Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography (8 page)

It is a training style that Pep emulates and applies today in his training sessions; but for a young player, Cruyff could be so imposing that it was difficult to talk to him. His iconic status
and his absolute conviction in his methods and ideas often created a near-authoritarian way of communicating.

On a sunny but cold day on the pitch sandwiched between La Masía and the Camp Nou, Cruyff decided to target Guardiola. ‘Two legs!’ he shouted at his pupil. And Laudrup and the
others laughed. ‘Two legs, two legs!’ The coach was trying to get Pep to lose his fear of his left foot. If he received the ball with his left foot, he could, with a slight touch,
switch it to the right one, then hit a pass. And vice versa. The problem for Pep was that he didn’t feel comfortable. ‘Two legs, kid!’ Cruyff kept shouting.

Johan Cruyff was the person who had the greatest influence on Guardiola: as the coach who was with Pep the longest (six years), and the one for whom Pep has the greatest affection and respect.
Cruyff was also the man who gave him the opportunity to play in the Barcelona first team, the one who believed in him at a time when
he was looking for exactly the kind of
player that Pep came to be – a passer of the ball positioned in front of the defence who could provide the platform from which every Barcelona attack would begin. He also taught his players
how to mark an opponent, teaching them to focus on a rival’s weaknesses – while accentuating what you were good at, to fight the battles you could win, in other words. It was a
revelation for Pep, who lacked the physique to beat a tall, powerful, central midfielder in the air – so he learnt, under Cruyff, to avoid jumping with his rival, but to wait instead.
Cruyff’s theory was: ‘Why fight? Keep your distance, anticipate where he’ll head the ball and wait for the bounce. You’ll be in control while he’s jumping
around.’

But it wasn’t all that easy for Pep, not in the beginning. After making his debut against Banyoles, eighteen months passed before Guardiola had the opportunity to play with the first team
again although his performances with the B side were not going completely unnoticed. Then, in the summer of 1990, Barcelona were looking for a central midfielder as Luis Milla, who regularly filled
that role, signed for Real Madrid – and Ronald Koeman was injured. Cruyff and his assistant Charly Rexach proposed that the club move for Jan Molby of Liverpool. The president asked for
alternatives and Rexach suggested Guardiola. Cruyff had little recollection of Pep’s disappointing debut and decided to go and see him play.

Unfortunately, on the day Cruyff dropped in on the B team, Pep spent the entire match on the bench. ‘You tell me he’s good; but he didn’t even play!’ he shouted to
Rexach. ‘I asked who was the best in the youth team. Everyone told me it was Guardiola but he didn’t even warm up. Why not if he is the best?’

Cruyff was incensed. They told him Pep wasn’t that strong physically and that other, bigger or more dynamic, quicker players were occasionally preferred in his position; to which Cruyff
replied: ‘A good player doesn’t need a strong physique.’

That argument led to the type of decision that has helped shape the recent history of the club.

The first day he was summoned again to train with the Dutch coach, Pep arrived early, eager. He opened the door of the changing room where he found a couple of players alongside the boss and
Angel
Mur – the team physio who was also an inadvertent conductor of the Barcelona principles, history and ideas. Pep kept his head down as he walked in. He stood still
and waited for instructions. ‘This is your locker. Get changed,’ Cruyff told him. Not another word.

On 16 December 1990, Pep, then nineteen years old, made his competitive La Liga debut against Cádiz at the Camp Nou – in a match for which his mentor, Guillermo Amor, was suspended.
Minutes before kick-off Pep suffered an attack of nerves: sweating profusely, his heart racing at a thousand miles an hour. ‘My palms were sweating and I was really tense.’ Thankfully
it didn’t occur on this occasion, but on other occasions his body had been known to betray him completely and he’d even been known to throw up before a big game. ‘He really lived
it, too much, even,’ remembers Rexach. At nineteen, Pep Guardiola lined up alongside Zubizarretta, Nando, Alexanco, Eusebio, Serna, Bakero, Goiko, Laudrup, Salinas and Txiki Beguiristain
– a collection of names that would soon become synonymous with one of the most glorious periods in the club’s history. The players who would come to be remembered for ever beat
Cádiz 2-0 that day.

That competitive debut marked some kind of a watershed moment for the club: a before and after in Barcelona’s history. Although Laureano Ruíz was the first coach to take the steps
towards the professionalisation of grass-roots football at Barça, it was Cruyff who really went on to establish the big idea, the philosophy – and no player epitomises that transition
better than Guardiola. Pep was the first of a legacy who has become a quasi-sacred figure at Barça: the number four (derived from the number five in Argentina, the midfielder in front of the
defence who has to defend but also organise the attack). It is true that Luis Milla played that role at the beginning of the Cruyff era, but it was Guardiola who elevated it to another level.

Pep only played three first-team games in that debut season but the following year Cruyff decided to position the lanky Guardiola at the helm of this historic team and, in doing so, established
a playing model and defined a position. The figure of Barcelona’s number four has evolved at the same rate as global football has edged towards a
more physical game, and
La Masía has gone on to produce players like Xavi, Iniesta, Fàbregas, Thiago Alcantara and even Mikel Arteta, proving that Guardiola’s legacy endures.

‘Guardiola had to be clever,’ Cruyff says today. ‘He didn’t have any other choice back then. He was a bit like me. You must have a lot of technique, move the ball
quickly, avoid a collision – and to avoid it you must have good vision. It’s a domino effect. You soon get a sharp eye for detail, for players’ positions. You can apply this when
you are a player and a coach, too. Guardiola learnt that way – thanks to his build – and he was lucky enough to have had a coach who had experienced the same thing.’

Once established in the first team, the best piece of advice Rexach gave Pep is one that he likes to repeat to his midfielders today: ‘When you have the ball, you should be in the part of
the pitch where you have the option of passing it to any one of the other ten players; then, go for the best option.’

Guardiola has said on numerous occasions that if he was a nineteen-year-old at Barcelona today, he would never have made it as a professional because he was too thin and too slow. At best, he
likes to say, he’d be playing in the third division somewhere. It might have been true a decade ago and perhaps even true at many other top clubs today, but not at FC Barcelona; not now. His
passing range and quick thinking would fit wonderfully into the team he coached – and his leadership skills must not be forgotten either; as it soon became evident in his playing career; he
didn’t just pass the ball to his team-mates, he talked to them constantly.

‘Keep it simple, Michael!’ shouted a twenty-year-old Guardiola on one occasion to Laudrup, the international superstar. The Danish player had tried to dribble past three players too
close to the halfway line, where losing the ball would have been dangerous. ‘That
was
simple,’ Michael replied with a wink. But he knew the kid was right.

Just seven months after his debut, Pep was not only one of the regulars, but also a leading player with immense influence in, at least up until recent times, the best Barça team in
history: Cruyff’s Barcelona won four consecutive La Liga titles between 1991 and 1994.

In the 1991–2 season, Barcelona had qualified for the European Cup final to be played against Sampdoria at Wembley, something that for Pep, both as a
culé
and player, represented the culmination of a dream. The club had never won that trophy.

The night before, in the last training session in London before the game, striker Julio Salinas and Pep were arguing about the number of steps up to the famous balcony where the cup was
collected at the old stadium. ‘There’s thirty-one steps, I’m telling you,’ argued Pep, for whom accuracy was important as he has a weakness for football mythology and
rituals. Salinas, who loved winding Pep up, got a kick out of disagreeing with him. Zubizarreta, the keeper, couldn’t bear to hear them squabbling any longer: ‘The best way to resolve
this is to win the game tomorrow! When we go up the steps to collect the cup, you can bloody well count them then, OK?’

Seventeen months after his debut, on 20 May 1992, Guardiola, as expected, found himself in the line-up of the European Cup final. Before heading out on to the pitch, Johan Cruyff gave his
players a simple instruction: ‘Go out there and enjoy yourselves.’ It was a statement that embodies an entire footballing philosophy and was central to Cruyff’s principles; yet
for others, its simplicity, ahead of such a key game, might be considered an insult to the coaching profession.

As Barcelona fans, players and directors were celebrating wildly after Ronald Koeman fired home a free kick in the final moments of the second half of injury time, at least one person wearing a
Barça shirt had something else on his mind amidst the chaos and euphoria. As the stadium erupted while one by one the Barcelona players held aloft the trophy known as ‘Old Big
Ears’, Zubi sidled up to Guardiola and said: ‘You were wrong, son, there’s thirty-three of them. I just counted them one by one.’

‘
Ciutadans de Catalunya, ja teniu la copa aquí
’ (Catalans, you have the cup here), cried Pep Guardiola from the balcony of the Generalitat Palace in Barcelona that
houses the offices of the Presidency of Catalonia. It was no accident that Barcelona’s returning heroes presented their first European trophy to the city
on the exact spot
from where, almost fifteen years earlier, the former Catalan president Josep Tarradellas had used a similar expression to announce his return from exile (‘
Ciutatans de Catalunya, ja soc
aquí
’, ‘I am finally here’). Guardiola, a Catalan referent of the team, of the club, understood the significance of FC Barcelona’s coronation as a European
superpower and its role now clearly established as an iconic symbol of the nation.

‘That night at Wembley was unforgettable: my greatest memory. It turned into a party that carried on through the following Liga matches,’ remembers Guardiola. Just a few days later,
Barcelona, led in midfield by the young Pep, won an historic league title in truly dramatic fashion. On the final day of the season, Real Madrid travelled to Tenerife as league leaders needing a
win to secure the title, something that many saw as a foregone conclusion. Yet after taking a 2-0 lead in the first half, a shambolic second-half collapse saw Madrid lose the match and, with it,
surrendered the league trophy to their rivals in Barcelona.

Cruyff was transforming a club that had, before 1992, been successful on the domestic front yet had failed to impose itself upon the European stage and established Barcelona as a genuine
international power. In fact, Cruyff did more than set a unique footballing model in motion: he challenged Barcelona fans to confront their fears, to overcome the sense of victimisation that had
been a constant feature of the club’s identity since the beginning of the century. This team, a collection of brilliant individual talents such as Ronald Koeman, Hristo Stoichkov,
Romário, Michael Laudrup, Andoni Zubizarreta, José Mari Bakero and Pep Guardiola pulling the strings in midfield, combined to become synonymous with beautiful, yet effective, fast and
free-flowing football that became universally known as the Dream Team.

The year 1992 continued to be a magical one for Pep as a footballer and, not long after the European Cup success, he found himself celebrating a gold medal win at the Barcelona Olympic Games.
Yet, Guardiola has bitter-sweet memories of the experience with the national team: ‘It passed me by like sand slips through your fingers,’ he recalls.

The Spanish Olympic football squad convened almost a month before the tournament at a training camp some 700 kilometres from Barcelona, near Palencia in northern Spain,
where, according to Pep, he behaved ‘like a complete idiot. I say it that clearly because that is just how I feel when I remember that I was distant and made myself an outsider from the
group. I didn’t show any intention of integrating, nor sharing in the solidarity that team members who have a common objective must show. My team-mates, despite being kind, would have at the
very least thought that I was full of myself: a fool. In the end, when I woke up from my lethargy, I ended up enjoying playing football with a team full of excellent players: guys with whom I
managed to forge strong, consistent friendships that have lasted until this day. The friendship, a triumph, as much as the gold medal we won.’ Some of the players in that Olympic Spanish side
– Chapi Ferrer, Abelardo, Luis Enrique (then at Real Madrid), Alfonso and Kiko – would go on to form the backbone of the senior national team throughout the following decade.

That summer Guardiola earned a reputation for being a little strange, a bit different from your average player: a label that, within certain football circles, he has been unable to lose. If the
distance he placed between himself and the rest of the national squad upset some, his intensity in games and training frightened others, distancing him even further from those who had little
interest in understanding the game. José Antonio Camacho, his national coach for three years, shares that view. ‘I saw Guardiola as a mystical type of person. The way he dressed
– always in black – he was sometimes very quiet, constantly analysing things, thinking things over: why we won, why we lost, why he’d lost the ball. Sometimes his obsessiveness
was excessive.’

That same year, his talent for making the right pass, for setting the rhythm of a game, touching the ball a thousand times a match and never for more than a second each time, his belief in the
style of play Cruyff had imposed, did not go unnoticed internationally and he was awarded the Trofeo Bravo for the most promising European footballer in 1992.