Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography (37 page)

But it didn’t always work.

There was too much to learn in one season, an overloading of information while he was trying to find his place in the club and the squad that ultimately frustrated him. His game suffered as the
season progressed. ‘I had to take lots of responsibility at Arsenal. I need to follow more tactical orders at Barcelona,’ Cesc admits. ‘And sometimes I felt lost.’

In the end, he not only stopped scoring regularly but he was also left out of the line-up in some important games (such as against Real
Madrid in April). That didn’t
diminish his adoration of Pep. So much so that within the club it was concluded that Pep’s departure could serve as a potential liberation for Cesc as he prepares to replace Xavi eventually
as a leader and axis of the team.

In hindsight, it must have been difficult for the former Arsenal star when he discovered that Guardiola told the president and Zubizarreta that he wanted to leave the club just two months after
the player joined Barcelona in August.

The hug that Cesc gave Pep in the Camp Nou dressing room after Chelsea knocked Barcelona out of the Champions League in 2012 was one of the longest. Fàbregas was emotional; he
couldn’t articulate it, but wanted Pep to continue and hoped his hug spoke for him.

But three days later, as Pep announced his exit in the dressing room, Fàbregas felt a resonance of the experience he himself had had at Arsenal only the year before.

There was another embrace at the end of the cup final after Atlético de Madrid had been dispatched in the last official game of the Guardiola era. But by then it was no more than a
resigned gesture of farewell.

14 May 1997. Stadion Feijenoord, Rotterdam. Cup Winners’ Cup final. Barcelona v Paris Saint-Germain. On one side, Ronaldo, Luís Figo, Luis
Enrique and Pep Guardiola, coached by Bobby Robson; on the other, a French team in decline, weakened by the departures of Djorkaeff, Ginola and Weah, but still featuring the legendary Rai, as
well as his compatriot Leonardo, a future star at AC Milan.

It was a tense affair. Both teams had good spells in the game, and numerous chances. A single goal proved decisive when, in the last few minutes of the first half, a penalty
taken by Ronaldo – then considered the best player in the world – gave Barcelona the lead.

Robson’s side clung on and when the referee Markus Merk blew the final whistle, the Catalan players celebrated with more than a hint of relief. The 1996–7
campaign, the first one without Johan Cruyff at the helm in almost a decade, had been tough.

As the players celebrated, Pep wanted to hug his team-mates – and just about everyone else connected with the club who was on the pitch. Ivan de la Peña and
Guardiola were both kneeling on the grass, hugging, and as they got to their feet, Pep caught sight of a member of the club’s staff. Pep waved at him and, with a huge grin on his face, ran
towards him with his arms outstretched.

It was José Mourinho.

Pep Guardiola and José hugged. At that time, the future Real Madrid manager was working for FC Barcelona as Bobby Robson’s translator and assistant. Mourinho
got hold of Pep and locked him in an embrace, raising him up and down, three times before they both started jumping
up and down again, bouncing around like two elated kids on
Christmas morning.

Two friends and colleagues were rejoicing in the success of a job well done.

It was their first campaign together, and there would be three more before José departed in 2000. Four seasons during which they got to know each other extremely
well.

Years later, in the middle of a series of four tense and ugly Clásicos, Pep recapped that the pair had once been friends: ‘I only want to remind him that we
were together for four years. He knows me and I know him. I keep that in my mind.’

‘I gave my all, there’s nothing left. That is the fundamental thing. And I need to fill myself again,’ said Pep at the press conference that confirmed his
departure. It was an open admission of his weaknesses, vulnerability, exposed to the eyes of the world.

But days, even hours, after conceding his exhaustion and inability to continue, Pep’s expression changed. The sense of relief that he had felt during his public farewell was replaced by
one of sorrow.

There was speculation about the reasons behind his mood swing, and whether or not it was a consequence of the press conference send-off that had been such an inappropriate ending for his
illustrious career: after all, the club was announcing that the best coach in their history was leaving and they decided that it should coincide with the announcement of his replacement, Tito
Vilanova. Was his melancholy due to the fact that his assistant and friend Tito was staying, a decision that surprised everybody? Was it because the boss and his replacement were still awkwardly
sharing the same space? Or perhaps it was more to do with the strange atmosphere created in the dressing room from the moment of his announcement, as everybody, team and staff alike, felt they
could have done more to convince him to stay?

Whatever the consequences, Pep was emotionally drained and, in exposing his fragility, he revealed the scars with which the intense
pressure of football at that level had
aged him so much. Perhaps it is true that four years of managing Barcelona takes the same toll as managing a quarter of a decade, at say, Manchester United. Pep was telling us: I am not Superman; I
am vulnerable, flawed. Pep Guardiola: the archetypal anti-hero, a man capable of achieving greatness and performing wonderful deeds, despite his own weaknesses and fears, aware of his power and
responsibility but who would have been happier if he hadn’t spread himself so thinly in his unwanted multiple role as club figurehead, philosopher and manager, and who, despite everything,
fought against being used as an example. More of a Spiderman, then.

After all, no Superman would have burst into tears in front of the world’s TV cameras as he did after the team won their sixth title in a year, the World Club Championship, against
Estudiantes. Or admitted straight afterwards, in his first words post-game, that ‘the future looks bleak. To improve on this is impossible.’ He had asked Tito, still on the pitch,
‘What else are we going to do now?’, because, having to face the same challenges, Pep could only foresee the problems ahead and didn’t think he was strong enough to overcome them
all over again. From the pinnacle of the game, the only way was down.

Yet, astonishingly, Pep did continue and did improve the team. Once again, he had proved capable of overcoming the odds, transforming and leading a group of men into performing heroics on the
football field, while at the time shaping and staying true to his own values and philosophy. He achieved the seemingly impossible, superhuman feats, but it took its toll: he may appear superhuman,
but cut him and he bleeds like the rest of us – and, because of that, what he achieved was all the more impressive not despite of but because of those human qualities.

That is part of Pep’s magic. The public is fascinated by such a seductive mixture: on the one hand fragile, even physically, and, on the other, strong in leadership and the sheer force of
his personality. And his team is precisely that, too: extremely convincing in the way they play, with obvious cultural characteristics; but, on the other hand, lacking physical stature, weak,
smaller than the average
footballer – it’s that dichotomy that makes Spiderman Pep and his team so appealing.

He earned his authority not just through the team’s play and their trophies, but through his behaviour in the good and the bad times, in his achievements and his self-confessed errors. The
cynics said that his exemplary composure and behaviour were merely a front and that we would only know the real Pep in defeat. The media loves football because it’s usually black and white,
about winners and losers. Good and bad. And the Madrid press wanted to believe that Pep was bad, that his public persona masked something altogether different. That tribalism came to the fore when
Barcelona had to play Real Madrid four times in a fortnight in April and May 2011. That desire to oppose good and bad and portray representatives of either side of the great divide as being
symbolic of either one or the other led to one of the most acrimonious periods in the recent history of Spanish football.

A couple of occasions towards the end of Pep’s tenure, losing to Madrid and being knocked out of the Champions League by Chelsea, worked as a litmus test and provided a rare glimpse of the
other side of Guardiola. His complaints about referees were a way of getting rid of feelings of frustration that he had felt all season.

Those moments made little difference to those who see Barcelona as more than a club, who had fallen in love with the team’s style and ethos – and in Pep Guardiola saw the essence of
the ideal man. Pep had been a reluctant social leader and the fans who were less intoxicated by his aura, the minority, understood. The rest spoke about a Guardiola who only existed in the
newspapers and in their own heads. A Guardiola whom Pep himself never recognised. ‘Who are they talking about when they talk about me?’ he asked himself when he read things about his
methods, his moral leadership and his supposed superhero virtues. ‘There are books that say things about me that even I didn’t know.’

In fact, in many senses Guardiola was the opposite of that ideal portrait painted by his fans. He is pragmatic, not philosophical, in the negative sense used by some, including Ibrahimović.
He is a coach more than a leader, more interested in the education than the competition. If he appeared to have another role at the club after Joan
Laporta left, it is because
the club has been devoid of a moral hierarchy and of authority, in the absence of which he didn’t shy away from the responsibilities. But, in the necessary duality created in the public eye
to make football more striking, a hero needs an arch enemy to complete the picture. And he – the media and also the fans – found the perfect character: a powerful opponent with a shared
personal history with Pep but who had eventually become a formidable opponent; who represented, in a superficial analysis, opposing values to Guardiola; who thrived on displaying a contrasting
personality to the Catalan manager – and who had been recruited by Barcelona’s arch rival to stop their dominance in its tracks. In José Mourinho, Pep had found his perfect
comic-book nemesis.

In this drama, the characters are clearly defined. The good v the bad; the respectful v the confrontational. They are antagonists and adapt each other’s role in contraposition to their
rival, which helps them define the character they have chosen to play. Clearly, Mourinho did look for the head-to-head confrontation, and felt more comfortable with a constant battle that he felt
was necessary to unsettle a team and a club that were making history. Pep never relished those sideline skirmishes – even though on one memorable occasion he decided to stand up to his enemy.
But, at the end of his four years at Barcelona, Pep admitted to one of his closest friends that ‘Mourinho has won the war’: a conflict that he didn’t want to engage in and one
that would ultimately tarnish for him the memory of the great moments of football offered by both sides.

Yet, the most surprising part of this football operetta is that, if you look deeper, if you scratch the surface, there are as many things that connect Pep and Mourinho, supposed adversaries, as
separate them.

When Bobby Robson went to Barcelona to sign his contract in 1996, a thirty-three-year-old José Mourinho was waiting to welcome him at the airport, to help him with his
bags and drive him to the Camp Nou. Mourinho was devoted to the man he was going to translate for and help settle in his new club, as he had done at Sporting Lisbon and Porto. From the start,
José, fluent in Spanish and Catalan, was always
present at the meetings with the Barcelona president Josep Lluís Núñez or the vice-president, Joan
Gaspart, helping his boss both translate and understand the context, as by then he was already more than the ‘interpreter’, a nickname used by some as far back as Porto where actually
Mourinho had already been helping with training. Despite the initial reticence of players to accept the instructions of a young man without experience in the football elite they eventually
recognised José could see football as clearly as any.

At Barcelona, Robson, who never fully managed to master the language, needed Mourinho to help him settle into his new life in Spain along with his wife, Elsie. José’s own partner,
Matilde, was also always on hand to help out, and dinner at the Robsons’ invariably included the Mourinhos. Little by little, the manager gave his subordinate more influence in the day-to-day
running of the team and even the assistant offered by the club, José Ramón Alexanko, had to share his authority and involvement in training sessions with the young Portuguese.
According to some of the players who spoke English, José’s instructions when translating Robson came sharper than his mentor’s and sometimes with a little bit extra. His videos,
exposing and highlighting the weaknesses and strengths of the opposition, were well considered and his relationship with Ronaldo also helped him win some kudos in the group. He soon became the
shoulder to cry on when players were left out of the team as Robson purposefully maintained a professional distance from the squad. Astutely, José crossed that line constantly and
freely.

Mourinho quickly recognised Guardiola as a natural leader and decided to get close to him, and win him over. He succeeded. The pair would spend hours together after training, chatting both in
Spanish and Catalan. ‘We did talk about things, when we both had doubts, and we would exchange ideas, but I don’t remember it as something that defined our relationship. He was Mister
Robson’s assistant and I was a player,’ Guardiola says now.