Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography (36 page)

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 the 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.

Although in his first few months he had the same freedom to move wherever his instincts took him – but mostly in forward areas, and he had scored with ease, from the last sixteen of the
Champions League – Pep began to demand more tactical discipline from him in a deeper position. He found it hard to understand what was being asked of him and, as Cesc himself admits, ‘I
was obsessed with it. Until I understood that if they had signed me it was because of who I was, not for who I could be. I couldn’t stop being myself.’

Pep wanted Cesc to feel he was on top of him, looking after him. Demanding more of him as the player asked him to in that pre-season chat. As he did very publicly in a game versus Valencia, in
that phase where Cesc didn’t score goals even though he was performing well and accepting his new responsibilities and obligations. Fàbregas had played perhaps one of his best games
with the team, assisting once for a goal, defending, passing, but missing chances. He forced a couple of incredible saves by Diego Alvés, the Valencia goalkeeper, and on another occasion he
mishit the ball. Pep
replaced him at 4-1, fans reacted well and gave him a resounding ovation.

Cesc felt happy with the game, but annoyed at not scoring. ‘God, the goals just won’t go in’, he was telling himself. As he was walking off the pitch, he saw Pep coming over to
hug him and became momentarily defeatist. ‘Bloody hell, it’s so difficult to score, it won’t go in, that third goal took a while’, he audibly communicated his
frustration.

‘Bloody hell ...’ Pep replied half joking. As he did that, he pushed the player away and shouted, ‘What do you mean it won’t go in? Make it go in! You should have
scored!’

Pep gave him a bit of stick and carrot when he needed it. Cesc is the kind of player who responds to it. The coach applied it after a game against AC Milan where the midfielder didn’t play
at all. In the next training session, Pep came to him and told him, ‘You’ll play in your position in the next game. I want to see you playing well, OK?’ When Pep talks about
‘your position’ he means that free role he used to have at Arsenal.

Often when Cesc played, Guardiola deployed a formation, 3-4-3, that wasn’t fully convincing but the coach defended one of Johan Cruyff’s maxims – if you have it, flaunt it;
always use your quality players. So if he had to place four midfielders and shrink the defensive line, so be it. Cesc is an important player for his system when it works, because he gets goals
coming from deep and that takes some responsibility for scoring off Messi. Meanwhile, the Argentinian was free to move about in attack and therefore it became more difficult for the centre back and
opposing defences to mark.