Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography (11 page)

Brescia training ground. A cold November morning, 2001

The lengthy periods of injury, his departure from Barcelona or sporting defeats pale into insignificance compared with the emotional ordeal Pep suffered after failing a drugs
test during his time at Brescia: firstly, after a game against Piacenza on 21 October 2001 and then, a week later, against Lazio on 4 November. The results of further analysis of the samples sent
to a laboratory in Rome supported the accusation that Pep had taken nandrolone, an anabolic steroid that is said to improve an individual’s strength and endurance and has similar properties
to testosterone.

Guardiola received the news about the supposed positive result while practising free kicks in a training session. ‘I saw Carletto Mazzone speaking with the team doctor. That moment, that
conversation, changed my life, but I only knew that later,’ Pep recalled recently. ‘They came over to me and told me the news. When I went back to the changing room I knew from the
missed calls on my phone that the world had already judged me.’

That same day, Pep called Manel Estiarte, in his day the Maradona of water polo, Olympic champion and friend who played in Italy and with whom he had forged a close friendship. ‘Do you
know a lawyer? I’m going to need one,’ he asked Manel. His friend went to see him the next day and he expected to find the footballer depressed, in need of a hug, and he had already
prepared some reassuring words; but when he arrived, he found Pep to be his usual self: stoic, pensive, obsessive. Guardiola had been up all night, researching every other incident similar to the
situation he now found himself in: reading the legal arguments and poring over case studies. Pep threw himself into finding a solution, rather than rolling over and accepting his fate. He
was going to fight, and he wasn’t just going to leave it in the hands of the lawyers. In typical fashion, Pep was taking this personally and he was determined to be in control of
his destiny rather than leave it to others to decide his fate.

Despite Pep’s determination to fight back, there were always going to be moments that would test his resolve, and Manel Estiarte was there to support him and help him avoid sinking into
despair, as Pep himself explains in the introduction to
All My Brothers
, the former water polo player’s autobiography: ‘For seven years I simply maintained that I had never
done anything wrong. From the first day when someone pointed me out and told me “Guardiola is a bad person”, you were on my side and stayed with me. When these things happen to people,
they don’t forget. It was you and your blessed luck that pressed that button on teletext and showed me the way to go so that, seven years later, the person who had pointed the finger at me
would change his mind and would say that “Guardiola is not a bad person”, that I was a good person. Yes, it was fate, I’m sure it was, but you believed in me and that’s why
I was lucky. You brought me luck. Much needed luck. That good fortune is a gift, the best title that I have ever won in my sporting career. I will never achieve another quite as important, I can
promise you. I held myself in too high esteem to take substances that could do me harm.’

What, you may be wondering, did teletext have to do with any of this ... ? Pep Guardiola is referring to a call he received from his friend Estiarte one Sunday, months after the Italian National
Olympic Committee had announced the positive result in the nandrolone test. Pep was dozing on the couch when Manel called, shouting down the line, excited. Estiarte went on to explain that on
Italian teletext he had accidentally stumbled upon a story referring to a new discovery related to positive testing in nandrolone cases. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) had ruled that a result
of less than two nanogrammes per millilitre of urine sample was an insufficient quantity to indicate substance abuse, because, they had now discovered, the human body is capable of producing up to
the nine nanogrammes per millilitre they had found in his body (in contrast, the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was found to have two
thousand nanogrammes per millilitre). It was
a coincidental yet key moment, part of a long judicial process that was a test of Pep’s mental strength.

‘I am convinced I will win,’ Pep said many times during that process to the Italian press. He was hit with a four-month suspension, but from the moment that the National Olympic
Committee sentenced him, Guardiola launched a legal battle that went on until he proved his innocence. He never accepted the allegations, nor any consequent sanction. He even said ‘The
Italian justice system cannot look me in the eyes. I am innocent.’

In May 2005, the Tribunal of Brescia fined him €2,000 and sentenced him to seven months’ imprisonment. The verdict was suspended because he had no criminal record but it was a
tremendous setback for Guardiola. ‘Do you think I need an illegal substance to play against Piacenza?’ he repeated to everyone.

For Pep, this was an issue related to human values, truth and lies. They were accusing him of something he hadn’t done and he was prepared to spend every penny fighting to prove his
innocence. The lawyers could indeed take every penny, but he would never give up his reputation. His allies, including Estiarte, saw him as being fixated by the issue. Perhaps obsession is his most
natural state, but it took him to the point of exhaustion. ‘Leave it, it’s done, no one remembers it,’ his friend told him afterwards. ‘I remember it and I know that it was
a lie, that it’s not true,’ Pep would answer. He had to persevere until he had cleared his name.

Collell explains an incident in his biography that illustrated the farcical nature of the process. In the spring of 2005, Guardiola’s agent, Josep María Orobitg, excused himself
from a judicial hearing relating to the case to go to the toilet. A mature gentleman entered the bathroom and took his place alongside him, then muttered mysteriously: ‘Sometimes the innocent
have to die to win the battle.’ It was a very senior person involved in the process.

Finally, on 23 October 2007, an Appeals Tribunal in Brescia acquitted Pep Guardiola of any wrongdoing, after it was scientifically proven that the test results upon which the accusations were
based lacked credibility, a development that had started with Estiarte’s
chance discovery on teletext. ‘I have closed the file and will leave it in a box. I
don’t want to talk about it but if one day someone wants to investigate, it’s all filed and it can be checked out,’ Pep told his good friend the journalist Ramón Besa.

The overwhelming feeling was a mixture of relief and happiness, of course, but much more than that. Guardiola had been carrying a huge burden on his shoulders and now felt suddenly weightless.
We are never far from the glare of public scrutiny, from the feared question, ‘What will people say?’ Suspicion and doubt assailed him during that period, and he wanted them gone. He
just craved confirmation of his innocence and demanded that the judicial system admit its mistake. A mammoth task which was inevitably doomed to failure – no one embarks upon a judicial case
without the stigma of suspicion remaining, without a trauma of some kind enduring. It’s the accusation that’s remembered, not the final judgement.

Yes, he had proved his innocence, and had fought hard to do so. He was cleared finally, and his reputation and integrity restored, but he was determined to ensure that no one close to him would
ever undergo a similar ordeal. So, in a way, the battle continued.

The captain of the Barcelona B team he was coaching at the time came to his office on behalf of the whole squad to congratulate him on the tribunal’s decision. While he was listening to
him he realised that he had, unconsciously, developed a very close bond with his players, a safety net he applied to his pupils and one that would eventually become all-consuming, a fatherly
feeling that probably originated from the isolation and sense of abandonment he had felt during that long legal process.

The Italian federation took until May 2009 to officially accept the tribunal’s acquittal ruling, when Pep was already enjoying success as manager of FC Barcelona. The beginning of the
doping case had been a front-page story, but was only a brief side note when he was cleared.

After a season at Brescia and while the court case was in progress, Guardiola signed for Roma in the summer of 2002, motivated less by the opportunity to play for a bigger club than to be
coached by, and to learn from, Fabio Capello, a manager he greatly admires despite
their differing approach to the game. Pep was eager to experience Capello’s defensive
rigour and discover his secrets in terms of how to apply pressure upon an opponent. While he played little during his time at Roma, he learnt a great deal. ‘He didn’t play much because,
by then, he was coming to the end of his career,’ says Capello. ‘He was a very well-behaved player. He never asked me for explanations as to why he didn’t play. He knew what my
idea of football was, but he was slow, he had some physical problems. He was a quick thinker, he knew what to do before the ball reached him and was very clever with positional play. And he was a
leader.’

A lack of playing time in Rome eventually saw Guardiola return to Brescia in January 2003, where he shared the dressing room with Roberto Baggio and Andrea Pirlo.

As his second spell at Brescia was coming to an end that same year, Pep received a call from Paul Jewell, the Wigan manager at the time. ‘He’d always been one of my favourite
players,’ Jewell says. ‘I got his number from his English agent. I called and left a message, “Hello, Pep, it’s Paul here”, something like that. About ten minutes
later he called back. He knew all about us. He’d watched us on TV and talked about our midfield short passing. He knew [Jimmy] Bullard and [Graham] Kavanagh. His wages were £10,000 a
week. Then he got this mind-blowing offer from Qatar. He could have played for the mighty Wigan, but ended up in some poxy job in Barcelona.’

In the meantime, before his move to the Qatari side Al-Ahli, Pep was presented with an opportunity to work alongside Lluis Bassat, a candidate in the 2003 FC Barcelona presidential elections
with the backing of some of the most influential political and financial Catalan powers. Bassat approached Guardiola, asking him to become the sporting director of his project and Pep agreed under
the condition that they would not use the names of potential signings to win votes, as so often happens in Spain – instead he wanted to sell a vision for the club to the fans.

Ronaldinho was offered to Bassat and Guardiola as a potential signing, but Pep wanted to focus upon a football project that could have included his former Dream Team colleague Ronald Koeman
as coach, or, if Ajax refused to release their Dutch manager, Juanma Lillo.

Even though the subjects of potential transfers were never publicly disclosed to bolster the electoral campaign, Guardiola was planning to build a side that would include the likes of
Iván Córdoba, Inter Milan’s Colombian centre back; Cristian Chivu, Ajax’s captain and defender; Emerson, Roma’s Brazilian midfielder; and Harry Kewell,
Liverpool’s Australian winger.

In the end, Joan Laporta won the elections, with the support of Johan Cruyff and the promise of bringing David Beckham to the Nou Camp – the use of the Beckham name was no more than a
marketing ploy, but one that worked for Laporta. The Manchester United website announced that his candidacy had made an offer for Beckham, a leak orchestrated by agent Pini Zahavi which included an
agreement that Barcelona would sign one of his players, the goalkeeper Rustü Reçber, which did indeed happen a month later.

When Bassat’s campaign defeat was confirmed, Pep told him, ‘I know we approached things differently, but ... we would do it again the same way, wouldn’t we?’

The decision to side with Bassat would come back to haunt Pep several years later, as there were those, Laporta among them, who would not find it easy to forgive him for ‘betraying’
Cruyff, his mentor, by siding with an opponent.

After the failed electoral campaign, the decision to play in Qatar was just about the only step in Guardiola’s career motivated by money: the move would earn him US$4 million in a two-year
contract. The journalist Gabriele Marcotti travelled to Qatar to interview Pep in 2004, and encountered a player in the wilderness at the end of his career, sad, but not bitter. ‘I think
players like me have become extinct because the game has become more tactical and physical. There is less time to think. At most clubs, players are given specific roles and their creativity can
only exist within those parameters,’ he told Marcotti.

Pep was only thirty-three.

The game had been transformed, reflected in the European football landscape of the time that was dominated by a powerful
Milan side, a physically strong Juventus, the
Porto–Monaco Champions League finalists, the arrival of Mourinho at Chelsea and his faith in athletes as midfielders. Pep was correct: ‘pace and power’ was the dominant
footballing ideology of the day, but it was soon to be challenged, firstly by Rijkaard’s Barcelona and, latterly, by Guardiola himself.

After playing eighteen games for Qatar’s Al-Ahli and spending most of his time lounging by the pool in the complex where he lived alongside Gabriel Batistuta, Fernando Hierro and Claudio
Caniggia, and after asking the former Santos winger and now coach Pepe Macia hundreds of times about the Brazil of Pelé, he went for a trial at Manchester City, spending ten days under
Stuart Pearce’s eye in 2005.

Eventually Pep turned down a six-month contract in Manchester, wanting a longer deal than the City manager was prepared to offer. In December 2005, he signed for Mexican side Dorados de Sinaloa,
taking the opportunity to be coached by his friend Juanma Lillo. There, he learnt a new type of football, but also deepened his knowledge of other aspects of the game, especially in terms of
administration, physical preparation and diet. Pep’s managerial education would often continue into the early hours of the morning, as he and Lillo sat discussing tactics, training and
techniques throughout the night.

Late at night in an apartment in Culiacán, north-west Mexico, 2005