Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography (20 page)

Barcelona willingly took the risk of allowing too much free space at the back of the defence and counteracted it with careful passing, attention in the marking and pressure. Guardiola included a
deep-lying midfield player who relieved the pressure on the defence; providing an outlet in possession and protection for the centre backs when defending, particularly if the back line is stretched
when the full backs are advanced. It’s a similar role to the one Guardiola used to play in the Dream Team, shared by Keita and Busquets in Guardiola’s first season, but it became one
that Busquets effectively made his own.

To the man in the street, the mention of Barcelona was always synonymous with attacking football, and one of the great
misconceptions about Pep’s Barcelona was that
their football was entirely focused on scoring at the expense of defending. But Guardiola’s thinking would surprise many. For example, when Barça failed to score, the first thing he
looked at was how his side were defending. Again, counter-intuitive and in defiance of conventional wisdom. So, for example, Abidal explains that before he arrived at Barcelona, every time he was
called into action on the pitch, as a defender he’d been taught to focus on winning the ball. As soon as he arrived at Barcelona, he was taught to think one step ahead about what he could do
with it once he’d got hold of it. ‘Now, every time I get the ball I know what I should do because I have learnt to understand the game.’

There is a final tactical insight that is fascinating.

A trick to test an opponent, to pull them out of position to create space, leads them where you want them. In a chat with Wayne Rooney, the Manchester United forward told me that he watched Xavi
doing that often: ‘He waits for one of us to get close to make the pass.’

André Villas-Boas is fascinated by it, too. ‘There are more spaces in football than people think. Even if you play against a deep-lying team, you immediately get half of the pitch.
You can provoke the opponent with the ball, provoke him to move forward or sideways and open up a space. But many players can’t understand the game. They can’t think about or read the
game. Things have become too easy for football players: high salaries, a good life, with a maximum of five hours’ work a day and so they can’t concentrate, can’t think about the
game.

‘Barcelona’s players are completely the opposite,’ continues the former Chelsea coach, ‘Their players are permanently thinking about the game, about their movement.

‘Guardiola has talked about it: the centre backs provoke the opponent, invite them forward, then, if the opponent applies quick pressure, the ball goes to the other central defender and
this one makes a vertical pass – not to the midfielders, who have their back turned to the ball, but to those moving between lines, Andrés Iniesta or Lionel Messi,
or even directly to the striker. Then they play the second ball with short lay-offs, either to the wingers who have cut inside or the midfielders, who now have the game in front of them. They have
an enormous capacity not to lose the ball, to do things with an unbelievable precision. But Barça’s 4-3-3 wouldn’t work in England, because of the higher risk of losing the
ball.’

The possibility of making it work in England is something that Pep Guardiola often wondered about. He has asked at least two Premier League players if they could start a move as his players did
at Barcelona, despite the risk of losing possession close to their own goal. Does the Premiership, he asked, have the quality of footballers with the confidence and understanding of the game
necessary to play that way? ‘It depends on the team,’ he was told. ‘And not all sets of fans would accept that style.’

As a coach, a teacher, Guardiola believes that when one of his pupils truly understands why they are required to act in a specific way, they believe more in what they are being
asked to do. It also means that this increases their capacity to take the initiative, or question what they’ve been told to do, in a more responsible way when the need arises.

This is how one of his pupils, Gerard Piqué, put it: ‘The coach makes us understand football. He doesn’t just give us orders, he also explains why. That makes you a better
player, since you know the reasons behind the instructions. That way everything has a meaning.’ While at FC Barcelona, Guardiola introduced a new approach to coaching and learning; he paid a
lot of attention to detail. Piqué goes further: ‘He has absolute conviction in what he believes and the team has taken on a rich football manual, from a tactical point of view, with
pride.’ On the field of play, in the heat of the action, it enabled Guardiola’s Barcelona to switch formations or positions as many as five or six times in the same game. When players
understand why,
it is easy to react to what is being shouted from the touchline in the heat of battle.

However, Guardiola also drilled patience into his sides, because, despite that ability to get his team to react, he and his players also had enough faith in their strategy to know when to avoid
a knee-jerk reaction to a tough passage of play or an opposition goal. In his own inimitable way, Charly Rexach has a peculiar analogy: ‘sometimes there are games where in the sixth or
seventh minute you say “that plan is not working”. But it is like preparing a plate of beans, some are hard, some perfectly tender, badly placed. Then you move the dish and the beans
start falling into place gradually. Patience. Football is the same. You see the game and you see that a player isn’t working. And you say, “relax, give it time to fall into
place.”’

Evolution, as opposed to revolution, is a word we’ve used many times so far. Because, for all of Pep Guardiola’s innovation, he was also very careful not to start out by tearing down
all that had gone before. Many of the foundations for success were there already, and he knew that a process of gradual adjustment was necessary, of fine-tuning, coaxing the best out of what was
frequently already in place. Step by step, he introduced mechanisms and alternatives, subtle adjustments and repairs to what Cruyff had set in motion a generation or so earlier. Pep was very
careful to preserve the model and its spirit (pressure, position, combination, go out to win every game) but evolving and expanding its possibilities and potential to previously unimaginable
extremes.

But new things have certainly been created on the pitch since his appearance on the scene. Villas-Boas compares Pep Guardiola’s Barça to the celebrated chef Ferran Adrià: but
rather than gastronomic experimentation, we are witnessing molecular football. Their recipe for success is innovation: they defend with three at the back in an era when everyone has signed up to
the back four doctrine; they pioneer diminutive players in the centre of midfield when the rest of the world has tilted towards the pace and power principle in the engine room. What others might
perceive as weaknesses, Barcelona have provided as solutions: tiny midfielders mean you cannot win the ball, so you make sure you always have possession.

Frequently the logic might appear counter-intuitive. For example, according to widespread conventional logic, without a six-foot-four powerhouse striker you can’t
score from headers. Barcelona turned that theory on its head: so the wingers still provide crosses, but it’s the positioning and timing of the attacker that makes up for their lack of
physical presence.

And the player on the receiving end of a cross may not even be a striker, because Barcelona frequently play without one. And then there’s the added ingredient of a goalkeeper who touches
the ball with his feet as often as a centre back – and frequently more often than an opposing midfielder. In fact, you might describe Valdés as a centre back who occasionally picks the
ball up.

Yet Barcelona’s most outstanding innovation has perhaps less to do with their constant breaking of convention, or even the creation and selection of such wonderful players with the
technique and vision to make it work – or even the realisation that beautiful football is such because it is effective, not vice versa – but, rather, the fact that they have found a way
to use the spaces on a pitch that seem to be almost impossible to beat or counteract. Yes, Pep was beaten by Chelsea and Real Madrid in different ways in his last season; but in the years Pep was
in charge Barcelona have the highest ratio of victories in crucial games in history. And not by chance.

Iniesta tells us that Pep was always explaining things to him about his positioning on the field. ‘He’d correct me, help me to improve, he’d tell me to enjoy what I do, have
fun and love this profession and this club.’ Xavi Hernández insists that Pep ‘is always two or three moves ahead of the rest’. Javier Mascherano will always be grateful to
Messi ‘for having recommended me and to Pep for making me see that football can be played another way’. It must be easy to train and compete if all the players had this level of
analysis, humility and passion for what they do. A credit to their profession.

And all of them, no matter how many times they won, carried around one commandment: ‘I am in a huge club even in the hard times. I try not to betray the club’s principles nor the
idea of team play nor the legacy of my predecessors.’

An away trip to newly promoted Numancia provided the opening game of the 2008–9 La Liga season.

The tactical chat at the hotel two hours before the journey to the stadium confirmed there were no surprises and all the big names were in the line-up: Víctor Valdés, Dani
Alvés, Puyol, Márquez, Abidal; Yaya Touré, Xavi, Iniesta; Messi, Henry and Eto’o.

The instructions were clear and simple: open up the pitch. Numancia will defend deep. Circulate the ball quickly. Be patient.

On the way to the tiny Los Pajaritos stadium (capacity just 9,025), Coldplay’s ‘Viva la Vida’ blared from the speakers on the team bus. That song, a favourite of Pep’s,
would become the soundtrack to the rest of the season – the anthem for Guardiola’s era, even. When that song played, the players knew the moment had arrived. It was a warning. The call
to action.

The last rituals took place after the warm-up but by then Pep had disappeared from the players’ view. His preparations were over.

Both teams came out on to the pitch. The new La Liga campaign had started.

On the bench, Guardiola gesticulated, appearing angry. Tense. He’d sit down, stand up again. Anxious. He couldn’t sit or stand still. More instructions. Fists in the air, arms wide.
He transmitted and exuded pure passion and energy. That is Pep, as a player and as a manager. Even as a spectator!

He had not promised titles. Rather, that each game would be treated as a final and that every minute of every game had equal importance. He doesn’t understand or accept a group that
doesn’t shout, hug, give their all. All of that was noticeable in the first Liga game of the season.

He even smacked Dani Alvés on the back of his neck after a quick instruction. Alvés turned round bewildered and surprised. It was only a gesture to connect with them, of
appreciation. ‘But one day they will turn round and smack you back,’ Estiarte warns him, laughing.

What Pep was doing, right from the beginning, was establishing a camaraderie, forging a bond, an unspoken code between football people. The players are made of skin and bone and they too like
this
contact. Even if it is a slap. Pep touches constantly, hugs, pushes them, to motivate them, to keep them on their toes, to make them feel loved. And his experience as a
footballer allows him to decide when to do it or when not to do it.

Barcelona attacked through the centre far too much, their movements funnelled into a congested area in front of goal. Too narrow. But one element was a sign of things to come: they had almost
all the possession and the chances. Twenty shots on goal from Barcelona, three from Numancia, one of them a goal from Mario, a defensive mistake that left him unmarked at the far post.

Barcelona lost.

1-0.

Beaten by a modest club with an annual budget of €14.4 million compared to the €380 million of FC Barcelona. The shock result of the weekend. Of the month. Of the season, even.

At the end, Guardiola set his doubts, disappointment and frustration to one side and approached the rival coach, Sergio Kresick, to shake his hand and congratulate him on his success.

‘When we lost that first game in Soria, we weren’t in a good mood in the dressing room,’ Iniesta recalls. ‘But Pep appeared straight away to control everything, to help
us to accept the result.’

The pre-season had given the players their hunger back, they knew the path they must take, the reasoning and challenges. They were receptive – well, most of them – and they started
to understand what Pep wanted of them. But they had lost their first league game to a side that everyone thought they should have thrashed. Straight after the game, Guardiola made the effort to get
it into the players’ heads that they needn’t change anything because of the defeat. They had made mistakes and these were pointed out to them in the immediate aftermath, but they should
also maintain a very clear idea about where they were going. That August evening at Los Pajaritos,
el mister
, as coaches are known in Spain, told his players something that he has repeated
several times since.