Page 139 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

According to Pep: ‘Messi doesn’t compete to appear in magazines, attract girls or appear in
adverts, but to win the match, the title, the personal challenge. He competes against the rival, against
Cristiano Ronaldo, against Madrid, against Mourinho. Rain or shine, whether they foul him or not,
basically he competes against himself to show that he is the best. He’s not interested in the rest of it.

Our obligation is to give the boy the ball in the best conditions. The rest is a case of sitting down and
watching how it turns out.’
The Argentinian, who will never be able to illuminate for us the secret to his success, doesn’t need
to have things explained to him twice when talking about football, nor receive messages via the press,
a trick that Pep quickly abandoned. He understood what Guardiola wanted from him and he applied
that to his game. He’ll switch wings in order to help Barça gain superiority, he will hold back or he
will almost disappear from the game only to reappear again by surprise. As Pep told the Argentinian

coach Alejandro Sabella, ‘You don’t need to talk much to him, just protect him and listen to the very
things he says. And don’t take him off, not even for an ovation.’ Unlike the foreign players who are
signed as stars, he has grown up in La Masía, immersed in the culture of the club. ‘He can participate
in the “musical theory” side of things, accompanying Xavi and Iniesta – and then finish off with an
exceptional solo’, as Ramón Besa describes it. ‘He usually does what the move demands of him.’ He
only does his fancy tricks to solve a problem.

And if things got complicated, he would always step up to the challenge. You simply have to be
clever in the way you ask things of him. So Pep would sometimes tell the players just before a game:
‘You should know that Leo is going to pressurise high up and will commit himself to the cause every
time we decide to press.’ Indirectly, Leo, that is your order. While manager of Swansea, Brendan
Rodgers said, ‘Leo Messi has made it very difficult for footballers who think they are good players. If
you have someone like him doing the pressure without the ball, then I’m sure my friend Nathan Dyer
can do it. It is an easy sell.’

Messi has a certain freedom in attack, yet he is well aware of his responsibilities in defence. If he
is distracted, the midfielders remind him of that, because the great success of teamwork is having
shared responsibilities. The Argentinian knows that he can miss one or two defensive movements, but
not a third. In one game against Arsenal, Xavi and Iniesta, who generally act as his guardians, had to
tell him off for disappearing from the game, for not tracking back, overshadowed by Ibrahimović who

had scored twice and was playing as a centre forward.
From day one, Guardiola took an holistic approach, overseeing every level of his team’s
preparation: physical, medical and dietary. And when he discovered that Argentinian beef – arguably
the best there is – formed the basis of Messi’s diet, the player having never eaten fish, the coach
insisted that a special diet was drawn up for him, banning cola, popcorn, pizza, and – Messi’s
favourite – conguitos (chocolate peanuts).
The effort to understand and accommodate Messi is justified not only because of his talent, but

primarily because of his behaviour; his commitment. Leo works his socks off in every training
session; his team-mates see that. He has never said: ‘I am Messi, you have to do this for me.’ He
generally recognises that there is no ‘I’ in ‘team’. For that reason, there were occasions when
Guardiola gave Messi permission to go on holiday earlier than the rest of the squad or allowed him to
return later. The logic was straightforward: he was often asked to do more than anybody else and
frequently Messi played more. And scored more, and won more games.

During the process of determining Messi’s ideal partner in attack, Guardiola had made some big
decisions but he did also have some footballing doubts: where did he want to take the team?
Barcelona was experiencing unprecedented success but Pep had changed his footballing criteria from