Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography (7 page)

A kid jumping on a bunk bed in La Masía, Barcelona. An early August evening, late 1980s

Soon after receiving the call, Pep, together with his parents and brother Pere, visited Barcelona’s facilities at La Masía, the old farm that housed the young
academy players from outside Barcelona. Lying on top of one of the bunk beds, Pep opened the window of the room he would share with four other lads and could barely contain his excitement as he
shouted, ‘Wow, Mum, look! Every day I’ll be able to open this window and see the Nou Camp!’

When he moved to La Masía he left behind the Platini poster that adorned his room – consciously or not, football had moved into another dimension. Yet, for Pep, it was still a game.
He doesn’t look back on his early days at the club as a time of emotional hardship, although he admits it was difficult to leave behind everything he knew, including all his friends, at just
thirteen years old. From one day to the next, family ties were broken, new relationships had to be forged. Occasionally, at night, he would go down to the ground floor of the old farmhouse to use
the payphone to chat with his parents, but, unlike many of the kids who suffered terrible homesickness because of the distances separating them from their families, Pep’s calls were less
frequent because most weekends he would return to his village, just an hour away. He describes it now as an eye-opening time, full of novelties and discoveries and some absences that helped him
mature: he grew up and developed quickly. The distance separating him and his team-mates from family and friends was going to make them resilient.

His father doesn’t remember it like that: ‘The lad phoned us up in tears; he used to break our hearts.’

Memory likes to play tricks. His life as a manager, tense, exhausting, created a curious effect: his young life seems to have been rewritten and Pep has started to look back on those days with a
mixture of melancholy and envy for the lost innocence of it all. Clearly he has now forgotten the most painful parts, the good memories blotting out the bad, but a decade ago he wrote that he
sometimes felt ‘helpless’ at ‘The Big House’, which is how the Barça headquarters was known to
the kids. The club had given him and the other
youngsters everything they required, but ‘especially the affection and peace of mind to know that whenever I needed them, they were always nearby to stop my problems getting in the way of my
dreams. And that fact – that they’re there for us – is so important to me that I’ll always be grateful to them and I’ll never be able to repay them.’

Their day started with a breakfast that consisted of yogurts, cereals, toast, jam and milk. Unlike other kids of their generation, the youngsters at La Masía shared a television with an
automatic timer that clicked off at eleven o’clock every night. Apart from daily training sessions, there were distractions far more eye-opening than anything their TV was showing before the
watershed. After dark, and despite the curfew, Pep and his room-mates would gather at the window to be entertained by one of the rituals of the residence: spying on the nightly comings and goings
of the prostitutes who plied their trade up and down the street that leads to the gates of La Masía. With time, their presence became ‘part of the furniture’.

The bedtime tears of some of the kids also became a part of the nightly soundtrack, but Pep quickly grasped that crying didn’t make him feel any better; they were living the dream after
all. Far better to focus on the job in hand, which in his case included a programme of physical improvement as his mentors could see the potential, but were worried about his slight frame.

He talked and talked football during the long coach journeys travelling to games all over Catalonia, the homeland that he got to know so well in those teenage years. He continually learnt from
everything he saw around him, from other teams, from coaches, from older team-mates. On one occasion, he asked a couple of his colleagues to repeat a free-kick routine he had seen the B side
perform the previous weekend. The move led to a goal and their coach asked, ‘Whose idea was that? And where did you pick that up?’ ‘From the grown-up players,’ responded a
fifteen-year-old Pep Guardiola. La Masía: a footballing university campus where players and coaches mixed.

‘The kids only want to play football, live football, and La Masía allows you to do it,’ Pep recalls. ‘Any time of day was ideal to get the
ball and
have a kickabout or to go and see how the others trained. Occasionally, when I’m asked to do a talk in La Masía, I use the following example: each night when you are going to sleep,
ask yourselves if you like football or not; ask yourselves if right then, you’d get up, grab the ball and play for a bit.’ If ever the answer is ‘no’, then that is the day
to start looking for something else to do.

There were other benefits to living in the football school. The Masía kids had the opportunity to become privileged spectators in the Nou Camp by handing out club leaflets on match days
or, after a long waiting list, becoming ball boys. There is a picture of a young Pep on the pitch, gleefully clapping alongside a couple of Barcelona players with Terry Venables carried aloft on
their shoulders in celebration after the final whistle the night FC Barcelona beat Gothenburg to reach the European Cup final in 1986.

Pep learnt an unexpected lesson as a ball boy when the teenager waited for his idol Michel Platini to come out for the warm-up before a Barcelona–Juventus game. He had been dreaming about
it for weeks, his first chance to see his childhood hero in the flesh, and he had a cunning plan to secure Platini’s autograph: pen and paper tucked away in his pocket, Pep planned to pounce
on the French star as he walked across the pitch to join his team-mates in the warm-up on the far side – he knew it was the only chance he was going to get without getting into trouble.
Cabrini, Bonini, Brio jogged out, then Michael Laudrup. But no Platini. It transpired that the French superstar didn’t always come out with the team to do some stretching. ‘Ah,’
Pep thought, ‘so not all players are treated as equals; it turns out they’re not all the same.’ The pen and paper stayed in his pocket, unused.

The Platini poster that hadn’t accompanied him to La Masía stayed on the wall of his bedroom in Santpedor for a few years, but gradually another player, this one far more
accessible, took centre stage: Guillermo Amor, future midfielder of the Johan Cruyff side, four years older than Pep and also resident at La Masía.

‘At the time, when I started to pay attention to everything that you did, I was thirteen years old,’ Pep wrote a decade ago in reference to Amor, in his autobiography
My People,
My Football
. ‘I didn’t
just follow every one of your games, but also the training sessions; I paid attention to your attitude, because you faced everyone as if
your life depended on it. I used to have my practical football lessons at 7 p.m. on an adjacent pitch; but I used to turn up two hours earlier, so I could listen in on the theory class on pitch
number 1: seeing how you carried yourself, how you encouraged your team-mates, how you asked for the ball, how you listened and how you earned the respect of everyone around you. I pay tribute to
you today for every one of those moments you gave us back then at La Masía on pitch number 1, during mealtimes, in the dressing room, throughout the holidays, away at hotels and even on
television.’

When Amor returned from away games with the B team – a side that also included Tito Vilanova, Pep’s future assistant and successor in the Camp Nou dugout – Guardiola would
pester him for the score and details of how they’d got along. ‘We won,’ would be the standard answer. Over the next few years, Amor, who embodied all the values instilled in
players at the club right through to the first team, became like a big brother to Pep, who intuitively understood that the club is not only about the bricks and mortar of the stadium or training
facility, but mostly about the footballing DNA shared by Guillermo and others like him. So when Pep took his first major decisions as a Barcelona manager, selling Ronaldinho and Deco or approving
Amor’s appointment as director of youth football, he did so with a desire to return the focus of influence in the dressing room to home-grown players.

Guardiola remained a lanky teenager with little muscle mass, the opposite of the ideal footballer’s stature. But great art is always born of frustration and since he lacked the pace and
strength to overcome the opposition, he substituted physical power with the power of the mind: instinctively developing a sense of spatial awareness that was second to none. He was capable of
leaving behind three players with one pass, widening or narrowing the field at will, so that the ball always travelled more than the player. Usually when children start to play football, they want
to learn to dribble. Guardiola didn’t: he learnt how to pass the ball.

La Masía, a word also used to generically describe the Barcelona youth system, was and still is rich in talent – the product of promoting, for more than three
decades, a style of football now celebrated around the world. ‘Some think it is like the Coca-Cola recipe,’ says the Catalan journalist Ramón Besa, ‘some sort of secret,
winning formula.’ In fact, it’s no secret at all; it is, simultaneously, a simple yet revolutionary idea: possession, combining, defending by attacking and always looking for a way to
the opposition goal; finding the best talent without physical restrictions as the key element of the selection of players. Add to that the commitment to technical quality and ensuring that the kids
develop an understanding of the game. It is a philosophy based on technique and talent: nothing more, nothing less. ‘I have never forgotten the first thing they told me when I came to
Barça as a little boy,’ says the Barcelona midfielder Xavi Hernández. ‘Here, you can never give the ball away.’

The Barcelona model is the consequence of a club that always favoured good football (in the 1950s the Catalan club recruited the Hungarians Ladislao Kubala, Sándor Kocsis and
Zoltán Czibor, key members of the best national team in the world at that time) and also of the revolutionary ideas brought to the club by two men: Laureano Ruíz and Johan Cruyff.
Laureano was a stubborn coach who, in the 1970s, introduced a particular brand of training to Barcelona based upon talent and technique, and by his second season at the club had managed to convince
all the junior teams follow suit. Under Cruyff, dominating the ball became the first and most important rule. ‘If you have the ball, the opposition doesn’t have it and can’t
attack you,’ Cruyff would repeat daily. So the job became finding the players who could keep possession and also doing a lot of positional work in training.

On top of that, La Masía, as all good academies should, develops players and human beings and instils in them a strong sense of belonging, of identity, as Xavi explains: ‘What is
the key to this Barcelona? That the majority of us are from “this house” – from here, this is our team, but not just the players, the coaches too, the doctors, the physios, the
handymen. We’re all
culés
, we’re all Barça fans, we’re
all a family, we’re all united, we all go out of our way to make things
work.’

Despite the fact that, since 2011, the old farmhouse no longer serves as a hall of residence, the revolution that started there three decades ago continued and reached its zenith with the
arrival of Guardiola as first-team coach as he put his faith in La Masía’s finest ‘products’. It is, as the Catalan sports writer and former Olympian Martí Perarnau
puts it, ‘a differentiating factor, an institutional flag and a structural investment’ – and it is one that pays dividends as well. In 2010, it became the first youth academy to
have trained all three finalists for the Ballon d’Or in the same year, with Andrés Iniesta, Lionel Messi and Xavi Hernández standing side by side on the rostrum.

‘I had the best years of my life at La Masía,’ Pep recalls. ‘It was a time focused upon the singular most non-negotiable dream that I have ever had: to play for
Barça’s first team. That anxiety to become good enough for Johan Cruyff to notice us cannot be put into words. Without that desire, none of us would be who we are today. Triumph is
something else. I am talking about loving football and being wanted.’

Even though Pep managed to overcome his lack of physical strength and got himself noticed, the final step was missing: the call-up to the first team. But when Johan Cruyff needed a number four,
a player to direct the team in front of the defence, the Dutch coach wasn’t deterred by Pep’s slight physique. He called him up because he sensed that he could read the game and pass
the ball.

On that day in May 1989, Pep had to drop everything, including a girl he was just getting to know, grab his kit and travel with the first team to a friendly in Banyoles. Suddenly, unexpectedly,
he had made his senior Barcelona debut. He was eighteen years old. If he’d hoped that the girl would be impressed with his new status, the same could not be said of Cruyff who was distinctly
underwhelmed by Pep’s debut performance. ‘You were slower than my granny!’ the coach told him at half-time; but Pep grew to understand Cruyff’s methods when it came to
chastising his players: ‘When he attacked you most and when you were at your worst was when he helped you most. But
since it was my first experience with a coach, who was
so important to me, that affected me enough for me never to forget it.’

‘Slower than my granny’ – those words marked the beginning of one of the most enduring and influential football relationships in history.

A training session. Nou Camp. Late morning, winter 1993

According to the principles Johan Cruyff introduced to Barcelona, coaches should lead by example: play football, be on the field during training and teach, because there is
nothing better than stopping the game, correcting and instructing, explaining why someone needed to pass to a certain player, move to a particular position or change an element of their technique.
That’s how Carles Rexach, Cruyff’s assistant for eight years at Barcelona, explains it: ‘One word from Johan during a training drill is worth more than a hundred hours of talks at
the blackboard.’