Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography (3 page)

The medical staff explained that the assistant manager, Tito Vilanova, Pep’s right-hand man and close friend, would have to undergo emergency surgery to remove a tumour from his parotid
gland, the largest of the salivary glands – and therefore he would not be able to travel to Italy with them.

Two hours later the Barcelona players left town in a state of shock. Pep appeared distant, isolated, wandering separately from the group, deep in contemplation. The team ended up beating Milan
3-2 at the San Siro to top the Champions League group in a thrilling game in which neither side concentrated on defending, treating the fans to an end-to-end encounter with lots of chances. But,
despite the result, Pep remained understandably melancholic.

Life, as the saying goes, is what happens when you are busy making other plans. It is also that thing that slaps you in the face and makes you fall when you think you are invincible, when you
forget falling is also part of the rules. Guardiola, who accelerated his inquisition of everything when he found out his friend was ill, went
through a similar thought process
when he was told that Eric Abidal had a tumour on his liver the previous season. The French left back recovered enough to play a brief part in the second leg of the semifinals of the Champions
League against Real Madrid in what Pep would describe as the ‘most emotional night’ he could remember at the Camp Nou. Abidal came on in the ninetieth minute, when the game was 1-1 and
Barcelona were on the verge of another Champions League final, having beaten Madrid in the first leg. The stadium gave him a powerful standing ovation which was something of a rarity. For Catalans
are very much like the English: they have a safety-innumbers approach to showing their feelings, until a collective wave of public emotion lets them release much of what they innately repress.

Weeks later, Puyol, unbeknown to Pep or anybody in the squad, would give Abidal the captain’s armband to allow him to receive the European Cup from Platini. Almost a year later, the
doctors would tell the French left back that the treatment had failed and he needed a transplant.

The health problems of Abidal and Vilanova left Guardiola shaken; they hit him very hard. It was an unforeseen, uncontrollable situation, difficult to deal with for someone who likes to predict
and micromanage what happens in the squad and to have a contingency plan when things come out of the blue. But with them he was helpless. There was nothing he could do. Much more than that –
the lives of people he felt responsible for were on the line.

After that victory in Milan, Barcelona had to travel to Madrid to play a modest Getafe side. Defeat meant that neither Guardiola nor the team, who dominated that game but failed to make an
impact in front of their opponent’s goal, could dedicate a victory that night to Tito Vilanova, who was on the road to recovery following a successful operation to remove the tumour.

Barcelona lost the game 1-0 in a cold, half-empty stadium, in the kind of ugly match in which it was becoming increasingly more challenging to inspire a group of players (and also the manager)
who had been the protagonists on so many glorious nights. Pep was upset at dropping three points, as their League campaign seemed to be faltering far too early in the season. Real Madrid, who had
beaten
their city rival Atlético de Madrid 4-1 away, were now five points ahead and they seemed unstoppable, hungry for success and with a burning desire to bring
Guardiola’s era to an end.

La Liga wasn’t the only reason for Pep feeling low – and his appearance after the game worried members of the team. On the flight back to Barcelona, in the early hours of Sunday 27
November 2011, Pep had never looked more isolated, down in the dumps and untalkative: far more bitter than he would have been had it just been a case of dealing with a defeat. There was a space
next to him on the plane, an empty aisle seat – and nobody wanted to fill it. It was where Tito Vilanova would have sat.

It would be difficult to pinpoint a lower moment for the Barça coach’s morale.

‘It would be silly not to see the job through.’ That is what Sir Alex Ferguson would have told Pep before he made his decision. But the Manchester United manager might have thought
differently had he had seen Pep, alone, on that flight.

Andoni Zubizarreta had witnessed first hand the effect of Tito’s illness on Pep; he’d seen it on the trips to Milan and Madrid and in the way the coach behaved at the training ground
around those games. It was as if he’d had a puncture and all his energy was leaking out through the hole. He seemed deflated, thinner, stooped, suddenly older and greyer.

Zubi wished now he’d known then what to say to Pep, how to comfort and support him. It might not have changed anything, but the feeling of regret persists.

Of course, Tito pulled through, but that week confirmed Pep’s worst fears – he was not ready for more: more responsibility, more searching for solutions, more crisis avoidance and
endless hours of work and preparation, more time away from his family.

It confirmed a nagging doubt that had persisted since October, when just after the Bate Borisov Champions League game, he told Zubi and president Sandro Rosell that he didn’t feel strong
enough to continue for another season: that if he was asked to renew his contract right then, his answer would be ‘no’. It was not a formal decision, but he was making his feelings
known. The reaction of
the club was instant: he would be given time, there was no need to rush.

Zubi, a lifelong friend and colleague, understands Pep’s character – and knew that it was best not to put pressure on him. The director of football hoped that Pep’s revelation
could be attributed to him feeling a little tired, understandably low: something of an emotional rollercoaster that he had seen Guardiola riding on a few occasions when they were team-mates.

Yet Zubizarreta also recalled a meal he had with Pep in his first season with the first team. It was a meeting between friends. Zubi wasn’t working for the club at that point and Pep was
still very excited about what he was doing with the side and how well everything was being received. His enthusiasm was contagious. Yet he reminded Zubizarreta that his job at Barcelona came with
an expiry date. It was a defence mechanism for Pep, because he knew as well as anybody that the club could chew up and spit out managers mercilessly. Pep was insistent that one day he would lose
his players, his messages wouldn’t carry the same weight, that the whole environment (the media, the president’s enemies, talk-show panels, former coaches and players) would be
impossible to control in the long term.

A friend of Pep’s, Charly Rexach – former player, assistant manager to Johan Cruyff and Barcelona first-team coach, an icon of the Catalan club and legendary public philosopher
– always said that a Barcelona manager dedicates only 30 per cent of his efforts to the team: the other 70 per cent is spent dealing with the rest of the baggage that comes with such a huge
institution. Pep sensed this when he was a player, but as a coach he quickly experienced that interminable pressure – and that Charly’s calculation was correct.

Johan Cruyff, who regularly shared long meals with Guardiola, understood that as well and had already warned Pep that the second year was harder than the first, and the third harder than the
second. And if he could relive his experience as boss of the Dream Team, he would have left the club two years earlier. ‘Don’t stay longer than you should,’ Cruyff told Pep on one
occasion.

So Zubizarreta knew it was going to be difficult to convince him to stay, but would give it his best shot. The director of football mixed
protection with silence, and
sometimes a bit of pressure in search of an answer. The answer never came. Guardiola’s responses to Zubi’s questions about his future were always the same: ‘You already know what
I’m going through, it is difficult’ and ‘We’ll talk, we’ll talk’.

At the start of the 2011–12 season, after the league and the Champions League had been won, Guardiola called a meeting with his players to remind them what every coach has told his
successful team since the day football was invented: ‘You should know that the story doesn’t end here. You must keep on winning.’ And the team continued winning silverware: the
Spanish Super Cup, the European Super Cup and the World Club Championship in December.

With limited weapons in his armoury due to the absences of Villa and Abidal, and after having built a small squad, Barcelona paid a high price in La Liga for the energy they put into the Copa
and the Super Cup (games in which they celebrated wins over Real Madrid). Barcelona’s fanbase supported Pep, obsessed as they all were with halting their bitter rival’s revival.

In September, the game against AC Milan in the group stage of the Champions League was a turning point and an omen for the season ahead. The Italians drew 2-2 in the last minutes of the game at
the Camp Nou – the equaliser the consequence of a poorly defended corner – and Guardiola reached the conclusion that his team had lost its competitive edge and there was a lack of
attention being paid to the finer points that had made Barcelona so special. This was followed by a run of relatively poor away form in La Liga, that included that 1-0 defeat to Getafe in
November.

Pep periodically asked himself if the players were getting his message the way they were a few years ago; he debated the reasons why the 3-4-3 system he had been using that year wasn’t
working to plan. He took risks with the line-up, as if he knew that there wouldn’t be a fifth season. He sensed that it was getting increasingly difficult to control his players, some of whom
could even lose their way in the world of football if they didn’t start correcting their bad habits. Dani Alvés, who separated from his wife during the summer and made the mistake of
returning late from his holidays over Christmas, was given the unexpected surprise of a week off mid-season to clear his
mind – an unprecedented move, at least one done so
openly, in the history of Spanish football’s greats.

Furthermore, there were a couple of occasions when the full back would receive a telling-off in front of his team-mates for not paying attention to tactics, something Pep rarely did. ‘A
defender, first and foremost you’re a defender,’ he told him after a game in which he got involved in the attack more than he should have done. The Brazilian, meanwhile, was unimpressed
when he was left on the bench. He wasn’t the only one. Seeing their distraught faces during games upset Pep. He spoke indirectly to the players who were angry about being left out of the team
by praising the behaviour of players such as Puyol and Keita when they weren’t starting. ‘I’m sure they’ve called me everything, but the first thing they did when they found
out was support the team,’ he told them.

Logically, those kinds of problems multiplied as the seasons went by, commonplace in any dressing room. But every conflict, even the most trivial, was chipping away at the bridges Pep had so
delicately constructed with his squad.

There were still high points. Barcelona eliminated Real Madrid in the quarter-finals of the cup in February and Guardiola appeared to have gone back to being the Pep of previous seasons:
energetic, challenging, inexhaustible. The team was still fighting for every trophy and the board thought that success would convince him to stay, even though his silence on his future had started
to become the subject of criticism from some directors who referred to Pep as the ‘Dalai Lama’ or the ‘mystic’. In a way, the club was a hostage to Guardiola’s
decision.

Little by little, Zubizarreta was trying to find common ground to get Pep to put pen to paper on a new contract. Then, in November, the director of football proposed Tito Vilanova as Pep’s
successor, an almost logical Plan B, perhaps, but also a tactic to get Pep to visualise his departure and, perhaps, make him think twice about it.

Secretly, the club calculated that Pep’s birthday could be the turning point. Two years before, on his thirty-ninth birthday, Pep went with his girlfriend Cris to see the Catalan band
Manel. His lack of renewal had become national news and the band, and the audience, changed
the words of a song to wish him a happy birthday and demand his signature. The next
day, Pep announced he was staying for another year.

By 18 January 2012, on his forty-first anniversary, Tito Vilanova had returned to the team, Barcelona had destroyed Santos in the FIFA Club World Cup final in Tokyo and the club thought the
conditions were right for Pep to change his mind. But the confirmation wasn’t forthcoming.

Over the course of the following months, up until 25 April 2012 when he announced that his decision was final, both the director of football and the president Sandro Rosell would subtly
introduce the conversation even in private dinners.

‘So, how are things going?’ Sandro asked him at an event in February, surrounded by figures from Catalan politics and society, perhaps not the best moment to raise the issue.

‘Now’s not the time, President’ was Pep’s blunt response. He never let his guard down.

Rosell had won the presidential elections in June 2010 after Joan Laporta ended his final permitted term. Months before, Pep had agreed to stay on for a season but wanted the new man in charge
to confirm the details. Two weeks after Rosell was voted in the contract had not been signed, agreed, negotiated or even talked about. In the meantime, Dmytro Chygrynskiy, signed the previous
season for €25 million, was sold for €15 million back to Shakhtar Donetsk, from where he had originally come. Guardiola was not pleased. He didn’t want his centre back to go but the
club, he was told, needed to pay wages, having run out of cash, thus shrewdly proving the point that Laporta had left the club in a poor financial state.

The response came quickly. Johan Cruyff, Pep’s mentor, returned the medal given to him by Laporta as a President of Honour, a very public gesture that amounted to an official declaration
of war between the two presidents. A throwing down of the gauntlet. And Guardiola was going to be placed in the middle of it all.