Pep Confidential (4 page)

Hoeness and Rummenigge were no longer interested in just winning titles, now they wanted a clear identity, an enduring hallmark which would establish their dominance once and for all. They wished that, in due course, the Bayern brand wouldn’t simply be related to effort, courage, power and victory. They wanted more. In this quest, Pep was the chosen one.

Perhaps the real stroke of genius on the part of the Bavarian club was to start making changes at the peak of their success. After all, nobody would have complained had they continued with Heynckes and his staff after their treble win.

Under Guardiola, the club hoped to take a quantum leap forward and achieve the kind of consistent and enduring success they craved. They understood that none of this would be easy. Heynckes had set the bar very high.

All of this has led to this moment. Here, today, on June 24, 2013, in the Allianz Arena.

On the pitch Guardiola’s eyes meet those of Matthias Sammer, Bayern’s technical director, the man on whom he’ll come to rely in the coming months.

Pep’s expression seems to hint at the paradox he is accepting. His climb starts here, at the summit. His mission is to climb higher still.

In Munich it rains for about 134 days a year. Just one more thing Pep will have to get used to.

3

‘I COULD SEE MYSELF COACHING HERE ONE DAY.’

New York, October 2012

‘PREPARE YOURSELF, MANEL. I’ve chosen Bayern!’

In Pescara, in the north-east of Italy, Manel Estiarte smiles. Hard though it had been for his old friend to close one chapter of his life, the decision about his next step had obviously been an easy one. Their destination would not after all be England, but Germany.

The exchange is taking place five months after Pep’s departure from Barça. In this time, he has been flooded with offers: Chelsea, Manchester City, Milan and, of course, Bayern. In reality, they are not job offers, but love letters, project proposals for this most illustrious of coaches.

The departure from Barça had been long and difficult and Guardiola had shared his plans with his friend Estiarte before speaking to the club, or even to Tito Vilanova, his deputy and successor. The reason was pretty straightforward. After four years at maximum intensity, Pep was drained. He had no more to give.

This was not the only reason, of course.

Over his four-year tenure, Pep had been expected to act as coach, club spokesperson, virtual president and even travel co-ordinator. During that time he had also struggled to remain on good terms with two successive presidents.

He had found in Joan Laporta a dynamic but pushy man, who possessed volcanic energy and who could be supportive one minute and undermining the next. Electric, contradictory – occasionally lewd.

Sandro Rosell was different and Pep quickly discovered that the new president’s smiling demeanour concealed the cold, treacherous heart of a bureaucrat. Guardiola balanced the at-times hysterical behaviour of Laporta with his own calm sobriety. He coped with Rosell’s sanctimonious posturing by injecting an overdose of his own energy.

Relations with neither president were simple. Pep managed to deal calmly and quietly with Laporta’s histrionic outbursts. Although the two men were not close, the coach appreciated the opportunities the president had given him. Laporta had initially appointed Guardiola as Barcelona B coach and Pep had been hugely successful there, bringing the team up from the tough Third Division, an achievement he still considers one of his greatest successes. His gratitude to Laporta was absolutely sincere and also extended to the sports director, his old colleague from Johan Cruyff’s Dream Team, the elusive winger, Txiki Begiristain.

The triumphs of Laporta’s period in charge, however, concealed the struggles and skirmishes going on behind the scenes.

At times Pep felt like the captain of a ponderous ocean liner as he fought to steer the team in one direction whilst the club pulled in the other. No decision was straightforward, whether it involved transferring training sessions to the new training ground, making sure his technical staff had the same sponsored cars as the squad, organising publicity shots or agreeing the club’s official position on any issue. FC Barcelona was a vast machine that moved to a rhythm and leadership style that had little to do with the way Guardiola managed his team.

However, by early 2010 Guardiola sensed that things were about to take a turn for the worse. Presidential elections were looming that summer and Sandro Rosell was the favourite to win. Rosell had been vice-president from 2003 to 2005, until disagreements with Laporta forced him to resign.

Under Laporta, the Catalan coach had won all six titles: La Liga, the Copa del Rey, the Champions League, the European and Spanish Supercups and the Club World Cup.

Rosell won the elections with an overwhelming majority and his arrival added a sense of animosity and resentment to the already complex bureaucratic difficulties which plagued life at the club. In private, the new president referred to Pep as the Dalai Lama. Believing his coach to be a Laporta devotee, he was slow to trust him and resented the fact that the team had peaked too early by winning the six trophies during his predecessor’s reign. The gulf between president and coach became unbreachable when Rosell persuaded the club’s general assembly of members to vote in favour of taking legal action against Laporta. Rosell was smart enough to abstain from the vote himself, but for Guardiola it was the beginning of the end.

For four years, Pep demanded unstinting effort from his players. Nothing but their best would do and at times his exacting standards caused friction within the group. Many of the players were unfazed by the relentless work rate, but some felt they had earned the right to relax a bit. They were the elite of world football, after all, and they had the trophies to prove it. More than one of Pep’s men were now interested in contesting only the important games and they began to make excuses to avoid the kind of grim, uninspiring winter matches which were played on cold, inhospitable pitches. To add to Pep’s woes, one new signing in particular was failing to live up to expectations.

Despite the team’s continuing success, Pep knew that his time at Barça was nearing its end. ‘The day I see the light go out of my players’ eyes, I’ll know it’s time to go.’

By early 2012, some eyes were already a little less bright.

People around FC Barcelona have often claimed that Pep’s decision to leave was influenced by Sandro Rosell’s lack of support for his plans to make drastic changes to the squad. Plans which apparently included selling players like Gerard Piqué, Cesc Fàbregas and Dani Alves.

The Catalan coach flatly denied this when we spoke: ‘It’s just not true. I left Barcelona because I was worn out. I explained how I felt to the president in October 2011. There was no change of heart after that. So it would have made no sense at all for me to start changing the squad. I knew I was leaving!

‘The facts of the matter are that we won four titles that year and were playing better than ever, with the 3-4-3 we used against Real Madrid and the 3-7-0 I opted for in the Club World Cup. We were playing brilliantly but I was on my knees and had no new tactical ideas left. That was why I left. There was no other reason.’

Having gone to New York in search of some peace and quiet, Pep nonetheless still had to cope with a certain amount of parting shots aimed at him from Barcelona.

During his sabbatical year the job offers poured in. His ex-colleague Txiki Begiristain, the director of football at Manchester City, was very insistent. He also met up in Paris with Roman Abramovich, who was prepared to do anything to lure Pep to Chelsea.

Bayern, too, were anxious to register an early interest and a delegation from Munich attended Pep’s last game with Barça, the final of the Copa del Rey against Athletic in Madrid on May 25, 2012. The Catalan club won 3-0 that day.

In the event the Bayern delegation did not get a chance speak to Guardiola, but they made their interest clear during a meeting with his agent. It was just six days since the Munich team had suffered a painful defeat to Chelsea at home in the Champions League final, a game they had lost on penalties. It was another heavy blow for the Bavarian club at the end of a bitterly disappointing period. One week earlier, they had lost 5-2 to Borussia Dortmund in the DFB-Pokal [the German cup] final in Berlin. Their opponents had just won their second consecutive league title after a brilliant campaign, beating Bayern by eight points.

In the space of a few weeks Bayern had lost three titles: the Bundesliga, the DFB-Pokal and the Champions League. After enduring the agonising Champions League defeat, Heynckes promised his wife that he would only go on for one more year. The directors of Bayern felt the same way. A substitute had to be found.

From the start Pep was well disposed to the overtures from the Bavarian club.

A year before, in late July 2011, not long after a resounding 3-1 victory in the Champions League final against Manchester United at Wembley, Barcelona competed in the Audi Cup in Munich. Pep liked the set-up at Säbener Strasse, despite the fact that it was smaller than Barça’s training ground and had fewer technical facilities. The Catalan was impressed and told Manel Estiarte privately: ‘I like this place. I could see myself coaching here one day.’

Estiarte was not too surprised by the comment. Pep had said something very similar a few months before, at Manchester United. The day after beating Real Madrid in the Champions League semi-final, Guardiola and Estiarte travelled to Manchester to watch their next opponent in action. It was May 4, 2011, and the pair sat together in the stands of Old Trafford watching Sir Alex Ferguson’s team beat Schalke 4-1. Once again Pep had turned to his friend and said: ‘I like this atmosphere. I could see myself coaching here one day.’

Guardiola has always felt a deep admiration, almost veneration, for the legendary teams and players of Europe. Estiarte knows this and was therefore not surprised by Pep’s eagerness to meet up for a chat with Uli Hoeness and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge in June 2011. The four had a quick coffee together and it soon became clear that his feelings of admiration for the two Germans were reciprocated in equal measure.

Bayern had just appointed Jupp Heynckes to manage the second phase of their project, the initial stage having been overseen by Louis van Gaal. Guardiola, fresh from winning another Champions League title with Barça, was still totally committed to the Catalan club. At that moment none of them could have imagined how closely linked their destinies would become.

There is no truth in the rumour that Pep gave the Germans his phone number that day. This was a man who had won every trophy imaginable and whose football philosophy was admired the world over. He had no need to scribble his details on a scrap of paper.

‘It didn’t happen the way it has been portrayed in the press. We were there for a friendly against Bayern and we met Kalle [Rummenigge] and Uli [Hoeness] for a chat. I told them how much I admired both their current team and Bayern Munich as a club. It has always been one of the great clubs of European football. But I had never given a thought to coaching there. Nor was I thinking about it then. I was certainly not offering them my services. The fact that I ended up signing for the club a few years later was just a twist of fate. It wasn’t something I was planning or proposing that day.’

Indeed, as we now know, the situation would have changed dramatically by the spring of 2012. With four more titles (the Spanish and European Supercopas, the Club World Cup and the Copa del Rey) under his belt, an exhausted Guardiola was bidding a weary farewell to FC Barcelona.

Over in Munich meanwhile, the indefatigable Hoeness and Rummenigge knew that Heynckes had only one year left and had started to look for a replacement. The Copa del Rey final was the ideal opportunity to register their interest.

Within a few months, in October 2012, Pep would be giving Estiarte the news during one of their regular
FaceTime
chats.

‘Prepare yourself, Manel. I’ve chosen Bayern.’

These two men are well matched and had both been first-class global sportsmen and Olympic champions.

Guardiola was an extraordinary footballer who preferred to go unnoticed on the pitch. He positioned himself far from the opponents’ goal and played a pivotal role in driving the flow of the game. He was a player who was constantly planning his next move as he played the ball and everything he did was designed to open up spaces and support his team-mates. For Guardiola, success meant organising the team around him.

Estiarte was an exceptional athlete. Known as the Maradona of water polo, he was a prolific goal-scorer who possessed a killer instinct. He won every honour and trophy available, earned 578 caps, scored 1,561 goals for Spain and played in six Olympic Games. For seven consecutive years, from 1986 to 1992, he was voted No.1 in the world in his field.

The ease with which he seemed to single-handedly change the course of every game also earned him comparisons with Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all-time, and he was the top goal-scorer in four consecutive Olympic Games, as well as in all the other competitions he competed in. Despite this success, one thing still eluded him. Winning Olympic gold for Spain.

In the end it would take a change in philosophy rather than athletic prowess to secure this final prize. Having met and befriended Guardiola, Estiarte began to reflect upon his own approach to sport. He began to understand that while his individualistic playing style and single-minded determination to score had won him plenty of honours, only effective team-work would help him to secure that elusive gold medal. Estiarte decided he needed to make some changes.

Already a harsh self-critic, he examined every aspect of his own game and saw that his egotistical ideas had to go. Working co-operatively with his team-mates, he began to play a more supportive, enabling role. Almost inevitably, Estiarte lost the top spot in terms of goals scored, but his sacrifice changed the fortunes of the whole team and Spain won Olympic gold and the World Cup consecutively.