Pep Confidential (10 page)

I am struck and rather surprised by the way the players interact with Guardiola. I don’t sense any of the usual hierarchical barriers between players and coach. This morning, with the sound of bird song in the air, the coach seems like just another one of the lads. Boateng and Alaba go out to the terrace to share a joke with him. Schweinsteiger interrupts and sits with him for a while as he says his goodbyes. He’s going back to Munich, along with Doctor Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt, to continue treatment on his ankle which was operated on at the start of June. There are fewer of the necessary resources in Trentino than in Munich and his recovery has been slow. This worries Pep. He wants
Basti
to play a key role in implementing his playing model. He sends the player off with good wishes for a speedy recovery: ‘
We need you, Basti.’

Lorenza Buenaventura arrives. He has spent the morning overseeing a strength-building workout for the youngest players, as well as an induction session for Arjen Robben, who has recently joined the team. ‘We gave Robben the same basic training the others had in their first day in the Allianz Arena, the three initial exercises and the work on developing compact defensive cover. He assimilated it all brilliantly, and quickly.’

Guardiola is particularly interested in the Dutch forward’s work. ‘Splendid, Pep, absolutely splendid,’ reports Buenaventura. ‘He worked really hard.’

Robben will be one of the surprises of the year. Guardiola’s appointment had barely been confirmed in January 2013 when people began to question whether the new coach would want to keep the Dutch player on. The doubts persisted even after Robben scored the goals which were so decisive in the club’s Champions League victory. But the player’s attitude on his arrival in Trentino has been just right and the man responsible for the winning goal at Wembley has approached his work with all the hunger of a youngster desperate to win a place in the team. Robben will continue to apply this same work ethic, in the process earning the support and admiration of his coach.

When I spoke to Robben, he explained: ‘I started the season with an open mind and was happy to try new ideas.’

Maintaining an open mind is essential for anyone hoping to learn this new footballing language. Pep’s players are quick to demonstrate that this is one quality they all share. If the boss has gone to the effort of mastering German, the least his players can do is learn the language of the man from Santpedor. The players’ initial unfamiliarity with the
rondos
, the
Kreisspiele
, soon changes to positive enthusiasm. Toni Kroos, who is delighted with the new regime, is sure that the ball will become a good friend to him. ‘The ball moves very fast,’ explains Daniel Van Buyten, ‘and that means we have to play and think just as fast.’

Lorenzo Buenaventura takes the chance to share his impressions of the coach: ‘Pep is obsessed by work but he’s also a revolutionary. Bayern had just won the treble when he took over and 99% of coaches would have come here and not changed a thing. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But he wants to transcend the mundane and ordinary. He is trying to introduce new concepts to football and he likes to see it evolving year by year. There have been several key periods in football in the last 25 years: [Arrigo] Sacchi’s era, the era of the Dutch and the era of Barça.’

Months later, during the Christmas holidays, Fabio Capello will say something similar: ‘Guardiola’s era is one of the three greatest legacies in the modern history of football: the Dutch school, Sacchi’s Milan and Guardiola’s football.’

But let’s get back to Riva del Garda. It is already clear that the players’ adaptation to Pep’s new game will not be easy. Or fast.

Lorenzo Buenaventura: ‘It isn’t the same as speaking to Xavi and Iniesta, who have spent 20 years at Barcelona. They learned all of this there and have put it into practice a thousand times. It’s another thing entirely to do it here with any speed. Pep always starts well. He goes slowly at the beginning as he explains A, B and C. But then there will be this sudden acceleration when you least expect it and before you know it, he’s on to Z and is revising the entire alphabet. In reality you can’t expect super-quick results from this kind of immersion.’

Outside on the spacious terrace, Pep’s ears must be burning because, despite the birdsong, he seems aware of everything we’re saying. He comes in and joins the conversation, waving his hands about animatedly.

‘That’s all well and good, but if we lose two consecutive games everyone will say it’s because of all the
rondo
training we’re doing instead of spending the pre-season doing 1000-metre runs or sprinting up Trentino’s mountains,’ he laughs as he gives Buenaventura a friendly shove. ‘The players won’t say it and people like Toni Kroos will insist that he loves training with the ball, but there’s no doubt that if we start losing some journalist will blame it on the way we train.’

Buenaventura laughs at this vision of doom. ‘I’ve worked with around 30 coaches. Lots of them were very good and all of them left me with something, some detail I could later use. But Pep, he’s the whole package. He possesses something which is vital in sport: a willingness to take risks. It is like that high jumper [Dick Fosbury, 1968] who one day decides to jump backwards and break all known records. How many football professionals are so willing to break the mould and dispense with tradition? People say, ‘There’s nothing new under the sun’. Well, I beg to differ. Pep is capable of coming to a new country, assessing what’s being done and working out how to respond. He is confident enough to take risks and introduce innovative ideas.’

Mona Nemmer has joined Bayern as the team nutritionist and today is her first morning at work. She is also sitting out on the terrace, surrounded by the hotel chefs, with whom she is planning the menu for the next few days. She is 28 and has worked previously in the youth sections of the German national team. Bayern listened to Guardiola’s request. The players’ post-match meals were already carefully planned by the club. The team bus has its own kitchen, where the players get their post-match ration of freshly cooked pasta, salad and meat or fish, prepared, as is all of Bayern’s catering, by well-known chef Alfons Schuhbeck. These meals are vital for their physiological recuperation. Despite this however, Pep felt that there was room for improvement and now Mona, who will closely monitor the players’ nutritional intake, has joined the staff.

Buenaventura agrees that this is vitally important: ‘Like all big teams, Bayern plays a game every three days, and that affects the way we prepare. Medical studies in Italy have shown that the speed of post-match recovery depends entirely on the players’ diet. If they eat properly then they should have recovered 80% of the glycogen in their muscles within three days. Only 80%! Just imagine what it would be if they ate unhealthily! And after four consecutive matches in cycles of three days, the risk of injury increases by 60%.’

In order to cope with the demands of these three-day cycles, players must be rotated. Playing so often means that the players never recover more than 80% of fitness, injuries occur more frequently and dips in performance are common.

‘In Barcelona, players like Messi, Busquets, Xavi, Alves and Pedro would play up to nine or 10 games [in three-day cycles] and every so often one of them played 12. The only exception was when they were called up to play for Spain, but of course that meant that they were still playing games. This is terrible for the players because, as well as the risk of injury, it can mean a sudden, brutal downturn in performance. That’s why it is important to have a full squad which allows you, from time to time, to leave a player out of a game and give them a little rest cycle of five days training,’ explains Buenaventura.

In Bayern, life is likely to be less demanding. ‘The fact that there is no tour of Asia in the summer is already a blessing. And this pre-season training gives us a real advantage because we have a series of complete five-day periods during which we can work without interruption. In those five-day slots we do six or seven training sessions, but without the usual physical exertion. Later in the year we also have the very welcome winter break.’

Over the next few months, Lorenzo Buenaventura will talk at length about the benefits of the winter break but today he simply says: ‘Having 14 days of rest at Christmas and two weeks of preparation afterwards is a huge competitive advantage.’

Guardiola and Torrent compare notes as the morning draws to a close, after each of them has fully reviewed yesterday’s training exercises.

Out on the shores of Lake Garda the birds are still singing as the coach’s thoughts turn to Schweinsteiger’s ankle problems, whilst the player himself wends his way home to Munich.

10

‘WE DON’T HAVE A MESSI OR A RONALDO – BUT WE HAVE THE RIGHT COLLECTIVE MENTALITY.’

Arco, July 7, 2013

THEY HAVE BEEN training like beasts.

As Pep Guardiola approaches the bench he shouts: ‘This is how Barça trained that first year!’

He opens his arms wide and waves them about, the way we’ve seen him do so many times during a match. He shouts again: ‘That’s how they trained that first year, like beasts.’

We are sitting on the bench next to Arco’s tiny training pitch. Bayern are preparing for the great battles of Guardiola’s first year as successor to the treble-winner, Jupp Heynckes.

Matthias Sammer, the club’s sports director, is seated on the same bench, chatting about what Guardiola is instructing his men to do out there on the pitch. The team is playing a game of 10 v 11 and the coach wants to see his forwards pressing hard and his defenders and midfielders marking tightly. Guardiola is running up and down, all the while shouting instructions whilst his players work with formidable intensity.

Sammer smiles: ‘We’re going to have some fun.’

‘We have two objectives,’ Sammer will tell us this Sunday afternoon. ‘We want to establish ourselves at the top level and then set about building an era of repeated and consistent success.’

Some months before, in January 2013, when the treble was still a distant dream, a senior executive from one of the world’s biggest sports goods companies put it to me like this: ‘In Munich they aren’t happy with the playing style of the team. The directors have a modern vision of management and believe that the team should be playing differently. At the moment they’re doing well and are very focused on winning, but Hoeness and his colleagues haven’t forgotten that this team has lost two Champions Leagues in three years, two Bundesligas in a row and has been trounced in the DFB-Pokal by Dortmund. They want to win, but they want to play in a more consistent way which will avoid all the highs and lows.’

So it was that Guardiola was brought in to spearhead what Paul Breitner called the ‘third phase’ of Bayern’s plan.

When he was still in New York, Pep had already begun to envisage his ideal Bayern line-up. We’ve never managed to find the time to chat about it but I reckon that at that stage, before he had the chance to get to know the players, his team would have looked something like: Manuel Neuer in goals. A defence of Philipp Lahm, Javi Martínez, Dante, David Alaba; Bastian Schweinsteiger as
pivote
; Mario Götze, Toni Kroos in midfield; Thomas Müller and Arjen Robben either side of the false 9, Franck Ribéry. His ideal would probably have been to have Götze and Ribéry alternating as false 9s, but if this was what he jotted down as he sat in New York planning his line-up, events would prove that a team is a living organism. It grows and develops, suffers setbacks and has to overcome obstacles. Over time, expectations are created and the team improves some areas of its performance but deteriorates in others. In other words, it evolves and usually in ways that you could not have planned for. In the end, it never turns out quite as you imagined.

In any case, neither Javi Martínez nor Dante are in the Trentino group, vice-captain Schweinsteiger has gone back to Munich because his ankle injury has been so slow to heal and Götze is still restricted to an exercise bike in the gym, despite it already having been two-and-a-half months since his hamstring injury. Robben has trained only once and Thiago still hasn’t signed for Bayern. If he did once have visions of his optimal line-up, Pep has discovered that the reality is very different and his main preoccupation at the moment is whether or not Thiago will arrive in time for the German Super Cup final in Dortmund. If not, he’ll have to consider exposing young Pierre-Emile Højbjerg to the Borussia sharks.

Alaba, Daniel Van Buyten, Mario Mandžukić, Xherdan Shaqiri, Claudio Pizarro and now Robben have been re-united for this pre-season training camp, whilst seven youth team players make the return trip back to Munich after working with the veterans for 10 days.

Pep spends a lot of time chatting one-to-one with his players. He finds in Jérôme Boateng a player who readily assesses and corrects his own performance and in Neuer someone whose obvious potential inspires complete trust. From day one he discovers his football alter ego in Toni Kroos and over time his chats with Lahm will reveal a prodigious and unexpected tactical intelligence. Højbjerg, too, receives individual attention. The youngster gets a private masterclass on positional play – taught how to move the ball forward, find the right passing lines and push his team forward. From now on Pep will protect his young protégé. He sees in him the makings of a great footballer.

The main activity of this Sunday afternoon training session in Arco is a 40-minute game which has two objectives. Pep wants the forwards to work on their penetration and he also wants to see how co-ordinated the other players can be in pressing the opposition. To achieve this first objective, Mandžukić and Müller, supported by Ribéry or Shaqiri, have to press and punish the opposition defenders until they have them absolutely hemmed in on one side. Once again Pep is pleased with their performance.

‘Their pressing is brutal. If you ask Müller to make a 40-metre diagonal run to the other wing, he’ll do it at full speed, regain his position and do it a hundred times more if necessary.’