Page 142 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

Messi’s circle what they would think if Barcelona signed Neymar. Messi knows the young star
through Dani Alvés and the three have played online football on PlayStation. The club got the answer
it was looking for: ‘Go ahead, sign him.’
Did Pep feel that he had given Messi too much power? When he spoke about leaving the club so as

not to ‘hurt each other’, many interpreted that as a reference to, among other players, Messi. Would
staying mean for Pep readdressing the balance of power somehow and avoiding one player scoring
seventy-three goals and the rest evading responsibility?
There is an argument to be made that Pep Guardiola started his coaching career at Barcelona
developing the team’s collective play but that in his last season he gave in to individual quality. It is
something that all managers do because the footballers are ultimately the ones who decide games and
especially if the individual in question is Messi.

Getting the right balance between an exceptional player and the team ethic is very difficult and yet
Pep somehow managed it for the majority of his time as a coach. But was it necessary for Pep to say
so clearly and so often that Messi was special? Was that the start of something that would eventually
culminate in Guardiola leaving the club, conscious of the imbalance that had been created? The coach
is the equilibrium. And if he gives in to a player, according to the unwritten rules of football the
scales need to be realigned.

Other victims of Messi

Fernando Parrado was one of the sixteen survivors of an event known as the ‘Andes Tragedy’. In
October 1972, a squad of Uruguayan rugby players was flying from Montevideo to Santiago de Chile
when they crashed in the snow-bound Andes. The survivors, in a story dramatised in the Hollywood
movie Alive, waited seventy-two days to be rescued. Low on food, with friends dying around them
and the feeling that there was no hope, they eventually cannibalised the bodies of the dead in order to
stay alive. Parrado crossed the Andes with his friend Roberto for ten days in search of help, traipsing
through deep snow wearing a pair of training shoes. In Guardiola’s last year in charge, Fernando gave

a motivational talk to the whole Barcelona squad.
‘It helped us realise that awful things happen that can destroy anyone, but there are people who
rebel against it and fight for their lives,’ Gerard Piqué commented on the talk. Later, Parrado gave an
account of his impression of the Barcelona players on Uruguayan television. ‘They’re sensitive young
men, they were like an amateur team. And Guardiola told me that if there is a hint of disharmony

within the group he removes it, as he did with Eto’o and Ibrahimović, who wanted to be stars in a
team where no one feels a star.’
In Pep’s first season in charge, Barcelona had missed a clear opportunity on goal in a key moment
during a crucial game – the coach doesn’t want to remember which game nor who had the chance. But
immediately after the miss he turned around to look at the bench. Some footballers had leapt from it in
anticipation of the ball nestling in the back of the net, while others neither moved nor reacted. Pep is
guided by many details such as this to understand the thinking of his group, and this one probably
stayed in his memory. It ended up being more than an anecdote. The following summer all the players

who had failed to react had left the club.
At the start of Pep’s fourth season in charge of the first team, another striker had to move on. It
wasn’t David Villa, signed to replace Ibrahimović and with whom Guardiola was very publicly
delighted. It was Bojan, the amicable, baby-faced and shy-looking boy, who won the hearts of