Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography (22 page)

In the bottom three of the league, Guardiola’s FC Barcelona travelled to Sporting Gijón’s legendary Molinon stadium for the third game of the season. The Sporting fans had not
seen the Catalans since 1997 when Guardiola was Barcelona’s playmaking number four and the standard-bearer for the team’s style of play. There were long silences on the team coach that
took them to the stadium but the technical chat had already been given in the hotel. Despite victory being essential, nothing changed the coach’s ideology and its practicalities. He would
give his all for this cause, he knew the truth – he had the line-up and the tactics that guaranteed control and pressure high up.

Just before kick-off, Pep Guardiola crossed paths with Manuel Preciado, the Sporting coach, who sadly died of a heart attack in the summer of 2012. The older, more experienced manager had
already heard the changes Pep wanted to make to the first eleven and had some warm words of comfort for the novice, and understood the enormous pressures faced by his younger opponent on that day:
‘Stick to your principles, Pep. If Busquets or whoever needs to be brought on, they should be brought on. You must be brave in order to defend your ideas.’

Sergio Busquets was named in the line-up for the second game running.

Piqué smiles when he remembers where Barcelona’s fortunes were about to change. ‘I treasure a lovely memory of the encounter with Sporting in the Molinon. That day signified
the takeoff.’

The game started. From the kick-off, ten players touched the ball, all except Messi. There were thirty passes in two minutes that terminated near the corner flag and with a foul on Iniesta.
Those opening exchanges were a statement of intent. The team kept jabbing away at Sporting like a boxer: two consecutive corner kicks, two balls recovered near the rival’s box, a Xavi shot on
goal. Only four minutes gone.

The team used the space patiently and cleverly, Xavi found many lines of passing, the ball fizzed about at a high tempo, every touch of it was sharp and positive. Henry was ill and Iniesta
played on the left. Eto’o started as number nine but he often appeared on the right wing, allowing Messi to move freely in the centre. Those tactics were to be repeated during the season.

Sporting thought that using a close-combat style against a faltering Barcelona team was going to give them a chance, but once the first goal arrived there was no way back.

When the team filed into the changing room at half-time, already 0-2 up, Pep demanded a moment of attention. He needed to give only one instruction, a simple reminder but a key instruction:
‘We will continue pressing high up,’ he said. The order was followed. In the second half, Sporting found that the Barcelona half was much further away and beyond their reach than the
naked eye would have you believe.

Barcelona beat Sporting 1-6.

‘You’ve surpassed us,’ Manuel Preciado conceded when, at the end of the game, he met with Guardiola on the way to the dressing rooms. ‘We’ve taken a step
forward,’ replied Pep.

The next day, at the training ground, one of Pep’s assistants gave him a photocopy with some of the stats of the game. Pep’s smile was difficult to control. Apart from Messi, who
scored twice, all the forwards had recovered possession at some point, suffocating
Sporting. Barça had a total of 22 shots, 9 on target and 14 corners, compared to
Sporting’s 5 attempts. But there was something else that gave Pep a lift: defensively, the young Busquets, promoted from the B team, had been the best player on the field. He had recovered 10
balls. And 48 out of his 50 passes had reached their intended target.

Without Henry, there were seven players involved in the game who had progressed through the academy system (Valdés, Puyol, Xavi, Iniesta, Busquets, Messi, Bojan), two less than the
previous game against Racing. Xavi was involved in all the goals.

It was the third game of the season and Barça had already established themselves as the La Liga side with the most shots on goal and received the fewest.

The result did more than present the team with a much needed three points. It also showed Guardiola was right. It showed that they had to give it time, that there were tactics and rules to
follow: a philosophy that could succeed.

‘Where would we be if we hadn’t beaten Sporting?’ Iniesta says now. The victory proved to be a sign of things to come.

Pep could only see the positives in the early days of his coaching career, embracing the moment; there was always his inner voice reminding him that he was there for the short
term. Methodical with a passion, Pep thrived on organising, making decisions, sharing experiences, applying what he had learnt over the years. His life centred on becoming the best manager he could
be and tales of his dedication to the job and attention to detail started to spread around Barcelona.

He had already shown that he was more than a coach who believed his job began and ended with giving instructions to a group of players out on a pitch, and repeatedly demonstrated an empathy and
ability to understand the needs of those around him; taking responsibility for the welfare of anyone related to the sporting side of the football club.

Before being appointed first-team coach back in May 2008, Pep was focused upon getting the reserve team promoted to the Second B division when he took time to visit Gabi Milito. The Argentinian
centre half was a regular in Rijkaard’s first team and was recovering from an operation on his knee. Despite the fact that Pep hardly had a moment to spare – not least because his
daughter Valentina had just been born – he surprised Milito with a visit that lasted more
than three hours to encourage and offer moral support to the player. Pep also
spoke of his love for Argentinian football, of his admiration for Menotti and Bielsa. Milito was won over by Pep’s charm and was especially surprised when Pep told the media: ‘I’d
prefer to see Gabi playing football again than win a title.’

After the final whistle in a cup match at the Nou Camp against Second B minnows Cultural Leonesa, Guardiola bumped into a group of the modest players hovering around the door of the Barcelona
dressing room, hoping to swap shirts with their Barça counterparts. Pep greeted them all with a warm smile and threw open the door to the first team’s sanctuary, telling the
star-struck opposition players to ‘go on in, please, and make yourself at home’. Cultural’s players couldn’t believe it.

Now that he was a manager himself he soon discovered the solitude of the job and made efforts to be included as a member of the coaching fraternity. Emulating one of the more courteous
traditions of the English game, Pep spent his own money on making sure that there was always a bottle of wine ready to share with the visiting coach after a match. If a fellow manager at another
club was sacked, he would send him a message of support, even once cancelling all his own prior engagements to organise a private meal with one individual to offer him encouragement only days after
his dismissal.

He has an incredible capacity for hard work: upon returning home from Milan after a Champions League encounter at around 4 a.m., Pep found that he couldn’t sleep, so he went to the
training complex to watch a video or two of their next rivals. He would increasingly have to turn to sleeping pills throughout his tenure, particularly in his final season in charge.

One of the first decisions that Guardiola took was to make sure that all the money collected from fines that were imposed on the squad went to a charitable organisation, instead of going towards
team meals, as was the custom. The sanctions couldn’t contribute to a reward for the team, hence he thought of a much more supportive use for them. At the start of his first season, he
donated the proceeds to the Sant Joan de Déu Foundation, which investigates Rett’s Syndrome, a serious mental illness.

When Pep signed a marketing agreement with Sabadell Bank, committing to a number of lectures and personal interviews as part of the deal – while still refusing to give
one-to-one interviews to the media – he was initially labelled a money-grabber by some of his critics. However, he was soon vindicated when it emerged that he had shared out all the money he
received from the bank between his staff as a way of acknowledging their dedication to a project in which each person had done his bit. Meanwhile, the bank was delighted with an upturn in their
number of clients, a 48 per cent increase in Catalonia and 65 per cent in Madrid.

At the start of the season Audi, as they do every year, presented a car to each first-team player as well as the coach; Pep, however, refused to accept his: if there were no cars for his
technical staff, then he would not take one either.

In November of Pep’s first year in charge, the goalkeeping coach, Juan Carlos Unzué, lost his father after a long illness. Guardiola didn’t have to think twice – despite
the fact that Barça had a game the following day, the first-team coach rearranged the entire pre-match schedule to take the squad to Orkoien in Navarra, 223 miles away, to attend the
funeral.

The season was going well. Aside from a poor run of three draws in March (against Betis, Lyon and Mallorca) and two defeats (against Espanyol and Atlético de Madrid) that led to some
reactionary criticism from certain quarters, the overall feeling among the supporters was one of euphoria. There was a sense that, under Pep Guardiola, something special was happening at the Nou
Camp.

Their football seemed to dominate the opposition, with a high percentage of possession and effective pressure high up the field; Xavi, Iniesta, Eto’o and Henry seemed entirely different
players from the season before and the new additions to the team were an improvement. ‘I feel strong and optimistic,’ was how Pep described his feelings around that time. Barça
bounced back from their mini crisis in that spring of 2009 by going on a run of nine consecutive wins. This spell was followed by two draws – against Valencia (2-2) in La Liga and Chelsea in
the 0-0 first leg of the Champions League semi-final) – that made the end of the season run-in tense and unforgettable.

The Clásico at the Bernabéu that May would be decisive. Going into that match, Barcelona were top with five games remaining and, with the two arch rivals
separated by four points, a win for Guardiola’s side would effectively guarantee that the title would be heading back to the Camp Nou.

Pep treated the game against Real Madrid like a cup final and demanded the same bold approach that he had seen from his team throughout the season. ‘We want to be champions, don’t
we?’ he asked his players in the days leading up to the visit to Madrid. ‘Now is the time to take this step. I only ask that we go out there with our heads held high because these are
the games that define us, they are what do our job justice.’

For such a pivotal match, Guardiola was considering handing Messi the tremendous responsibility of playing as a false striker for the first time. Guardiola had already won the confidence of the
little Argentinian and had started the process of building a team around him at that stage. But the relationship between coach and player hadn’t always been that easy.

At the beginning Pep was worried. He wanted to get Messi on his side because he had a feeling that the lad, who at the time was just twenty-one years old, was a diamond in the
rough. He foresaw that Barça would depend on him and he was scared of losing him. So he had to establish with Messi a dynamic, a relationship formed on common ground before they could work
together. To do so, the coach had to adjust his idea of the team to include an extraordinarily gifted and hungry individual, while at the same time convincing the player – shy, quiet, even
distant off the pitch – he had to accept his leadership.

Unmoved by the status of legends or even the credit that an exceptional career in football gives former players, in Messi’s eyes Guardiola was little more than just another coach. At the
time of Pep’s appointment, Messi was drifting into melancholy, having become increasingly disillusioned during the last few months of the undisciplined Rijkaard regime.

The beginning of Pep’s tenure was a period of uncertainty for the young Messi. For all the faults of the former regime, it must be remembered that Rijkaard had given
Messi his debut and the Argentinian felt protected under the Dutchman. Then along came Pep, a new boss, new regime, and instantly got rid of Ronaldinho, Messi’s friend, mentor and neighbour
(three houses away) in Castelldefels. Messi understood the reasons for the changes and had recently grown closer to Puyol and Xavi as he saw the damage Ronnie was doing to himself, but,
nevertheless, it was a period of change in the youngster’s life and he needed to establish a connection, the right one, with the new man in charge.

Pep had wanted to impress upon Leo the idea of a group above everything else, not just because he had been a midfield general but also because he understood that it was necessary for the type of
football that he wanted to put into practice. Guardiola had identified Leo’s drive but, crucially, he had misunderstood it, mistaking it for selfishness. ‘I wanted to make Pep
understand that it was ambition, not selfishness. Leo is so self-demanding, wants to play every game, win every title, to such an extent that he transmits that to others and it becomes like a
tsunami,’ reveals Manel Estiarte, the ‘Messi of water polo’ in his day, and a man brought to the club by his friend Pep as player liaison. Leo always wanted the ball, to be the
main protagonist, to finish a move. ‘It’s like a demon inside you that you don’t know you have, and you can’t control it. That is what has made him become the best football
player of all time. And I tried to explain all that to Pep.’