that his idol was a man of his word.

  Fàbregas was so determined to go to Barcelona that he reduced his yearly wages by one million and put that money towards the transfer fee as the conversations between clubs, once started in the summer of 2011, were developing very slowly.

  By then the rumours that the new season could be the last one for Guardiola had started. The conversations between Pep and Cesc resumed. The player didn’t know how to ask, but he did need to find out what the manager’s plans were. Not even Pep knew it at that point, so that issue wasn’t dealt with properly. ‘If it is not me, it will be someone else who will look after you,’ Pep told him on one occasion.

  Cesc was very clear to Pep: ‘If I’ve come here it is for you, too. Barça is my dream, of course, but one of the things that has made it happen is because you are the coach. As well as the fact you were my idol as a player and I have always admired you.’

  Finally, in mid-August 2011, the transfer took place. Despite a certain scepticism on the part of Rosell, who disagreed with the huge cost for a former player, Barcelona ended up paying €40 million for the Arsenal captain.

  With his return to Barça, Cesc had a weight lifted from his shoulders. He felt reborn and he showed it in public and in private with his family. ‘Cesc is a very shy person. He keeps everything to himself. It’s difficult for him to open up when he has a problem, and during his last few months in London he had a bad time of it. We know because he hardly picked up the phone, not even when we phoned him.’ The speaker is the player’s father, Francesc Fàbregas. ‘Obviously I’m very happy that my son has come home, but to be sincere, I’m a bit worried because I’ve learnt that in life you always have to be prepared for the blows, especially in the world of football.’

  Straight after signing for his new club, Cesc spoke to Guardiola face to face. He wanted to describe what he had been living through in his last months at Arsenal. He didn’t put it like that but he was interested in finding out if Pep was going through the same experience. In the last months in London, Fàbregas had lost the enthusiasm with which he had arrived at Arsenal as a sixteen-year-old. His lacklustre training reflected that. Eight years had passed and it felt like he needed a new challenge, something to help him rediscover that feeling in the pit of his stomach,
that anxiety to please, even the pleasure of combating his doubts.

  He was happy to go back home even if he was going to be on the bench first, as everybody expected. He knew, he told Pep, he wasn’t going to play often: ‘look at the players you have!’ But he was willing to fight for his place. ‘I want to be whistled, that you ask more and more from me, I want that pressure,’ Cesc added. He didn’t have any of that at Arsenal any more.

  Pep opened up to him. It all sounded very familiar: ‘When I left Barça the same thing happened, I went to train and I didn’t have the same excitement, that’s why I needed to leave.’

  It was the first of many face-to-face chats they had in their single campaign together – in training sessions, before and after games, in airport lounges. Not much about tactics at first because Pep just wanted Cesc to rediscover his love for the game. And goals, and enjoyment, started arriving from the first day.

  In fact, Cesc Fàbregas learnt more than anyone in Pep’s last season at Barcelona. The manager, conscious of the awe in which the midfielder held him, wanted his new player to see him as a guy who took decisions. And from the moment the midfielder arrived, Guardiola wanted to fill Fàbregas’s hard drive with as much information as possible (positional play, runs into the box, movement off the ball, link-up play) with the hope that it would make sense at some point, even if at first it didn’t totally sink in – and even though he might not be there to guide him through it.

  Cesc, the media and fans thought he might not play much at first, but that he would be able to adapt quickly; after all, he had played for Barcelona up until the age of sixteen, when he left to join Arsenal in 2003. However, the years spent in England had logically made a huge imprint. When he returned to Barcelona, he had left a club whose style of play gave him total freedom to move around; whereas Barcelona’s play is more positional and demands other tactical obligations. Cesc found it difficult.