Messi (80 page)

After being a substitute in a 4–0 win over Sevilla the previous season, he did not turn up for training.
El País
reported that players had not realised his anger and, when they did not see him the next day, they thought he had a cold or something similar. ‘When he is that upset, or has lost a game, he doesn’t feel like doing anything,’ explains Cristina Cubero. ‘Basically he no longer gives a damn about going training, or whatever has to be done the next day.’

In that 2011−12 season, the last time Messi was seen on the bench was against Real Sociedad after a transatlantic flight to play for the national team. Barcelona went 2–0 up but the local team brought it back to 2–2. He went on in the sixty-second minute but the deadlock remained. According to
El País
, Leo did not attend training the following day, disgusted once again at not starting. For reactions like those, some commentators call Messi, a ‘child champion’.

If Messi got angry, he could go several days without speaking to Guardiola. It is one of Leo’s usual ways of dealing with conflict: erect a wall. He does it with Pep and even with his mother. Then, a few days later, his mood mellows and the door is once more open: ‘Speak to me’ his eyes say, or ‘I’m back’. Not even Leo can bear himself when he reacts in that way. ‘If I shut myself up, I go crazy,’ he said in an interview for
El Mundo Deportivo
. It is part of his baggage and that is how it is understood in the dressing room.

But the distance that Leo created during these periods of sulking was difficult for Guardiola to endure.

Guardiola understood that his success as a coach was due in no small part to Messi helping him to reach his peak, in exchange for Pep keeping him happy, for creating a team that would help him to maximise his talent. But he also thought that Messi listened to him and acted upon his advice. In that season, Pep’s fourth, the coach began to feel that Leo listened to him less and less. It became increasingly difficult to get his ideas across to him.

Eventually Guardiola gave in: he decided to play him whenever he was fit. If it was what he wanted, if that made him happy, then let him have it.

Messi played every game until Christmas. He was able to rest up in Rosario, ten days during which he slept, forgot about his diet and hardly did any exercise. It was what he needed and on his return he seemed unfit. That confirmed ‘the Flea’s’ suspicions: it was better to carry on playing and not lose that physical sharpness that he needed to make the difference.

Despite the years they spent together, Leo Messi, often difficult to interpret, is still something of a mystery to Guardiola. At the start, he found it hard to understand that Leo’s mentality was different from his own. ‘How is it possible for him to be like that, to go three days without speaking to me?’ he would ask himself. But in the end, he discovered that the question was misguided, and that you have to think as Leo, Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods do. He had to make an effort to understand him, instead of forcing or managing him.

He tried to find a balance between making concessions to the star player and taking decisions for the collective good, between the amount of goals and the triumphs. Pep left him to his own devices, he let him play, because it was what he wanted and also because he scored two or three goals for him per match. It was a policy that brought success in its wake.

But at the end of his time in charge, it became clear to Guardiola that coaches are simply instruments used by the greats (be they Michael Jordan, Maradona or Pelé) in order to achieve the maximum expression of their potential. Pep finally understood that Leo was above him, and above Barcelona, in the same way Pelé was above Santos or Maradona was above Napoli. They all construct a building that they use to achieve the goal they set themselves when they were children. And when the coach leaves, another arrives; it is as simple as that. In effect, the coach is superfluous.

Pep accepted all responsibility for the departures of Eto’o, Ibra and Bojan, the young winger from the youth team who felt mistreated by Guardiola because he stopped playing regularly, despite a promising start to his career. But his decisions were taken to create the conditions to benefit Messi’s game on the pitch and to make him the best in the world. Messi does not have to ask for other forwards to be removed; the coach does that for him.

And what will go through Leo’s head? He must think, of course
you have to choose and you have to make those choices that benefit me, because I am the best and because I win matches. Pure logic. Leo must think that the coach would do everything necessary to keep him happy, because that was his duty.

Barcelona, incidentally, had gradually adopted a policy of feeding Leo’s ambition and making him feel special. Thus, at 26, with the responsibility of carrying a universally acclaimed club and the hopes of a nation on his shoulders, Leo’s life became extremely complicated. How to live a normal life when you are indulged and given anything you want, so long as you continue to win titles? We live in another world, we cannot see what Leo sees, we have no idea what it is to live with those expectations. But it remains clear that it is precisely because of that pressure that he openly demands the ball from David Villa, Cuenca or Tello. Leo thinks that they are making a mistake if a chance of an opening, which he clearly sees, is lost.

Guardiola’s success was also down to a phenomenal group of people with whom Leo shares the dressing room. It was almost impossible to combine Pep’s vision in the same team, the fourth best player in the world answered to the third, the third to the second, and all of them to Messi. So, who has won 14 out of 19 titles, the extraordinary figure achieved in the Guardiola era? Does the success belong to Leo, his team-mates, the coach? They say that with everything Barcelona has given him, Messi should be eternally grateful to the Catalan club. But Guardiola will add that he has earned everything he got from Barcelona on the pitch.

Guardiola started his career with the idea of dictating the team from the bench, where the players are pieces with specific roles that must adapt to his particular philosophy. But little by little, experience made him give in to the magic of footballers, their role in the game.

The coach’s submission to Leo and the team organisation in order to make him feel comfortable was a general plea from the coach to the group to obey the star. And that exercise inevitably leads to unbalances.

It is in these thoughts that the roots of the so-called ‘Messidependence’ are found, which soon became a topic for discussion that season: team-mates started to avoid taking responsibility and always gave him the ball; Leo always wanted it. It was becoming difficult
to balance the team spirit with the Argentinian’s needs, something Pep had managed successfully until then.

But something else brought that dependence on the Flea. It was very difficult to arrive from another club and fit into that team straight away. The well-oiled machine that was Barcelona needed players that had enough talent and personality to add when they arrived – and the centre back Chygrinski, Ibrahimović, Afellay or Alexis were not acquisitions that made the team better. With every failed signing, the team looked more and more to Messi for solutions.

As always happens, time gradually erodes dressing-room relationships, and Pep’s with Leo was also starting to wear. ‘What you cannot hope for is a group of players to last for ever, they are not machines,’ explains Josep María Minguella, a man who knows the ins and outs at Barcelona better than most. ‘There are ways of being, there is jealousy, different egos, changes in hierarchy, in lineups, all of that causes tiredness and stress which you have to know how to accept. It has occurred historically: Ajax came and then disappeared, later Bayern, with the same result; Milan … And Barça’s turn came, they had their time with Pep. But, given Pep’s personal characteristics, with his hands-on approach which tires players out, and the normal procession of players, it is impossible for that to last indefinitely.’

Pep’s exhaustion was clear for everybody to see and even his partner Cristina discussed openly with relatives of the players that the demands of the job were extraordinary and having an adverse effect. But his departure was more complex than just a plea for rest.

Perhaps in the end Guardiola did not have the strength to reinvent the team around Messi. Or did not know how to make Leo happy. There was a falling-out after the Christmas holidays: Messi returned later than scheduled and it was made to look as if he had had permission from the club to do so, although he had not. Manel Estiarte dealt with those issues to avoid the further strain on Guardiola, who was already beginning to lose the enthusiasm to carry on. It bothered Leo that the coach had not spoken to him directly. That’s what happens when you are together for a long time: the small things start to get bigger.

Pep thought that the end he feared so much, that he had predicted
since that first day in the first-team dressing room, was coming. Relationships with Leo and some of the senior players were gradually breaking down with that degree of impatience that comes from overfamiliarity. Coaches’ decisions were questioned; the message was not reaching the players no matter how much effort he put into it. He tried to shield the players by appearing at every press conference that he could, but that created a mythology and adulation around Guardiola that was verging on the religious.

It was Guardiola’s team.

And the players? Pep’s excessive protagonism in the eyes of fans and commentators made players unhappy and the distance between them and the coach was becoming agonising.

Pep had to take big decisions if he wanted to recapture the magic and authority, to recycle the message and the squad, but preferred not to do so. He no longer wanted, was able to or knew how to put limits on his players. He chose not to correct the situation.

As Guardiola always said, football cycles last two or three years. In fact, his revolutionary era probably lasted a year more than he had expected, but having surrendered to the magic of players and what they had done for the club, he could not find the strength to get rid of some of them and start all over again.

Those are the reasons why Pep left FC Barcelona. He did not do it because of Leo Messi, as it has been so simplistically written.

With the erosion of time, the relaxation after years of winning and the loss of the understanding that had worked so well for three years, the collective organisation disappeared gradually on the pitch, especially without the ball; it is the first thing a team loses when things are not right. Players are inclined towards comfort, like all human beings and in all professions – and comfort means doing what you most fancy, not what you have to do.

The Catalan media preferred to ignore the warning signs. They unanimously backed Guardiola and wanted him to confirm as quickly as possible that he was going to renew his contract again for another year, which would be his fifth. Suggestions started appearing about players having lost the passion or the focus that had taken them so far. But the team was progressing in the competitions, Real Madrid seemed stronger than in previous years and not too far away in the league, and that always hides the cracks.

As journalists do not have access to the training ground, some snippets of information were now used to match certain personal agendas or opinions. An incident took place on the training ground that was taken out of context by those who had decided that there was another ‘darker’ side to Messi. Leo reacted to a hard tackle from youth player Marc Bartra, which caused bruising on his calf and prevented him from playing a friendly against Hamburg, with very public recriminations. As had happened in similar situations with Thiago Motta or Sergio Busquets in previous years, nobody likes to be whacked that hard in training. Bartra was trying to make an impact in his first season with the first team, and his understandable enthusiasm made him mistime the tackle from behind, which could have seriously injured Leo. Messi’s reaction was, for some outside the club, proof of his new ‘boorish’ behaviour. For his team-mates, some of whom laid into Bartra, it was just the typical response to an excessive use of force.

In this confusing atmosphere, everything was being weighed up; Guardiola was about to make a decision about his future. ‘It would be difficult to find a replacement. Barcelona have been playing like that for four years for him,’ said Messi in March of that season. ‘For me, he is more important than me at Barcelona. We are the same as all of you, waiting for him to decide whether he stays or not.’ And what would happen if Pep decided to leave? ‘The club will go on and we will, too. But it will be very different without Guardiola.’