Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

by Balague, Guillem

  Every trophy, an entire campaign, was being contested against the eternal rival in a period of just eighteen days.

  In that incredibly high-pressure period of less than three weeks, Pep had to establish a routine, a way of doing things that allowed him and the players to connect and disconnect before and after matches.

  He kept his preparation rituals the same, the timetables, training – but he tried to sell each Clásico to the players as a different movie. He demanded a victory in the league, gave a day off after the cup final and, after the blow to the morale to his players as a consequence of the defeat, he needed a new strategy for the Champions League.

  He spent every waking hour in his office dedicated to thinking and preparing for these games. Estiarte would tell him, ‘Let’s go, we’re not eating here today, we’ll go and eat elsewhere so we don’t spend the whole day here.’ But when they were eating out, if a meal normally took an hour and a half, after forty minutes his friend could see Pep’s mind was on other things: looking at him maybe, but not listening. So Manel would give up, get the bill and go back to the training ground.

  On the eve of the first leg of the Champions League semi-final, José Mourinho unwittingly handed Pep the psychological edge he had been looking for.

  On that afternoon, Mourinho burst into the press room of Real Madrid’s Valdebebas training ground like a whirlwind.

  His face told the story, beaming from ear to ear – here was a man who had just masterminded victory over his club’s arch rivals, he had put one over Guardiola and he was about to lead Real Madrid into a Champions League semi-final for the first time in five years.

  Mourinho delivered his press conference referring to his Catalan opposition as ‘Barça’ for the first time since taking over at Madrid – usually it was just ‘them’. Another first: he also referred directly to Guardiola, singling him out, calling him Pep.

  And then he let loose. He was asked about the appointment of experienced German official Wolfgang Stark as the referee for the Champions League semi-final. Previously, before Stark was named, Guardiola said Mourinho would be ‘super happy’ if Portugal’s Pedro Proença was chosen. When Mourinho responded, he revealed his most provocative side: ‘Besides the naming of the referee and the pressure that they exerted so Proença was not chosen, the most important thing is that we are in a new cycle. Until now there were two groups of coaches. One very, very small group of coaches that don’t speak about refs and then a big group of coaches, of which I am part, who criticise the refs when they have made mistakes – people like me who don’t control their frustration but also who are happy to value a great job from a ref.’

  And then he turned on Guardiola.

  ‘And now, with Pep’s statement the other day, we are entering a new era with a third group, which for the moment includes only him, who criticise the correct decision of the referee. This is something I have never seen in the world of football.’

  Mourinho was referring to a goal by Barcelona’s Pedro Rodríguez that was disallowed for offside in the Spanish Cup final against Real on 20 April, and which video replays showed was a correct decision by the referee.

  ‘In his first season [Guardiola] lived the scandal of Stamford Bridge [in the semi-final], last year he played against a ten-man Inter. Now he is not happy with refs getting it right. I am not asking the referee to help my team. If the referee is good, everyone will be happy – except Guardiola. He wants them to get it wrong.’

  The Champions League Clásico had just kicked off.

  After training that same afternoon at the Santiago Bernabéu and before Guardiola’s turn arrived to talk to the press, well aware of what Mourinho had just said, one of the highest ranking people at Barcelona entered the sacrosant dressing room. It surprised many.

  The director told the coach to calm down, not to get involved in a war of words, to stay the usual Pep. Perhaps it would be a good idea, it was suggested, if Mascherano appeared with him, always balanced, calm. He was indeed the chosen player to accompany him in the press conference.

  But Guardiola had decided to reply. Enough was enough.

  In front of the media, Pep had always been the Barcelona coach, a club representative, and never just Pep Guardiola: he had had to bite his lip dozens of times. But now he’d had enough. He wanted to react as his body was telling him to, exactly as he felt.

  ‘Let’s talk football, eh Pep,’ the director reminded him again a few minutes before Guardiola entered the press room at the Bernabéu. ‘Yes, yes,’ the coach answered. He wasn’t faithful to the truth.

  But a doubt assaulted him just before entering the conference area where dozens of international journalists were waiting for him. He looked around for support.

  Nothing is ever lineal or simple in Guardiola’s mind.

  Was it a good idea what he was about to do? Manel Estiarte was next to him: ‘Pep, just think about your players, about yourself, about all the Barcelona fans out there on the streets.’

  That was that. Point of no return.

  He sat down and took the bull by its horns.

  ‘As Mr Mourinho has mentioned my name, he called me Pep, I will call him José.’ Pep glanced around with a half-smile – in front of him rows of journalists and at the back dozens of cameramen. ‘I don’t know which one is Mr José’s camera. They must be all of these.’

  His body language showed discomfort. He moved his shoulders, shifted position in his chair. But as the discourse progressed, the Pep of easy words, the one that always convinces you, started to take over.

  ‘Tomorrow at 8.45 we will play a match out on that pitch. Off the pitch, he has been winning the entire year, the entire season and in the future. He can have his personal Champions League off the pitch. Fine. Let him enjoy it, I’ll give him that. He can take it home and enjoy it.’

  The speech, two minutes twenty-seven seconds of it, was delivered with controlled anger, with wit, without pause.

  ‘We will play a football game. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose, we win, we lose. Normally he wins, as his CV shows. We are happy with our “smaller” victories, which seem to have inspired admiration around the world, and we are very proud of this.’

  For months he had been telling his players, ‘do you think I don’t want to answer back? But we can’t, we shouldn’t. We are Barcelona.’ Everything, of course, has its limits.

  ‘We could draw up a list of complaints of our own. We could remember Stamford Bridge or 250,000 other things, but we don’t have secretaries and ex-referees or managing directors on our staff to note those kinds of grievances down for us. So ... we are only left with going out at this stadium at 8.45 p.m. tomorrow and trying to win by playing the best football we can.

  ‘In this room, he is the fucking boss, the puto amo, the fucking chief.

  ‘He knows the ways of the world better than anyone else. I don’t want to compete with him in this arena not even a second.’

  There was something else he didn’t want to leave untouched. This José Mourinho that questioned the legitimacy of the Barcelona successes is the same one that hugged him, lifted him in the air that night in Rotterdam all those years ago. Colleagues in the same dressing room. Friends, even. Employees of Barcelona. José, what happened? Pep wanted to ask.

  ‘I’d only remind him that we were together, he and I, for four years. He knows me and I know him. That’s enough for me. If he prefers to “go” with statements and claims of newspaper journalist friends of Florentino [Pérez] about the Copa del Rey and to put more weight on what they write than on the friendship, well, no, not quite friendship, but working relationship he and I had then, that’s his right.’

  The scene was under control, the emotions applied with the right intonation. His body was releasing an unquantifiable amount of tension, of accumulated rage. But, aware of the moment, having captured everybody’s attention, and in the middle of the monologue, there was even time for humour.

  ‘He can continue reading Albert [Einstein ... Mouri
nho had said that he used to quote him in speeches to inspire players]. Let him do all that with total freedom, or let him read the thoughts of the journalists who suck on the tit of Florentino Pérez and then draw whatever conclusions he wants.

  ‘I will not justify my words. After the cup final I only congratulated Real Madrid and that is what Barcelona do. I congratulate Real Madrid for the deserved victory against the good team I represent with a lot of pride.’

  Pep felt it was all said, job done. He was by then sitting very comfortably, and looked straight into the cameras. To Mourinho.

  ‘I don’t know which one is José’s camera, I don’t know which one is your camera, but ...’

  ‘... this is it.’

  Gauntlet taken up.

  Although the day had been tense, the preparations for the training session were quieter, with the team still recovering from the cup defeat. However, in the interval between Mourinho’s press conference and Pep’s, the Catalan radio phone-ins were getting heated. Relatives of the players who had travelled to Madrid and knew of the incitement of the Portuguese coach were incensed. How could he get away with it?

  The players were finishing training as Pep delivered his answer. He hadn’t got away with it.

  Guardiola felt Madrid had taken the initiative, and he needed to seize it back. Impressions and titles could have taken a definitive turn if Barcelona hadn’t reacted. It was the most delicate moment of the season, with everything on a knife edge, and Pep felt saturated and ready, consumed and strong.

  Manel Estiarte puts the moment into context: ‘Do you think it was a good idea to come out with all that? Was it? When you’ve just come back from losing the Copa del Rey and they could really hurt us in Europe, without Iniesta? If we had lost, it would have been seen as a mistake. Pep showed his strength – it was without doubt the worst moment to do something confrontational like the “he’s the fucking chief” thing.’

  In other words, if Barcelona had lost the next Clásico it would have been analysed as a loss of control, a rant; but it would be pure genius if it preceded a victory. Whatever way you see it, Guardiola gave his side the tonic they needed.

  Xavi: Pep had told us more than once he had to bite his lip, he needed to remain in control and not react to the accusations and provocations. But on that day, the Real Madrid coach had attacked Pep directly. He had mentioned him by name.

  Puyol: They say things. Then more things, and more things, all lies. One day you have to blow up.

  Xavi: I was impressed when I heard what Pep did: shocked. And I liked it. I liked it a lot.

  Puyol: We have been attacked; people had made things up about us. That has always hurt us and Pep simply answered all that back.

  Xavi: The internal anger has to come out somehow. After we finished training, we were told that he had said all that; my mobile was hot with text messages. In the hotel we watched the news and there was Pep!

  Villa: We weren’t watching it live as we had finished training, got changed, went to our rooms. But by the time we went down for dinner we all knew. Before the boss returned from the press conference we were buzzing.

  Piqué: I got a message about it saying ‘Pep’s gone and done it’, and I thought, ‘what’s happened??’ because I hadn’t seen it. Spoke to my parents, who were in Madrid: ‘Wow, that was brilliant! It’s about time someone gave it back to Mourinho,’ they said. It was a real confidence boost for the whole team.

  Xavi: We started watching the images of Pep’s press conference replayed on the TV and, as we walked into the dining room of the hotel, our parents were rushing up to us and telling us: ‘Fucking hell, you should have heard what Pep just said!’

  Piqué: When Pep walked in afterwards we gave him a standing ovation. And Pep’s reaction was like ‘What’s up?’ (as if to brush it off). His friends were there too, Trueba included.

  David Trueba: Yeah, he got an ovation – which I think was more than just a show of support; it was a message to Pep telling him not to feel beaten for having been sucked into Mourinho’s games.

  Piqué: He must have felt bad about it because he isn’t like that. But it was necessary. He attacked him directly, and this time, ‘well done!’ He’d thought about it and planned it. It came off wonderfully.

  Villa: What Pep did, it did help the team, but I don’t think he did it to motivate us, rather so that he himself felt good, got stuff out of his system and also in the process defended the players, the technical staff and everyone who works with him.

  Xavi: Ah, sometimes you need to give it back and it was perfect on that occasion because it was as if Pep took the lid off a bottle of fizz and he released all the tension that had been building up; it really lightened and lifted the mood.

  Piqué: Sometimes I feel like answering back too, I’m not made of stone. But Pep taught us that he prefers respect, humility, demonstrating it on the pitch, you don’t need to do so in a press conference ... Respect for the rival is essential, but if they are attacking you all the time, in the end you have to answer back. A line had been crossed and if you don’t answer back you look silly.

  Pep was feeling more vulnerable without Laporta, and with Rosell acting with discretion, but he couldn’t show it. What he actually did for the first time as a coach was try and win the game in the press conference. He wanted to act upon this melancholic state the club had fallen into at that moment, to turn it around, to show people that he wasn’t scared or daunted by the task of facing up to his team’s nemesis after losing to them in the cup. His was a statement of intent, as if to say, ‘I’ll take care of Mourinho’; the players could take care of their opponents on the pitch, the directors could deal with their counterparts and the journalists could fight between themselves – Guardiola, in the meantime, knew what he had to do.

  The stereotypical Catalan attitude, the idea that ‘if something can go wrong, it will’, throwing the towel in, generally being pessimistic, could have taken over. He wanted to transmit to his team and the fans the idea of ‘Sí, podemos!’ – ‘Yes, we can!’ The mood changed.

  After the evening meal in the hotel, and in keeping with the new-won confidence, goalkeeper Víctor Valdés surprised the squad with a home-made video filmed at the training ground hours after the Copa del Rey final defeat.

  The team were expecting a motivational film in preparation for the two tough Clásicos ahead. But what they got was a series of parodies of Barcelona players and staff, from Valdés himself or Javier Mascherano, to Manel Estiarte, portrayed in a swimming pool, wearing a tight water polo hat. Valdés was the comedian in every role. It was beyond funny, it was hilarious.

  What shocked Pep most was that this home-made comedy masterpiece had been created by one of the captains, who had spent extra hours at the training ground after a demoralising defeat to give it away as a gift to his team-mates. It was a treat that was repeated before the World Club Championship Final in 2011.

  The night before the most important game of the year the players went to bed crying with laughter.

  Mourinho’s aggressive strategy worked in Barcelona’s favour; it boosted their competitiveness and warmed them up for the forthcoming clashes. José had pushed Pep into unfamiliar and uncertain territory – and he brought out the best and worst in the Catalan coach and the team. Pep had resisted succumbing to Mourinho’s taunts throughout the season, but he finally broke – and revealed a more human side than many wanted to believe existed. According to Víctor Valdés, he also showed he was the leader that the team and the club needed.

  27 April 2011 – Champions League Clásico. First leg. Santiago Bernabéu stadium. Real Madrid 0 Barcelona 2

  Mourinho had been happy with his team set-up in the Copa del Rey final the week before, but this time around he was looking for a result, even a goalless draw. During the match, with the teams deadlocked at 0-0, something happened that left his plan in tatters: Pepe was sent off in the sixtieth minute for a foul on Dani Alvés. Mourinho, angered, then got himself sent off and was forc
ed to watch the rest of the match from the stands. Following the dismissals, Madrid made no changes to the team, they did nothing to try and salvage a result. Messi took advantage of the situation and scored two goals in the last few minutes. It was after this defeat that Mourinho had one of his more memorable outbursts: ‘Por qué? Por qué?’ (Why? Why?)

  He accused Barcelona of having the referees on their side: ‘Why, in a balanced game, in which the score is level, has the referee done this?’ He controversially went on to say that he would feel ‘ashamed’ to win the Champions League the way Guardiola had. ‘If I were to tell the referee and UEFA what I think about what has just happened, my career would end right now,’ he complained. To finish off his rant, and even more astonishingly, he wrote off his team’s chances of making a comeback in the second leg. ‘Madrid has been eliminated from the Champions League final. We’ll go out with pride, with respect for our world – the world of football, which sometimes makes me a bit sick. It makes me sick to live in this world, but it is our world.’

  The complaints continued. Barcelona reported Madrid to UEFA for Mourinho’s accusations and Madrid responded by reporting Alvés and Pedro for faking injuries and alleging that Busquets called Marcelo a ‘monkey’.

  Mourinho was punished for the following five matches in the UEFA club competition, but the fifth match was suspended for a probationary period of three years and the final penalty reduced to three games on appeal. Pepe was suspended for one match. Meanwhile, FC Barcelona goalie José Pinto, who received a red card at the end of the match, was suspended for three games.

  In the post-match press conference, Guardiola went back to being his usual self – the cool, calm and composed coach to whom we are accustomed. Unlike his rival, Pep refused to accept that the second leg of the tie was a mere formality, used the press conference to remind the media not to get ahead of themselves and insisted that everybody remain respectful of exactly who his team was up against: ‘A team that has won nine European Cups can never be written off. We are going to be careful and recover both emotionally and mentally.’