Pep Confidential (9 page)

President Uli Hoeness initially requested an open-door policy to give supporters as much access as possible to the players throughout the season, but he has agreed that his coach need open up only post-match training. The rest of the squad’s preparation will remain private.

There are two reasons for Guardiola’s approach. He prefers to work with as few distractions as possible and he is also keen to avoid his techniques becoming public knowledge. His training sessions don’t focus solely on tactics for the next game; they are part of an ongoing, season-long teaching process. He’ll introduce a specific move or key aspect of his game into every training session and allow the players to practise it. He’ll then revisit the move with them at a later stage. The idea is that his men will refine and eventually master a variety of plays which he can then use whenever strategically necessary. It is not always the next game he has in mind as he takes his men through the moves he wants them to perfect. He wants as much privacy as possible and when he gets back to Munich he fully intends to block off Säbener Strasse’s main pitch.

The second major surprise is that Pep has decided to grant me a first-hand, in-depth insight into the team’s work. I had hoped that a controlled level of access, the odd cup of coffee with him, and limited attendance at training sessions would give me enough material for the book. But Guardiola’s unexpected offer changes all my plans. Free access means that I will be privy to everything that goes on. I’ll be able to observe his coaching methods up close and witness the decision-making and planning process as it happens. Essentially, I will be spending months at the heart of this elite team with complete access to an enormous amount of internal information. Not even in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that the champions of Europe and the most successful coach of the decade would grant me such a privilege.

Pep asks for only one thing in return: my total discretion during the season.

‘You can write about everything you see and be as critical as you like in the book but during the season please don’t talk to the outside world about what you witness inside.’

I am enormously grateful despite the fact that my journalistic skills will have to be put on hold for a while. For one year I will live through all of the team’s vicissitudes. The highs and lows, the injuries, the tactics, the line-ups, the periods of sickness, the good behaviour and bad, the jokes, the praise, the worries, the transfer plans … I will know it all, yet the journalist in me will have no voice until the day I pour everything I have learned into this book.

So, the doors of the Arco stadium are closed for the training session today, Saturday, July 6, 2013. It has been two days since Bayern arrived in Trentino and Guardiola has used their rest time this morning to show his players a video about pressing the opposition. They are images taken from the first seven training sessions and the coach explains to his men that he doesn’t want long runs. He doesn’t want to see Ribéry and Robben running 80 metres in every game as they attack the opposition defence. Pep wants attacking runs that last ‘four seconds at peak performance’.

The afternoon training session focuses on pressing, too. The defenders and one midfielder start things off, working together at the back, and the forwards try to get the ball from them using fast, aggressive pressing.

Neuer’s skilled footwork stands out and Mandžukić’s Eto’o-style aggression also impresses. The coach shouts his instructions to his players as he directs their efforts.

‘It’s four-second pressing only. I don’t want to see Ribéry chasing his winger the length of the pitch. He needs to make it into the centre and stay put. What I need is for them all to press together for just a few seconds. That way they’ll get the ball back high up the pitch.’

At the end of the session, Pep sits down on the bench in the heat of the afternoon and shares his ideas: ‘We need intense, precise work. If all we were interested in was one-on-one man marking, all this effort wouldn’t be necessary. I could just sit back and that would be enough. But we are aiming at a very specific style of play and must therefore work extremely hard to perfect every single move.’

There is no middle ground. If the players want to play his brand of football, they will have to give it all they’ve got. ‘We have to train with the maximum intensity. It’s just like the
rondos
: you do them with 100% effort or you don’t do them at all. If the players don’t like them then they’re welcome to go mountain running, but in that case we’ll never achieve our potential.’

Zonal defending rather than man marking; four-second pressing with the nearest player in position to press the man who’s about to receive the ball; moving calmly into the middle to create and use space; working in a co-ordinated way. Pep breaks down his fundamental ideas about the game for me.

‘This team just needs to slow down a bit. They’ve already got everything else down pat. They need some deceleration in the centre of the field. Neuer makes a clean pass and they move together to penetrate deeper – completely co-ordinated. I want intricate passing as they move forward, not too fast initially, so that none of our men ends up in the wrong place. A highly-organised advance until they reach the centre and then, boom! We trample them underfoot!’

Kroos possesses this ability to slow down, as do Schweinsteiger and Götze. And Thiago.

‘Thiago’s coming,’ Pep tells me.

I have to ask him several times: ‘Which Thiago? Thiago Alcántara? Thiago from Barça? Are you talking about the pearl of the Barça youth system?’

‘Yes, that Thiago,’ he replies.

Bayern are hoping to transfer Mario Gómez to Fiorentina and, since the striker is happy to make the move, the deal looks set to go through. The club will then buy Thiago, whom Barcelona have been trying to transfer since the summer of 2011, a year before Guardiola left the Catalan club.

Mario Gómez is a committed professional with a strong work ethic. He continues to train as hard as his team-mates despite the fact that his transfer to the Italian team is about to go through. In other circumstances, Pep would be quite happy to keep him because he values the player. In reality, however, he would struggle to find a role for the German striker alongside the other centre-forwards, Mandžukić and Pizarro, in the false 9 system his team will play. Pep already relies on Mario Götze and Frank Ribéry to fulfil this role and Gómez’s departure is therefore inevitable – which must mean that Thiago’s arrival is imminent.

In fact Thiago is interested in signing only for Bayern, and the deal is done without any difficulty. Despite claims by some sections of the media that he is considering Manchester United, the eldest of the Alcántara brothers is desperate to be reunited with Guardiola. For the time being he is holed up in a little holiday house in Begur, on the Costa Brava, where he barely has any means of communication with the outside world. He has even had to buy a special antenna to get an internet connection. Thiago will spend several tense days waiting for Gómez to sign with Fiorentina and for Rummenigge, Bayern’s chief executive, to close the deal with Barça. In the end it will be eight long days before negotiations are completed, on Sunday, July 14.

Guardiola and his staff are extremely happy at Bayern. As a nation the Germans are renowned for their efficient, if at times overly rigid organisational skills and the Bayern press department certainly lives up to this reputation. They have established a press centre here in Trentino which would be the envy of any World Cup media centre.

The people at Bayern treat Guardiola and his staff with the greatest of care. Nobody doubts for a moment that he is second only to the president in terms of importance and everyone works together to ensure his ideas and plans are fully implemented. People are already commenting on the efficiency of the member of staff responsible for logistical organisation, as well as the impressive work of the team manager, Kathleen Krüger, a young woman who until recently was a midfielder in the successful Bayern women’s team. Kathleen is responsible for all first-team administration issues and she carries out her duties with assured efficiency.

A few days ago Pep stopped taking German lessons. His teacher, a Borussia Dortmund fan, stayed in New York. Pep believes that he now knows enough to carry out the daily interactions with players and press. ‘Our language on the pitch is all about giving instructions. I use the imperative a lot:
drück
(press),
schwingen
(balance),
sehr gut
(very good). With this type of language I think I have enough for the moment.’

After the session, which has focused on pressing, Stefano, who looks after the Arco stadium, offers us a refreshment. Sweltering in the evening heat, we are only too pleased to accept. Stefano is a cultured man who explains, to our amazement that, despite being situated in the north of Italy, near the Austrian Tyrol province, Trentino is home to no fewer than 450 different fruit species, some as heat reliant as the avocado. It seems that Arco and Riva del Garda have their own special ecosystems with the kind of microclimate which supports this amazing natural phenomenon. Here, in the shadow of the mountain range, lies an abundant fruit garden.

Stefano knows a lot about nature locally as well the culture and geography of the area. He also has a nose for football. ‘Guardiola is the third Bayern coach I have known in four years. Van Gaal directed with his eyes, with facial expressions and silence. Heynckes was a coach who moved a bit more and gave a few instructions to his players. But Guardiola! He’s a whirlwind of energy, a volcano.’

9

‘THE IDEA IS TO DOMINATE THE BALL.’

Riva del Garda, July 7, 2013

THERE ARE CURRENTLY no guests staying at the Lido Palace in Riva del Garda – except for the Bayern party, who have reserved the whole hotel. On this, the first Sunday of July, two guards patrol the steel fence that rings the lakeside building, which is accessed via a long wooded path. Here, thousands of birds welcome the newly-arrived traveller. Their unceasing chorus is an ad man’s dream and if right now there is a place of tranquility and calm in the world, this is it.

Pep is on the terrace of the Lido Palace going over yesterday’s training session on his laptop. He is obsessed by football, obsessed by work and revels in the hours of detailed, methodical analysis. He will, from time to time over the next 12 months, reproach himself for this meticulous, demanding attitude and is aware that there are those in football who take a more light-hearted, less fastidious approach, preferring to put their faith in good luck and raw talent. However, the whispered tones in which he tends to express these sentiments suggest that in his heart of hearts, he’s happy as he is.

Inside, on the other side of the window, Domènec Torrent, his assistant coach, is also studying the previous day’s training on his computer. It’s a curious situation. Pep is outside and Domènec inside. Both men are reviewing yesterday’s ‘four-second pressing’ exercises but they choose to do it separately.

‘I prefer watching it without Pep so that I can make my own evaluation and then swap notes with him later,’ the assistant coach tells us.

He shares his own take on his boss’s first few weeks at Bayern: ‘Pep is off to a flying start and is more motivated than ever. I keep telling him that we have to go
piano, piano
though. We don’t want to overwhelm the players with too many new concepts. These guys are switched-on tactically and they have welcomed our training model which involves a lot of ball work and no continuous running, but we have to take into account that all of this is like a whole new language to them.’

This concept of language learning will come up in conversation again and again this season. Guardiola uses it to describe a particular way of understanding football, both in terms of match strategy and training methodology. The coach makes a clear distinction between the notions of ‘the core idea’, ‘language’ and ‘people’.

For him, ‘the core idea’ is the essence of a team and its coach. More than a single concept, it is the synthesis between a particular belief system and the group’s stated mission. It can be summed up in a phrase often used in Pep’s playing days by Johan Cruyff, the man who has been like a father figure to him in the course of his career: ‘The idea is to dominate the ball.’

‘Language’ is the way in which the core idea is expressed on the pitch and is the culmination of a training regime which uses a range of systems, exercises and moves to reinforce understanding and mastery of the basic concepts.

And finally, ‘people’. The quality of the ideas and the complexity of the language are of no consequence if your players are reluctant students. Essential though it may be, it is not merely sheer talent that matters here. The player must also be completely open to learning the secrets of the language, to practise them and make improvements where necessary. They must have complete faith in this process.

In Guardiola’s view these three concepts, the ‘core idea, ‘language’ and ‘people’ are fundamental parts of any playing model and can determine a coach’s chances of success or failure.

To Guardiola, his job at Bayern Munich presents far greater challenges than those he encountered at Barça. There is a simple explanation for this. At Barça, the language of the game is taught from a very young age. Thousands of children pass through La Masia, the club’s youth academy, where they are taught the Barça language as defined by Johan Cruyff more than 25 years ago and implemented by a serious of great coaches since then. They learn the specific details of this unique and precise language. By the end they will have mastered this particular brand of football so that by the time a player has made it into the first team he will have accumulated more than 10,000 hours of practice and training in this single playing model. As such, he has become a fluent speaker of the language.

There is no equivalent at Bayern, at least not with the same level of uniformity either in terms of the language or the machine which teaches it – and this has a major impact on Pep’s plans. Domènec Torrent explains: ‘It’s like we’re showing them the numbers first, then the days of the week, then verbs, etc. This is a huge departure for them and we need to be flexible and cautious. In the past they were taught about man-marking and now we’re talking in terms of covering a whole area, for example. We don’t want them to mark a player and abandon the positions we’ve assigned them, because all it takes is a long pass, and the opposition will ruin our organisation. It will take time but they are assimilating everything well. Yesterday’s pressing exercises were well executed, particularly considering it was only the second time they had done them.’