Page 17 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

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.