Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

by Balague, Guillem

  It’s fair to say that both coaches are befitting of the clubs they represent. Mourinho said that Guardiola is the best coach ‘for Barcelona’, a subtle reminder that he won titles in four different countries. Pep has imposed a model in the club which places a lot of emphasis on players progressing through the academy, where the players begin to develop feelings for the club and a sense of belonging. Pep is an example of Barcelona-ism, whereas Mourinho is the guru whom Madrid needed to recover belief.

  Even aesthetically they are different: Guardiola is avant-garde, cutting edge; Mourinho is more classical. Pep is the coach who brought Prada and Dior to the football pitch. Although his image goes beyond his elegant suit, his image is also his attitude. His style is that of a human being with diverse cultural interests, whereas Mourinho’s style is more similar to that of an Italian man, unostentatious apart from the way he fastens his tie: a large, open knot for the Portuguese; straight and neat for the Catalan.

  The differences are to be found in their personalities, too. Mourinho knows what he wants at every given moment. With Pep there are moments when it’s a yes, others a no, and he chops and changes his mind. Sometimes he’ll ring a friend in the evening asking for help in one thing or another – and the very next morning he’s changed his mind and rings them to tell them to forget about it.

  With Mourinho, it’s clear from the start. ‘I’m going to win the league here in this country, then there in that country and two years later, there. Then at fifty years of age, I’ll win the World Cup with Portugal.’ The only deviation from the plan is in terms of age or timescale. If it doesn’t happen when he’s fifty, then it will happen later.

  He thrives on the other stuff he gets involved in, like going to London, toying with buying a house there – keeping everyone on their toes and running around him. Perhaps a consequence of a footballer’s career that never took off. Pep doesn’t have the need to make it all about his choices, his next move, his arguments, his crusades: ‘I have played for Barça. Everything that is used to feed an ego is unnecessary for me. Even praise makes me uncomfortable.’

  Even their intelligence differs: Pep takes in as much knowledge as possible to help him with decision-making. José does the same, although he also has a cunning edge. He mischievously went out of his way to get Pep to a point when their rivalry escalated to never-before-seen levels in world football. One imagines Mourinho shaving in the morning thinking what he can come up with. ‘Ah, I know!’ he must have thought one morning. And in the press conference that day he threw a dart: ‘There are people, much more intelligent than me, who manage to sell an image of themselves completely different to mine, but deep down, they’re the same as me.’ Very rarely has Pep felt the impulse to answer Mourinho, but that day, less than an hour later, Guardiola mentioned his words in his own press conference. ‘We’re similar in the sense that we both want to win, but apart from that no ... If that is the case then I’ve done something wrong. I’ve never wanted to bring myself to his level. There are images that speak a thousand words. Both of us want to win, but our paths are very different.’

  The roads to victory may well be very different, but the cars they drive, the petrol they use to get them there, are not so dissimilar. Mourinho is right.

  The first game between Pep and José following the latter’s appointment at Real Madrid took place at the Camp Nou. Mourinho had only had five months with his new squad and privately admitted that football was a ‘box of surprises’. He had no idea exactly how his young team was going to react to both the Barcelona style and the pressure – only when you open it, he would say, do you know what’s inside.

  The Clásico was played on a Monday, a rarity due to the postponement of fixtures because of an election day in Catalonia on the Sunday. Madrid were in good shape, taking on Barcelona as La Liga leaders a point ahead of the Catalans – under Mourinho they had already become a solid team that conceded few goals and killed off the opposition with their quick counters: the classic Mourinho team.

  As they had in their prior Champions League encounters, the match started in the pre-game press conferences: a cat-and-mouse game to see who was going to fire the opening shot. José took aim at Guardiola: ‘I hope players can help the referee and that it’s a game where people only talk about football.’ The implications were obvious. Pep kept his head beneath the parapet.

  Barcelona won 5-0 with goals from Xavi, Pedro, Villa (2) and Jeffren. ‘We couldn’t have played better, we could have scored more. We had them asleep, they couldn’t touch the ball,’ Xavi remembers.

  Víctor Valdés was practically a privileged spectator in the Barcelona goal: ‘I was getting dizzy following the ball. Finally I decided to stop looking so closely, my guys were the ones with it anyway.’

  Unsurprisingly, typically, Pep prepared for the game with an obsessive attention to detail. Early in the match, the team performed a few of those high-speed ‘piggy-in-the-middle’ passings for which they are famous, in midfield areas, with the intention of keeping possession and finding a gap at the same time. The Camp Nou was ecstatic, seeing their players not only hammer the opposition, but run – or, rather, pass – rings around their rivals. Guardiola identified more than ever with what the team was doing: it was a moment of confirmation when everybody, fans, players, manager, was walking in the same direction. The big idea, writ large out there on the pitch.

  The fact that this moment of affirmation, one of the best games ever seen, took place against a side managed by Mourinho was doubly satisfying. Pep admitted privately that he had betrayed himself with the line-up versus Inter the previous season: the presence of Ibrahimović mortgaged the way the team played, with less possession and more direct attacks. That admission was confirmation that he didn’t have the key to success but, if he was to fail, he wanted to do it his way. He studied closely the reasons for his mistake, and in the new season Pep persisted in the idea of controlling games, of making Xavi, Iniesta and Messi the focus of the team. In the 5-0 Clásico performance, Pep saw the Barcelona he had been dreaming of.

  Guardiola wanted to put the result into context: ‘What will prevail in history is not just the result, but the way we did it. It isn’t easy to play so well against such a strong team – a team that was killing opponents domestically and in Europe. We have to be proud. Let’s dedicate this victory to Carles Rexach and Johan Cruyff who started all this, and to everybody who has participated in the process: former presidents, former coaches, everybody. It is a global victory because we have done things differently and because there is no other club in the world that trusts local people as much as we do.’

  José tried to take the heat out of the result: ‘It is one that is easy to accept. It is not a humiliation, only my biggest defeat.’

  Of course, Mourinho was underplaying the reality – and the truth was that this match would have the most profound influence upon his professional career. He made the mistake of being too bold, of focusing his team’s energy on what they would do in possession, rather than when they didn’t have the ball. He went to Barcelona believing that he could take them on, at their own game, in their own backyard. The scoreline might not have reflected the actual distance between the two teams in terms of quality – it was, rather, a difference in understanding how to apply that quality to a particular situation. And that was Mourinho’s mistake. It was one that he vowed would never happen again.

  José used the backlash of that humbling defeat to help him justify and argue that the supertanker that is Real Madrid needed to change course – convincing all aboard that they should follow his direction. For Mourinho, that 5-0 defeat exposed the fact that the club needed a drastic change: from one being run by the president to one run by a winning manager who could control signings, the academy, facilities, everything. In his quest to knock Barcelona from their perch, the Portuguese was going to transform, for the first time in history, the role of first-team coach at Real Madrid into a general manager – and more, into the leading light of the insti
tution.

  Pep Guardiola and José Mourinho may have different styles of leadership and contrasting personalities but they have one very important thing in common: they both love football, winning and are successful in the leadership of their respective teams. They control, plan, analyse and decide everything. They win by surrounding themselves with their praetorian guard and discard those who don’t fit with their ideas for the squad. They both have superstar players whom they count on in the pursuit of silverware. A lot in common, then.

  Pep wants to leave a legacy and a blueprint for the club that will last the test of time, so that the team can still keep up its winning ways long after his departure from the dugout. At Real Madrid, and having reached a position of huge power, so does Mourinho – in his eyes, one of his main targets is to bring the club to the new century and set ways to keep them at the top.

  The Portuguese’s charisma is preceded by his fame and success, but in Spain he had a tough challenge ahead in pleasing a fanbase with high expectations, who demanded attractive football and silverware. He started providing both very early on.

  Mourinho might put on a front with the media, yet another enemy, but he is generous with his players. He transmits love and respect to them. He is actually a lot softer than he lets on, although his public persona tries to give people the opposite impression. He is honest with them: ‘I’m not going to tell them they are doing things well if that isn’t the case.’

  Pep and José soon won their troops over.

  Listen to Ibrahimović: ‘José Mourinho is a big star … He’s cool. The first time he met [my wife] he whispered to her: “Helena, you have only one mission. Feed Zlatan, let him sleep, keep him happy!” The guy says what he wants. I like him.’

  Or to Mascherano: ‘Never in my career have I seen a dressing room of players follow a coach with so much faith; what he says goes. I reckon it will be difficult to come across another. Pep has the gift of leadership.’

  ‘He has got one thing going for him that no one can fail to notice,’ Patrick Barclay writes in his enlightening Mourinho: Anatomy of a Winner. ‘He is astonishingly good looking. Players appear desperate to win his approval, like schoolgirls fighting for an approving glance from their favourite teacher. As well as being very handsome, Mourinho is always nicely turned out, something most modern professional footballers take extremely seriously.’ Pep’s aura can be described in the same way: ‘You just want to impress him,’ Xavi says.

  Mourinho is constantly making notes in his now famous notebook, something he took from Van Gaal, his maestro. It was not the only thing he learnt from the Dutch coach. Or from Bobby Robson. Or many other coaches he studied carefully.

  According to Juanma Lillo, ‘Guardiola is a sponge, he learns from everybody because for him anywhere is a good place to talk about football, to confront ideas and turn a game into a passion.’

  Mourinho gets to Madrid’s Valdebebas training ground as early as seven o’clock in the morning and makes sure everything is prepared for the day ahead. Guardiola has been seen leaving the training ground at ten at night and sometimes later.

  They can both be characterised by their modernity, they employ all the new technology and methods possible to help the growth of their players. But they are also delegators, they lead a great team of assistants and are capable of making their personnel feel responsible, valued, gifted. And both of them have earned themselves a reputation as being great listeners.

  They know the institution and fanbase whom they are working for. They know how to direct their emotions, they can awake the enthusiasm and mobilise their players and fans to do what they want. Both are very good at absorbing all the bad vibes directed at their clubs and channelling them away from their players. ‘I let people see me angry because I really am, but sometime I pretend to be angry. These days coaches should play with their emotions,’ Mourinho says.

  Like his Catalan counterpart, he imposed his timetable, his rules and minimal contact with the press. Both coaches are aware that they live in a complex world, almost a media bubble. News sells, and the more exclusive and explosive the story, the better. Both are masters in the science that is handling the media, the message and the art of leadership, making their players stand out among the greatest in the world by clarifying expectations, helping them get to know themselves better, motivating them to be self-disciplined.

  When they close the dressing-room door and prepare to face the media, that is when they certainly do things differently.

  Once Barcelona had knocked Shakhtar out of the quarter-finals of the 2011 Champions League campaign, Guardiola stopped going to the gym, where he used to spend a couple of hours a day to help him overcome a discal hernia that had hospitalised him. He swapped his exercise regime for the preparation of a programme to steer his side through a run of four Clásicos in eighteen days, starting with their league encounter, followed by the Copa del Rey final and then the home and away legs of the Champions League semi-finals.

  For the league encounter, he decided to field the same team that was responsible for the 5-0 thrashing given to Madrid earlier in the season, apart from Eric Abidal who was recovering from his operation. In the run-up to it Guardiola reminded his players that this game would not be a repeat of that extraordinary result; this time Mourinho would not be caught quite so off-guard.

  Mourinho is especially good at making games difficult for the opponent: for that occasion, he let the grass on the pitch grow longer than usual so the ball didn’t run as much and he used Pepe as a third midfielder to detain Messi. This was the most defensive side Mourinho had fielded and one that was criticised by Madrid’s honorary president, Alfredo Di Stéfano. But the idea was not to lose the first one, almost accepting the league was out of reach for Madrid, and focus on the other three Clásicos.

  16 April 2011 – La Liga Clásico. Santiago Bernabéu stadium

  The game finished with the teams tied at one goal apiece, practically assuring that the league title stayed at Barcelona. The tight marking of Messi by Pepe provoked the Argentinian to respond angrily following his limited contribution to the game. When towards the end the ball went out of play, he struck it fiercely, hitting some spectators. ‘He had wanted to hit the hoardings and it went high,’ one of his team-mates explained. There was more tension on the pitch than in the stands, and it spilled over into the tunnel after the game, with Pepe once again a protagonist.

  20 April 2011 – Copa del Rey Clásico. Mestalla stadium (Valencia)

  The Copa del Rey final came four days later. Mourinho stuck with his midfield defensive trio but he moved them forward to try and create greater pressure on Barça. It was a brave, aggressive Madrid team, with Ramos as centre back, Pepe giving his all and Khedira battling. Ozil acted as a false nine which disorientated Barça. The second half was agonising and the match was finally decided by a Cristiano Ronaldo goal in extra time. For Guardiola, it was the first final out of ten that he had lost. No love was lost between the Spanish internationals on either side: Busquets aggressively tackled Xabi Alonso; Arbeloa stood on David Villa and then accused him of play-acting, which angered the forward.

  It was the tensest moment between both clubs.

  Messi walked into the changing room, sat on the floor and cried. Guardiola, as usual, stayed away from the dressing room and didn’t say anything special to the players.

  The squad were silent on the bus taking them to Valencia airport after the match. Just seven days later Barcelona and Madrid were going to meet again in the first leg of the semi-finals of the Champions League. On the plane back home, Pep decided he had to do something to recover group morale – he wasn’t sure what – but he also knew that Mourinho would try and take advantage of the pre-match press conferences to kick Barcelona while they were down.

  The day after the defeat, the Barcelona manager admitted to one of his closest friends, ‘you have no idea how difficult this is.’ He didn’t mean physically, he was talking about facing Madrid, dealing with Mourinho, and
everything that had transpired that year: the provocations and comments coming from the Spanish capital. Along with the regular accusations over Barcelona’s influencing of referees, the federation and UEFA – a radio station suddenly came out with an extraordinary and false allegation of doping: something that, understandably, hit Pep where it hurt.

  ‘It is all so hard, this is too much,’ Pep admitted privately.

  The problem went beyond Pep’s mental endurance: the constant friction made it difficult to take the right decisions, his juggling of so many roles – figurehead, coach, beacon of the club’s values – was becoming too much to bear. One of his close friends heard him saying, ‘I am leaving, I’ve had enough.’ The next morning the crisis was averted but Pep kept repeating to himself that he was not going to stay in the Barcelona job for long.

  When Pep talks about Mourinho, suddenly an invisible wall pops up. His neck muscles tense, his shoulders hunch and he stops looking you in the eye. Clearly, he is not comfortable with the conversation and it becomes evident that he wants the chat to move on. He feels that he has suffered personal attacks; he thinks his club and its values have been assaulted, his players have been ambushed. And he is not sure why. He can’t comprehend why the rivalry could not have been limited exclusively to the sporting arena, to the action on the pitch.

  Perhaps one day – and it may take a very long time for him to see it this way – Pep may be able to look back on those Clásicos against Mourinho and realise that, because they pushed him as a person and as a coach to the limit, he emerged a better manager.