Page 148 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

find out what the manager’s plans were. Not even Pep knew it at that point, so that issue wasn’t dealt
with properly. ‘If it is not me, it will be someone else who will look after you,’ Pep told him on one
occasion.
Cesc was very clear to Pep: ‘If I’ve come here it is for you, too. Barça is my dream, of course, but

one of the things that has made it happen is because you are the coach. As well as the fact you were
my idol as a player and I have always admired you.’
Finally, in mid-August 2011, the transfer took place. Despite a certain scepticism on the part of
Rosell, who disagreed with the huge cost for a former player, Barcelona ended up paying €40 million
for the Arsenal captain.
With his return to Barça, Cesc had a weight lifted from his shoulders. He felt reborn and he
showed it in public and in private with his family. ‘Cesc is a very shy person. He keeps everything to

himself. It’s difficult for him to open up when he has a problem, and during his last few months in
London he had a bad time of it. We know because he hardly picked up the phone, not even when we
phoned him.’ The speaker is the player’s father, Francesc Fàbregas. ‘Obviously I’m very happy that
my son has come home, but to be sincere, I’m a bit worried because I’ve learnt that in life you always
have to be prepared for the blows, especially in the world of football.’
Straight after signing for his new club, Cesc spoke to Guardiola face to face. He wanted to

describe what he had been living through in his last months at Arsenal. He didn’t put it like that but he
was interested in finding out if Pep was going through the same experience. In the last months in
London, Fàbregas had lost the enthusiasm with which he had arrived at Arsenal as a sixteen-year-old.
His lacklustre training reflected that. Eight years had passed and it felt like he needed a new
challenge, something to help him rediscover that feeling in the pit of his stomach, that anxiety to
please, even the pleasure of combating his doubts.
He was happy to go back home even if he was going to be on the bench first, as everybody

expected. He knew, he told Pep, he wasn’t going to play often: ‘look at the players you have!’ But he
was willing to fight for his place. ‘I want to be whistled, that you ask more and more from me, I want
that pressure,’ Cesc added. He didn’t have any of that at Arsenal any more.
Pep opened up to him. It all sounded very familiar: ‘When I left Barça the same thing happened, I
went to train and I didn’t have the same excitement, that’s why I needed to leave.’
It was the first of many face-to-face chats they had in their single campaign together – in training

sessions, before and after games, in airport lounges. Not much about tactics at first because Pep just
wanted Cesc to rediscover his love for the game. And goals, and enjoyment, started arriving from the
first day.
In fact, Cesc Fàbregas learnt more than anyone in Pep’s last season at Barcelona. The manager,
conscious of the awe in which the midfielder held him, wanted his new player to see him as a guy
who took decisions. And from the moment the midfielder arrived, Guardiola wanted to fill
Fàbregas’s hard drive with as much information as possible (positional play, runs into the box,

movement off the ball, link-up play) with the hope that it would make sense at some point, even if at
first it didn’t totally sink in – and even though he might not be there to guide him through it.
Cesc, the media and fans thought he might not play much at first, but that he would be able to adapt
quickly; after all, he had played for Barcelona up until the age of sixteen, when he left to join Arsenal
in 2003. However, the years spent in England had logically made a huge imprint. When he returned to
Barcelona, he had left a club whose style of play gave him total freedom to move around; whereas

Barcelona’s play is more positional and demands other tactical obligations. Cesc found it difficult.
Although in his first few months he had the same freedom to move wherever his instincts took him