Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography (27 page)

‘I know that my parents are very happy today, and that makes me very happy. To have been born in this village, to have played for Barça and all those things ...’

And then he had to stop, because his voice wavered and broke.

Two training grounds. One in the north-west of England, the other outside Barcelona. Two fortresses. At the end of a narrow road, Carrington. Off a main
motorway, the facilities at Sant Joan Despí.

As you enter the Carrington offices, a smiling receptionist asks you to wait and then she walks you into the press room, a small version of a school classroom. A powerful
silence embraces you. It is only broken by the voices of players, a burst of sound that disappears behind doors that takes them to their isolated world. Then the door opens and the imposing figure
of a seventy-year-old man appears. Alex Ferguson’s frame, dressed for training, is assertive, buoyant. His eyes are penetrating as he offers a strong handshake and the smile he keeps for when
the cameras are not around.

Above the changing rooms of Barcelona training ground, away from the footballer’s world, is Guardiola’s office. As you go in, Tito Vilanova might be scribbling
some notes at his table. Behind him, a glass door gives way to the three- by four-metre space where Pep spends most of the hours of every day. Guardiola’s working desk is ordered – in
the centre, the notebook; on one side, some files; on the other, books on leadership, a biography, a history book. Pep briefly stands up and welcomes me into his office. He then sits in a chair
that suddenly becomes smaller. In fact, abruptly the whole place looks smaller than it is – he is one of those men who fills a room with his presence.

Same as Ferguson, really.

– Pepe. Pepe Guardiola. What a fantastic job he has done.

Pep leans forward. And before he refreshes his memories of Rome and the gladiators, Wembley and Messi and Xavi, he wants to praise everything
that
Ferguson stands for, what he has achieved, what Manchester United represent on and off the pitch.

– Sir Alex couldn’t play any other way than they did in Rome. And in Wembley. It is Manchester United after all we are talking about. They dignify football with
their approach as a club and as a team.

FC BARCELONA v MANCHESTER UNITED. ROME 2009

The preparations

Sir Alex Ferguson: Ah, Rome. It wasn’t a great game for Manchester United, we really should have won that game, we let ourselves down really.

Pep Guardiola: Now that time has passed, I realise we had a very positive dynamic, it didn’t matter who we were playing against, we had very high self-esteem. We had won
the league, the Copa del Rey, got to the final of the Champions League in the last seconds of the match against Chelsea. The team dynamic was fantastic, even though we had some injuries.

Sir Alex: On the morning of the game we had two or three footballers who weren’t well, we never said it. We had a problem about the fitness of some of the players, but
they wanted to play and I went along with that. It was wrong.

PG: We were helped by the confidence and form going into that game: no doubt about it. How important that is! We felt we could beat anybody even though our preparations were
full of uncertainty. We were without Dani Alvés and Eric Abidal, both suspended; Rafa Márquez, who was crucial to us, was injured; I had to decide who to replace him with. Iniesta had
not been with us for a month and a half, Thierry Henry was also restricted to a limited programme of exercises ... They were desperate to participate. Wow, so many difficult situations. If you
think about it now, calmly, and remember the line-up we played against: Rooney, Cristiano ... Carlos Tévez was on the bench!

Manchester United also had concerns ahead of the match. Rio Ferdinand had suffered a calf injury and missed the previous four matches, but flew out with the rest of
Ferguson’s squad to Rome after taking part in training that morning. The signs were good: there was no apparent reaction to the defender’s muscular problem. And Rio wanted to
play.

Guardiola told both Iniesta and Henry he was going to wait right up until the last minute possible to decide if they could be passed fit. Pep had been playing the final for
weeks in his head, visualising every conceivable tactical scenario and permutation; calculating where the
spaces would open up; where his side could gain the upper hand in two
v ones; endlessly replaying the key battles. The manager’s reluctance to rule Iniesta and Henry out was understandable: both played a key role in the game he had been planning.

He’d prepared for every eventuality, planned every contingency. Two days before that final, he took Xavi to one side and told him, ‘I know exactly where and how we
will win in Rome. I’ve seen it. I can see it.’ The midfielder looked at his boss with a mixture of enthusiasm and, perhaps for the last time, some scepticism. ‘Yes?’ said
Xavi. ‘Yes, yes, yes. I’ve got it, we will score two or three, you’ll see,’ replied Pep with such absolute conviction that Xavi’s doubts, the typical anxieties
experienced by every player before a big game, evaporated.

This was Pep Guardiola’s first European final as a coach. The biggest club final in world football. He had less than a year’s experience as manager of a first
team.

PG: On paper, that Manchester United side were dominant in every department. I was worried about everything about them: quick on the counter, strong in aerial play, conceding
few goals. Sometimes the rival is better than you and you have to go out and defend, but we were going to be brave. And Manchester United knew it.

Subtle changes would have to be made – and those were the little details he had been visualising for weeks – but Guardiola told the players they just had to
persist with the same things they had been doing all season. Most of the especially significant decisions that Pep had to make were related to the absentees and their replacements in the line-up.
Puyol would have to move to his old position at full back, while midfielder Yaya Touré would fill in as an improvised centre half. Another midfielder, Seydou Keita, was considered ahead of
Silvinho for the right-back slot vacated by Dani Alvés. However, when the idea was put to the player in training ahead of the final, a match that every player in the world would give
anything to participate in, Keita told Pep, ‘Don’t play me there.’

Keita’s reasoning blew the manager away, because his motives were selfless rather than selfish, as they first appeared: ‘I would do anything for you, boss, but I
have never played there. My team-mates will suffer,’ explained Keita. The player was putting the collective needs of the team
ahead of any individual desire to play: the
midfielder knew that he was not going to be in the line-up unless he was the makeshift right back. On more than one occasion since that day, Pep has said: ‘I’ve never met such a good
and generous person as Keita.’ That week, the coach knew that his midfielder would do the job if he asked him to – ’I can still convince Keita,’ he kept saying – but,
in the end, decided that Silvinho, who had participated little that year and would be playing his last game for the club, would play at left back in Rome.

‘I don’t know if we will beat United, but what I do know is that no team has beaten us either in possession of the ball or in courage. We will try to instil in
them the fear of those who are permanently under attack,’ Pep told the media, translating his prediction into four different languages himself the day before the final. ‘I will tell the
players to look their best because they are going to be on the telly for the whole world. Oh, and I believe it is going to rain. If not the pitch should be watered. That should be an obligation, to
guarantee a spectacle. After all that, the enjoyment of fans is why we play this game.’

The British press made reigning European Champions Manchester United clear favourites to retain their title in Rome. Having also just secured their eleventh Premier League
title, Ferguson’s side were brimming with confidence and self-belief and the mood was reflected across the country as fans and pundits alike predicted that the Red Devils would be too
powerful for the diminutive Catalans.

In Catalonia the mood was far more circumspect: United were worthy of considerable respect.

Guardiola was on the verge of possibly his third title in an incredibly short managerial career, an historic treble – the first in the history of FC Barcelona –
the greatest achievement for a debutant coach in the history of the game. ‘And if I win that third title, the Champions League, I could go home,’ joked Pep, ‘call it a day and
finish my career there.’ He was asked, ‘What would Sir Alex make of that?’

‘I am sure he will think, “Look, here goes another one that will abandon this profession before me.”’

Back at the hotel after the pre-match press conference on the eve of the final, Pep organised a meeting with all his backroom staff and presented
them
with a photograph of them together, taken a few days before, with the inscription: ‘Thanks for everything. Pep’. The staff applauded and over the noise you could hear the voice of
Guardiola shouting, ‘you are amazing, as good as the players, you are!’

Pep had a precious minute to reflect on the way up to his hotel room. He wanted to make sure everything had been organised according to plan. There had been, as happens ahead
of every final, huge amounts of information to digest and elements to ponder apart from just tactics: such as the line-up, the state of the grass, logistical issues and even private and personal
matters to take care of. It was something he had experienced many times before as a player and knew how quickly events caught up with you as time flew past in the build-up, so he began his
preparations several weeks earlier.

Carlo Mazzone, Guardiola’s former coach at Brescia, had received a phone call ahead of the game. At first he thought it was somebody winding him up. ‘Carletto,
this is Pep ... Pep Guardiola. I want you to come and watch our Barcelona.’ For Pep, it was important to invite those people from his past who had played their part in his journey: people
like the seventy-two-year-old Italian coach, as well as other former Brescia team-mates and even others from his brief spell at Roma.

Closer to home, Pep learnt that Angel Mur, the club’s retired massage therapist for thirty-three years and one of Pep’s favourite members of staff from his playing
days, did not have tickets, so he came as a personal guest of the manager.

All seemed in order, but, around midnight on the eve of the Champions League final, Pep lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, struggling to switch off and get to
sleep.

The players had been joined by their partners the night before the final – contrary to the conventional belief that players become distracted with their wives or
girlfriends around them – because Pep had experienced the excessive pressure and tension that builds to a crescendo on the eve of big games he knew how important it was for the players to
relax. If having their nearest and dearest by their side helped them cope with the anxiety and even distracted them, it meant they would sleep more soundly the night before. That level of empathy
with those under
him became another of those little details for which his footballers are grateful to him.

As the lights finally went off in Pep’s hotel bedroom, the last-minute dress rehearsal of the Champions League ceremony at the Olympic stadium in Rome was coming to a
close.

The day of the final. One surprise before kick-off

Andrés Iniesta: The minutes leading up to a Champions League final are like the minutes building up to any other game. Really. I don’t want to
seem boring or take away any of the glamour from the world of football, but that’s the way it is. And it’s a good thing that it is like that. The same talks, the same
customs.

However, their pre-match routine was not going to be the same as any other in Rome.

On 27 May 2009, with two hours to go before kick-off, the teams arrived at the stadium. Typically, Pep prefers to leave his charges alone for most of that time and
deliberately tries to avoid going into the players’ dressing room up until the right moment, when he allows himself around five, ten minutes to intervene. But that night he had a surprise up
his sleeve for the players.

Guardiola has an abundance of emotional intelligence, and needs, wants, to get in synch with his players. He can communicate with them in different ways, reach them with a
word, a gesture, a look, a hug – it is easier to place instructions and demands in an open heart, and even to enjoy the profession if the relationships are based on trust and – yes, why
not? – love.

Throughout the season, his speeches had engaged with the players emotionally before games but on this occasion he had prepared something different, something that would not
require any additional words.

Pep Guardiola: What I have learnt over the years – I am aware tactics are very important, but the really great coaches are coaches of people and that human quality is
what makes them better than the rest. Choosing the right people to look up to and give them the authority in a changing room is one of the many selections a coach has to make.

Sir Alex Ferguson: Well, in my experience, human beings want to do
things the easiest possible way in life. I know some people who have retired at fifty
years of age, don’t ask me why. So the drive that certain human beings have got is different from the Scholes and the Giggs and the Xavis, you know, and Messi. I look at Messi and I say to
myself, nothing is going to stop him being one of the greats. When he gets to thirty-four, thirty-five, most defenders are going to say ‘Thank fuck he’s gone’. You know what I
mean? Because he looks to me an exceptional human being. And Xavi, too, in the same way I would describe Scholes and Giggs. In other words, that motivation is not an actual issue for them; their
pride comes before everything else. You know, you see the way Giggs and Scholes train, how they go about their life and that is a fantastic example to other people in the dressing room. I think I
have a few who will follow on from that and I’ll be surprised if people in the dressing room at Barcelona do not take how Puyol acts, for instance, as sort of a personal
motivation.