Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography (9 page)

His rise had been meteoric: he had become recognised as a world-class player in the two years since making his debut. Even more league trophies immediately followed, one
after another, but then came the first big slip-up, one that would teach him something more than any victory. It was 18 May 1994: the all-powerful Dream Team was the bookmakers’ favourite in
the European Cup final against Fabio Capello’s Milan in Athens. The 4-0 defeat served up a slice of humble pie for Barcelona, a lesson in the dangers of becoming overconfident, complacent
even, and made all the more bitter because the reason for the defeat was neither defensive nor tactical – it was mental, it was down to a lack of preparation: ‘All of us thought that we
were playing against a gang. We went out there convinced that we were the better team and they put four past us. Their superiority was so great that I just wanted the game to be over,’ Pep
wrote years later.

After the golden era of 1990–94, Cruyff found it increasingly difficult to find new solutions and motivational tools to counter the team’s problems, leading to the Dutchman making
some strange decisions during his last two seasons at the club. One in particular revealed Pep’s sensitivity. When the goalkeeper Zubizarreta, a captain, a leader, a man whom Guardiola
considered a brother, was told by Cruyff he had to leave the club, Pep was devastated. He held it together until the night the squad gathered in a restaurant to pay tribute to the man they knew
fondly as ‘Zubi’. Pep disappeared and was found, tucked away in a corner, in tears. Only Zubi was able to console him.

By 1994, Guardiola was established as the figure who orchestrated Barça’s play. ‘My role was to move the ball around the pitch for my team-mates to finish off the move,’
he says. The departure of Zubizarreta had made Guardiola the new leader, in charge of carrying out Cruyff’s instructions on and off the pitch.

Even if sometimes, albeit rarely, he forgot what his role involved. He understood football as a team sport, but his genuine appreciation of the game made him an unconditional admirer of the
best. His adoration was particularly reserved for the magical players capable of transforming a game into a spectacle. When Romário joined the club, Cruyff wanted the Brazilian to accompany
him and Pep, the
captain, for dinner. The coach was stunned by the admiration, the reverence even, that Pep showed towards the newcomer. In fact, such was his fawning adoration
of the new star that when Romário disappeared to the bathroom, Cruyff had to remind Pep to stop acting like a star-struck fifteen-year-old.

Unfortunately, the quality of the squad had deteriorated since that fateful night in Athens. With eleven trophies, Cruyff was Barcelona’s most successful manager (Pep would surpass him)
and he still is the club’s longest serving; however, in his final two years until his departure in 1996, he failed to deliver any silverware and underwent a very public and acrimonious
falling-out with club president, Josep Lluís Núñez.

In his final season in charge (1995–6), Cruyff signed Luís Figo from Sporting Lisbon but results on the pitch did not improve substantially enough. The end was on the cards as soon
as it became mathematically impossible for Barça to win the league: something that happened with two games remaining, just after they had been knocked out of the UEFA Cup by Bayern Munich in
the semi-finals and beaten by Atlético de Madrid in the Copa del Rey final. Cruyff’s relationship with President Núñez had become untenable and it all came to a head on
18 May, just before the final training session ahead of FC Barcelona’s final home game against Celta Vigo when, following an extremely heated discussion between Cruyff and vice-president Joan
Gaspart in the coach’s office at the Camp Nou, the man who had led Barcelona to the most successful period in their history was sacked.

The Dutchman would not have continued beyond the end of that season, but had wanted to see out the remaining two games and leave with some dignity in the summer. The falling-out denied him that
opportunity and his discovery that the club had already made a move to appoint Sir Bobby Robson as his successor heaped further humiliation upon him. Guardiola preferred, during that convulsive
period, to act like most players would do – watch from a distance as everything fell apart.

In the first game of the post-Cruyff era, the Nou Camp was filled with banners supporting the Dutch coach, thanking him for all the success
he had brought to the club. The
club was divided between supporters of Cruyff and those of Núñez. In the end, even the man who had changed the history of Barcelona cracked under the intense pressure at the club, the
behind-the-scenes conflicts and his deteriorating relationship with the board. Cruyff was gone, yet one of his most enduring legacies remained in the form of Pep Guardiola, a spindly young central
midfielder who became both icon and embodiment of the philosophies that the Dutchman had set in motion.

After Cruyff came Sir Bobby Robson, a jovial sixty-three-year-old manager who rapidly earned the nickname ‘Grandad Miquel’ (the star of an advertisement for cheap wine) among the
senior players. Robson never grasped the Spanish language or his players, but he suffered unfair comparisons to the Dutch master, whose shadow would have eclipsed anybody.

One of Sir Bobby Robson’s first training sessions at the Nou Camp. Late morning, 1996

One morning soon after his arrival, Sir Bobby Robson used a piece of chalk to scrawl his tactics on the dressing-room floor, with José Mourinho duly translating
Robson’s English into Spanish. The players looked on and exchanged bewildered glances with each other as the old man knelt down before them making unintelligible squiggles on the floor. It
was at that moment, right at the beginning of his tenure, that he lost the changing room and as the season progressed a form of self-management evolved among the players. Frequently, Mourinho would
translate the words of Robson, then add extra, clearer instructions – quite a lot extra sometimes. Pep and José quickly identified each other as football people and the pair connected,
talked and took coaching decisions among themselves. Quite possibly it was something that happened less frequently than José likes to admit it did, yet perhaps happened more often than Pep
is prepared to own up to these days.

Guardiola has written in
My People, My Football
: ‘Charly Rexach always said that in order to be a trainer you have to think 30% about
football and the rest
about everything surrounding the team: about the environment ... And I only understood it the year Robson was with us. I came from another school of football. I was so used to Cruyff’s
methods that I assumed all the coaches were like him. Robson thought we had to be different and it wasn’t what I expected. He was right though, but in the process we lost three or four
months. It was too late. In football you have to be brave. Always. If we just complain, we’re dead. Action must be taken, always bearing in mind commitment to the common goal. Both Robson and
the players were fighting for the same cause: Barça. But by the time our thoughts and his met along the way, it was too late. That synchrony was interpreted as self-management.’

Pep might call it a synchrony and claim that the suggestion that it was a case of ‘self-management’ was only one interpretation of what happened under Robson. But that is misleading,
because that is exactly what took place. At half-time in the 1997 Spanish Cup final against Real Betis, Sir Bobby Robson sat in a corner of the changing rooms at the Bernabéu. The score was
level at 1-1 and the Barcelona players wanted to seize the initiative and capitalise on the weaknesses the players themselves had spotted on the left of the Betis defence, while exploiting the gaps
present between their opponent’s midfield and defence. The players, not the coach, gave each other the instructions combined with interventions from Mourinho. The game was won in extra time,
3-2, the third title – Spanish Cup, Spanish Super Cup and European Cup Winners’ Cup – in a season that remains etched in the memory by the images of Ronaldo powering past, round
or through La Liga’s defences.

Guardiola’s confidence was growing both in terms of asking questions (why are we doing this? Why don’t we start building that way, this way? Why don’t we move those players in
that direction when the ball is in that other direction?) and advising his team-mates. ‘I was up to my balls with Pep, all day: this and that and this and that in the dressing room. He made
my head spin!’ says Laurent Blanc who played for Barcelona in the team during Sir Bobby Robson’s reign, and at the time was not particularly impressed by Pep’s
‘perseverance’ – a polite way of describing his obsessive nature.

The league title eluded Barcelona and celebrations were muted as the season drew to a close, the mood not helped by the fact that Sir Bobby Robson had learnt, as far back as
April of that year, that the club had already reached an agreement with Louis Van Gaal to take charge at the Camp Nou the following season.

For Guardiola, this represented an opportunity to learn from the architect of the extraordinarily successful Ajax team that he admired so much. But then a personal sporting tragedy struck.

Early the following season, in an August Champions League encounter versus Latvian side Skonto FC, Guardiola picked up a muscle injury that went undiagnosed until it was far too late. He
realised something was wrong when, on his way to a delicatessen, he struggled to sprint across the road before the traffic lights turned red. What had at first appeared a fairly innocuous calf
muscle injury would eventually lead to Pep missing most of the 1997–8 campaign as he visited one specialist after another in a seemingly interminable quest to find out exactly what was
happening. It was not until the end of that season – in which Barcelona won a league and cup double under their new manager – that Pep was finally able to receive the necessary
treatment and underwent an operation in the summer that would also see him miss out on Spain’s disastrous 1998 World Cup campaign in France.

The injury required a slow and arduous period of recuperation and it would not be until some fifteen months after that fateful sprint to the shops that Guardiola would be able to play an
injury-free game of football for the Barcelona first team, almost halfway through the ’98–9 season, making his return at the Riazor stadium against Deportivo La Coruña on 5
December.

There were those at the time who mischievously suggested that Guardiola’s prolonged absences and mystery injury that coincided with Van Gaal’s first season at the club were no mere
coincidents and that the player was deliberately avoiding working under the Dutchman. While it is true that, despite winning two league titles and a Spanish Cup during a stormy three-year first
spell at the club, Van Gaal often found himself at loggerheads with the local media, the assumption that the Catalan local hero, Guardiola, shared an
uneasy relationship with
the Dutch coach is incorrect. Van Gaal quickly identified Pep as a natural successor to Guillermo Amor as club captain, with Pep eager to learn from the coach whom he greatly admired, and the pair
constantly discussed football, tactics, positioning and training exercises. ‘He is, alongside Juanma Lillo, the manager whom I talked to most. Especially at the beginning, because in the end
the contact diminished, both in quantity and content,’ recalls Pep.

It is testimony to the mutual respect that the pair hold for each other that, when I approached Van Gaal to request an interview asking him to reveal as much as he could about his personal
relationship with Pep, the Dutchman – operating under a self-imposed media embargo at that time – was more than happy to chat about Guardiola, his former player and pupil.

According to Van Gaal, it quickly became apparent to him, back when Pep was a relatively inexperienced young player, that he possessed an innate ability to lead a group of his peers and
superiors: ‘I made Guardiola captain because he could speak about football. You could see then that he was a tactical player. He could speak like a coach, even then – not many players
can do that. Guardiola’s best position was as a number four, that is in the centre of the midfield, because from there he can see the game and he had the personality to dominate it. He was
younger than Amor and Nadal, but he was my captain. I told him in a meeting that I had chosen him and he said, “It’s not how it happens at FCB, the oldest player in the team is usually
the captain here.” But I insisted, “No, you are the only one I can speak to on my level, you are my captain.” He used to tell the other players like Figo where they should be:
ahead of him, out wide, where he could play the ball. Pep is a very tactical guy and also a good human being, and because of that he could persuade his fellow players.’

As the Barcelona captain and his coach’s relationship developed, Pep grew in stature and did more than just disseminate Van Gaal’s instructions to the other players out on the pitch,
frequently suggesting an alternative approach if he felt it was for the benefit of the group.

Van Gaal gives one such example of the way the pair would work together to try and achieve a solution: ‘Pep was always modest. Yes, we would talk and he would suggest
ideas but always in a modest way. For instance, I will tell you what happened with Stoichkov. Hristo didn’t want to accept my rules. Discipline is key, very important. If there is no
discipline off the pitch, there is none on it. I always had to tell the Bulgarian in front of the other players, “You don’t obey, I cannot keep you in the team.” I even forced him
to train with the reserves. But the players thought that was not such a good idea, so Guardiola, already captain, told me I should give him a second chance. I said to him, “OK, it’s not
about me, the team is more important. But he cannot fail again.” So Hristo trained with the first team but he failed me soon after and I had to correct him again. Pep came to me and said,
“Go ahead, we have given him a chance and he didn’t take it.” He knew how important Stoichkov was to the side but also that there are rules, limits. That the team comes
first.’