Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

by Balague, Guillem

  Although in his first few months he had the same freedom to move wherever his instincts took him – but mostly in forward areas, and he had scored with ease, from the last sixteen of the Champions League – Pep began to demand more tactical discipline from him in a deeper position. He found it hard to understand what was being asked of him and, as Cesc himself admits, ‘I was obsessed with it. Until I understood that if they had signed me it was because of who I was, not for who I could be. I couldn’t stop being myself.’

  Pep wanted Cesc to feel he was on top of him, looking after him. Demanding more of him as the player asked him to in that pre-season chat. As he did very publicly in a game versus Valencia, in that phase where Cesc didn’t score goals even though he was performing well and accepting his new responsibilities and obligations. Fàbregas had played perhaps one of his best games with the team, assisting once for a goal, defending, passing, but missing chances. He forced a couple of incredible saves by Diego Alvés, the Valencia goalkeeper, and on another occasion he mishit the ball. Pep replaced him at 4-1, fans reacted well and gave him a resounding ovation.

  Cesc felt happy with the game, but annoyed at not scoring. ‘God, the goals just won’t go in’, he was telling himself. As he was walking off the pitch, he saw Pep coming over to hug him and became momentarily defeatist. ‘Bloody hell, it’s so difficult to score, it won’t go in, that third goal took a while’, he audibly communicated his frustration.

  ‘Bloody hell ...’ Pep replied half joking. As he did that, he pushed the player away and shouted, ‘What do you mean it won’t go in? Make it go in! You should have scored!’

  Pep gave him a bit of stick and carrot when he needed it. Cesc is the kind of player who responds to it. The coach applied it after a game against AC Milan where the midfielder didn’t play at all. In the next training session, Pep came to him and told him, ‘You’ll play in your position in the next game. I want to see you playing well, OK?’ When Pep talks about ‘your position’ he means that free role he used to have at Arsenal.

  Often when Cesc played, Guardiola deployed a formation, 3-4-3, that wasn’t fully convincing but the coach defended one of Johan Cruyff’s maxims – if you have it, flaunt it; always use your quality players. So if he had to place four midfielders and shrink the defensive line, so be it. Cesc is an important player for his system when it works, because he gets goals coming from deep and that takes some responsibility for scoring off Messi. Meanwhile, the Argentinian was free to move about in attack and therefore it became more difficult for the centre back and opposing defences to mark.

  But it didn’t always work.

  There was too much to learn in one season, an overloading of information while he was trying to find his place in the club and the squad that ultimately frustrated him. His game suffered as the season progressed. ‘I had to take lots of responsibility at Arsenal. I need to follow more tactical orders at Barcelona,’ Cesc admits. ‘And sometimes I felt lost.’

  In the end, he not only stopped scoring regularly but he was also left out of the line-up in some important games (such as against Real Madrid in April). That didn’t diminish his adoration of Pep. So much so that within the club it was concluded that Pep’s departure could serve as a potential liberation for Cesc as he prepares to replace Xavi eventually as a leader and axis of the team.

  In hindsight, it must have been difficult for the former Arsenal star when he discovered that Guardiola told the president and Zubizarreta that he wanted to leave the club just two months after the player joined Barcelona in August.

  The hug that Cesc gave Pep in the Camp Nou dressing room after Chelsea knocked Barcelona out of the Champions League in 2012 was one of the longest. Fàbregas was emotional; he couldn’t articulate it, but wanted Pep to continue and hoped his hug spoke for him.

  But three days later, as Pep announced his exit in the dressing room, Fàbregas felt a resonance of the experience he himself had had at Arsenal only the year before.

  There was another embrace at the end of the cup final after Atlético de Madrid had been dispatched in the last official game of the Guardiola era. But by then it was no more than a resigned gesture of farewell.

  6

  PEP GUARDIOLA AND JOSÉ MOURINHO

  14 May 1997. Stadion Feijenoord, Rotterdam. Cup Winners’ Cup final. Barcelona v Paris Saint-Germain. On one side, Ronaldo, Luís Figo, Luis Enrique and Pep Guardiola, coached by Bobby Robson; on the other, a French team in decline, weakened by the departures of Djorkaeff, Ginola and Weah, but still featuring the legendary Rai, as well as his compatriot Leonardo, a future star at AC Milan.

  It was a tense affair. Both teams had good spells in the game, and numerous chances. A single goal proved decisive when, in the last few minutes of the first half, a penalty taken by Ronaldo – then considered the best player in the world – gave Barcelona the lead.

  Robson’s side clung on and when the referee Markus Merk blew the final whistle, the Catalan players celebrated with more than a hint of relief. The 1996–7 campaign, the first one without Johan Cruyff at the helm in almost a decade, had been tough.

  As the players celebrated, Pep wanted to hug his team-mates – and just about everyone else connected with the club who was on the pitch. Ivan de la Peña and Guardiola were both kneeling on the grass, hugging, and as they got to their feet, Pep caught sight of a member of the club’s staff. Pep waved at him and, with a huge grin on his face, ran towards him with his arms outstretched.

  It was José Mourinho.

  Pep Guardiola and José hugged. At that time, the future Real Madrid manager was working for FC Barcelona as Bobby Robson’s translator and assistant. Mourinho got hold of Pep and locked him in an embrace, raising him up and down, three times before they both started jumping up and down again, bouncing around like two elated kids on Christmas morning.

  Two friends and colleagues were rejoicing in the success of a job well done.

  It was their first campaign together, and there would be three more before José departed in 2000. Four seasons during which they got to know each other extremely well.

  Years later, in the middle of a series of four tense and ugly Clásicos, Pep recapped that the pair had once been friends: ‘I only want to remind him that we were together for four years. He knows me and I know him. I keep that in my mind.’

  ‘I gave my all, there’s nothing left. That is the fundamental thing. And I need to fill myself again,’ said Pep at the press conference that confirmed his departure. It was an open admission of his weaknesses, vulnerability, exposed to the eyes of the world.

  But days, even hours, after conceding his exhaustion and inability to continue, Pep’s expression changed. The sense of relief that he had felt during his public farewell was replaced by one of sorrow.

  There was speculation about the reasons behind his mood swing, and whether or not it was a consequence of the press conference send-off that had been such an inappropriate ending for his illustrious career: after all, the club was announcing that the best coach in their history was leaving and they decided that it should coincide with the announcement of his replacement, Tito Vilanova. Was his melancholy due to the fact that his assistant and friend Tito was staying, a decision that surprised everybody? Was it because the boss and his replacement were still awkwardly sharing the same space? Or perhaps it was more to do with the strange atmosphere created in the dressing room from the moment of his announcement, as everybody, team and staff alike, felt they could have done more to convince him to stay?

  Whatever the consequences, Pep was emotionally drained and, in exposing his fragility, he revealed the scars with which the intense pressure of football at that level had aged him so much. Perhaps it is true that four years of managing Barcelona takes the same toll as managing a quarter of a decade, at say, Manchester United. Pep was telling us: I am not Superman; I am vulnerable, flawed. Pep Guardiola: the archetypal anti-hero, a man capable of achieving greatness and performing wonderful deeds, despite his own weaknesses
and fears, aware of his power and responsibility but who would have been happier if he hadn’t spread himself so thinly in his unwanted multiple role as club figurehead, philosopher and manager, and who, despite everything, fought against being used as an example. More of a Spiderman, then.

  After all, no Superman would have burst into tears in front of the world’s TV cameras as he did after the team won their sixth title in a year, the World Club Championship, against Estudiantes. Or admitted straight afterwards, in his first words post-game, that ‘the future looks bleak. To improve on this is impossible.’ He had asked Tito, still on the pitch, ‘What else are we going to do now?’, because, having to face the same challenges, Pep could only foresee the problems ahead and didn’t think he was strong enough to overcome them all over again. From the pinnacle of the game, the only way was down.

  Yet, astonishingly, Pep did continue and did improve the team. Once again, he had proved capable of overcoming the odds, transforming and leading a group of men into performing heroics on the football field, while at the time shaping and staying true to his own values and philosophy. He achieved the seemingly impossible, superhuman feats, but it took its toll: he may appear superhuman, but cut him and he bleeds like the rest of us – and, because of that, what he achieved was all the more impressive not despite of but because of those human qualities.

  That is part of Pep’s magic. The public is fascinated by such a seductive mixture: on the one hand fragile, even physically, and, on the other, strong in leadership and the sheer force of his personality. And his team is precisely that, too: extremely convincing in the way they play, with obvious cultural characteristics; but, on the other hand, lacking physical stature, weak, smaller than the average footballer – it’s that dichotomy that makes Spiderman Pep and his team so appealing.

  He earned his authority not just through the team’s play and their trophies, but through his behaviour in the good and the bad times, in his achievements and his self-confessed errors. The cynics said that his exemplary composure and behaviour were merely a front and that we would only know the real Pep in defeat. The media loves football because it’s usually black and white, about winners and losers. Good and bad. And the Madrid press wanted to believe that Pep was bad, that his public persona masked something altogether different. That tribalism came to the fore when Barcelona had to play Real Madrid four times in a fortnight in April and May 2011. That desire to oppose good and bad and portray representatives of either side of the great divide as being symbolic of either one or the other led to one of the most acrimonious periods in the recent history of Spanish football.

  A couple of occasions towards the end of Pep’s tenure, losing to Madrid and being knocked out of the Champions League by Chelsea, worked as a litmus test and provided a rare glimpse of the other side of Guardiola. His complaints about referees were a way of getting rid of feelings of frustration that he had felt all season.

  Those moments made little difference to those who see Barcelona as more than a club, who had fallen in love with the team’s style and ethos – and in Pep Guardiola saw the essence of the ideal man. Pep had been a reluctant social leader and the fans who were less intoxicated by his aura, the minority, understood. The rest spoke about a Guardiola who only existed in the newspapers and in their own heads. A Guardiola whom Pep himself never recognised. ‘Who are they talking about when they talk about me?’ he asked himself when he read things about his methods, his moral leadership and his supposed superhero virtues. ‘There are books that say things about me that even I didn’t know.’

  In fact, in many senses Guardiola was the opposite of that ideal portrait painted by his fans. He is pragmatic, not philosophical, in the negative sense used by some, including Ibrahimović. He is a coach more than a leader, more interested in the education than the competition. If he appeared to have another role at the club after Joan Laporta left, it is because the club has been devoid of a moral hierarchy and of authority, in the absence of which he didn’t shy away from the responsibilities. But, in the necessary duality created in the public eye to make football more striking, a hero needs an arch enemy to complete the picture. And he – the media and also the fans – found the perfect character: a powerful opponent with a shared personal history with Pep but who had eventually become a formidable opponent; who represented, in a superficial analysis, opposing values to Guardiola; who thrived on displaying a contrasting personality to the Catalan manager – and who had been recruited by Barcelona’s arch rival to stop their dominance in its tracks. In José Mourinho, Pep had found his perfect comic-book nemesis.

  In this drama, the characters are clearly defined. The good v the bad; the respectful v the confrontational. They are antagonists and adapt each other’s role in contraposition to their rival, which helps them define the character they have chosen to play. Clearly, Mourinho did look for the head-to-head confrontation, and felt more comfortable with a constant battle that he felt was necessary to unsettle a team and a club that were making history. Pep never relished those sideline skirmishes – even though on one memorable occasion he decided to stand up to his enemy. But, at the end of his four years at Barcelona, Pep admitted to one of his closest friends that ‘Mourinho has won the war’: a conflict that he didn’t want to engage in and one that would ultimately tarnish for him the memory of the great moments of football offered by both sides.

  Yet, the most surprising part of this football operetta is that, if you look deeper, if you scratch the surface, there are as many things that connect Pep and Mourinho, supposed adversaries, as separate them.

  When Bobby Robson went to Barcelona to sign his contract in 1996, a thirty-three-year-old José Mourinho was waiting to welcome him at the airport, to help him with his bags and drive him to the Camp Nou. Mourinho was devoted to the man he was going to translate for and help settle in his new club, as he had done at Sporting Lisbon and Porto. From the start, José, fluent in Spanish and Catalan, was always present at the meetings with the Barcelona president Josep Lluís Núñez or the vice-president, Joan Gaspart, helping his boss both translate and understand the context, as by then he was already more than the ‘interpreter’, a nickname used by some as far back as Porto where actually Mourinho had already been helping with training. Despite the initial reticence of players to accept the instructions of a young man without experience in the football elite they eventually recognised José could see football as clearly as any.

  At Barcelona, Robson, who never fully managed to master the language, needed Mourinho to help him settle into his new life in Spain along with his wife, Elsie. José’s own partner, Matilde, was also always on hand to help out, and dinner at the Robsons’ invariably included the Mourinhos. Little by little, the manager gave his subordinate more influence in the day-to-day running of the team and even the assistant offered by the club, José Ramón Alexanko, had to share his authority and involvement in training sessions with the young Portuguese. According to some of the players who spoke English, José’s instructions when translating Robson came sharper than his mentor’s and sometimes with a little bit extra. His videos, exposing and highlighting the weaknesses and strengths of the opposition, were well considered and his relationship with Ronaldo also helped him win some kudos in the group. He soon became the shoulder to cry on when players were left out of the team as Robson purposefully maintained a professional distance from the squad. Astutely, José crossed that line constantly and freely.

  Mourinho quickly recognised Guardiola as a natural leader and decided to get close to him, and win him over. He succeeded. The pair would spend hours together after training, chatting both in Spanish and Catalan. ‘We did talk about things, when we both had doubts, and we would exchange ideas, but I don’t remember it as something that defined our relationship. He was Mister Robson’s assistant and I was a player,’ Guardiola says now.

  Guardiola at that time was, as Robson would put it, ‘a big fish’, and never afraid to give his opinions on the way to play, what they ha
d to do or avoid doing. In fact, little by little and finally for large parts of the season, the so-called ‘gang of 4’ (Pep, Luis Enrique, Sergi and Abelardo) established an element of self-management when they recognised that Robson couldn’t quite get to grips with the Barcelona style and the demands of La Liga. It was a critical time and Mourinho had to place himself on the side of the coach

  Robson won three trophies that season (Spanish Cup, Spanish Super Cup and European Cup Winners’ Cup) but not the league and, by April, the club, aware of the lack of authority of the manager, had already signed Louis Van Gaal who had impressed at Ajax. Mourinho had decided that he wanted to go back to Portugal at the end of the campaign, but Robson recommended him to the Dutch coach who gave José even more authority and allowed him to coach the team in a few friendlies and dispense some tactical chats at half-time. The Robsons were replaced at the evening meals by Truus and Louis, the Van Gaals.

  Slowly but surely, José’s personality started blossoming. Away from Robson, after a few years of working in the dressing rooms of big clubs, freed from the early ties that contrived his behaviour, Van Gaal discovered ‘an arrogant young man, who didn’t respect authority that much, but I did like that of him. He was not submissive, used to contradict me when he thought I was in the wrong. Finally I wanted to hear what he had to say and ended up listening to him more than the rest of the assistants.’

  Mourinho was clearly much more than a translator at Barcelona, but that was how he was known by the Catalan media and the title by which president Núñez insisted on referring to him as such. It is easy for a Spaniard to dismiss the authority of a Portuguese, two nations with a unilateral rivalry (Spain looks beyond the Pyrenees for adversaries). That lack of respect would never be completely forgotten, or forgiven, by Mourinho.