Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography (14 page)

‘All my life I wanted to be Guardiola,’ said Laporta that afternoon, basking in the reflected glory of an idol to a generation of Barcelona fans. Cruyff was nowhere to be seen,
despite the fact that he approved Guardiola’s appointment, preferring to remain pulling the strings behind the Laporta era, just as he had always done.

The level of risk that was being taken by the club with regard to Guardiola was on a par with his notoriety – but he wasn’t scared of a fall. His speech during his presentation to
the media came like a cascade of words that he himself had repeated many times in bed, when in the pool in Doha or walking around the beaches of Pescara, daydreaming. ‘I am no one as a coach,
that’s why I face this opportunity with such uncontrollable enthusiasm. I’ve come here prepared to help in any way necessary. I know the club and I hope to help these players and the
idea of football that you all have to grow. In fact, the best way of educating the players is to make them see that they can win. I hope the sense of privilege I feel is felt by everyone in the
team,’ he told a full media room.

Guardiola likes to repeat that his real vocation is teaching: he dreams that, once he gives up the professional game, he’ll be able to train kids, youngsters who ‘still listen and
want to learn’. It was to an audience of attentive youngsters eager to learn that he gave his first speech as a coach a few days after his presentation. He recalls that he chose a selection
of ideas that represented, as well as any others, his footballing philosophy.

He could live with them playing badly now and again, he told them, but he demanded 100 per cent on the pitch in every single game. He wanted the team to act as professionals even if they
weren’t yet considered so and to be competitive in everything they did. ‘The aim is to gain promotion and in order to do that we have to win and we can’t do that without
effort,’ he said to them. He also pointed out
that the attacking players would need to become the best defenders; and the defenders would have to become the first line of
attack, moving the ball forward from the back.

And that no matter what happened, the playing style was non-negotiable: ‘The philosophy behind this club’s style of play is known by everyone. And I believe in it. And I feel it. I
hope to be able to transmit it to everyone. We have to be ambitious and we have to win promotion, there’s no two ways about it. We have to be able to dominate the game, and make sure that we
aren’t dominated ourselves.’

The club had bagged a prize asset. He was useful for the institution, and not just because he won games but also because he understood and applied what La Masía had taught him; La
Masía, the academy that had shaped him and made him strong, that had accentuated his strengths and hidden his weaknesses, ultimately leading him to success.

Pep settled into his new role by surrounding himself with a team of assistants whom he knew he could trust, a group of colleagues who had been inseparable since the time they had first met at La
Masía: his right-hand man, Tito Vilanova; the rehabilitation coach, Emili Ricart; and the fitness coach, Aureli Altimira. The group quickly became aware that the technical quality of the
players they had at their disposal in the B team was never in doubt: because of the selection processes involved, every player at La Masía had above average technique after more than two
decades favouring intelligent youngsters who could play the ball rather than being considered for their physiological characteristics. However, Pep realised that in order to make the team a success
he needed to add intensity and an increased work rate to their technical abilities.

And, above all else, they had to learn to win. Instilling a fiercely competitive, winning spirit into a team, an academy already blessed with an abundance of talent, represented something of a
watershed for grass-roots football at FC Barcelona.

The B team’s relegation to the fourth tier of the Spanish league was symptomatic of a club that had prioritised its philosophy, but lacked the skill to implement it competitively at youth
level. Pep set
about disbanding the Barcelona C team, which had been playing in the third division, combining the pick of the players from the squads and taking the
revolutionary step of allowing players over twenty-one to join the new B team structure for a maximum of two seasons before being sold. In allowing older footballers to play alongside the under-21s
in the B team, Pep was breaking with tradition in the hope that he would raise standards and make them more competitive.

In combining the B and C teams, Pep had to trim a group of fifty players down to just twenty-three, resulting in a great number of players being released from La Masía – an
unenviable task, as described by David Trueba: ‘Pep wanted to find teams for the players he was letting go; he had to arrange meetings with their parents, holding back tears, dissolving the
childhood dreams and vocations of those boys who thought that football was more important than life itself, who had put their studies on hold because they were boys who were called to succeed.
Creating that squad was a “bricks and mortar” job, of intuition and strength, a dirty and thankless task. From one day to the next you had to decide if you were letting a lad called
Pedro leave the club to go to Gavá or if you were keeping him.’ The decisions also had to be made quickly, after only half a dozen training sessions: a risky business, with the
potential for mistakes. But, again, Pep could live with the mistakes, because they were his mistakes.

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 friendly 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.