Page 189 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

Guardiola measures success in different ways from most coaches. His experience as a player, his
bitter departure from Barcelona in 2000 and his experience in Italy made him stronger. He values
happiness above anything else but, at the same time, doesn’t ignore the fact that money gives you the
freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want. His managerial career will be assessed not by

titles won, but because he did it his own way.
He needs the new club to offer him cariño, an expression that doesn’t exist in English, a concept
between friendship and love, respect and commitment. Affection is perhaps the closest.
After a few months away from football, after some long walks in New York, Guardiola will start
thinking about what happens next – and he will recover the capacity to want to imagine what happens
next. What he wants to do when he grows up.

As a player, Guardiola learnt to hide his private life; most players do. Discovering what they like,
what they do, is a little step away from using it against them. ‘Public opinion is cruel, but I like the
same as everybody: wine, reading, the family.’ Success, extreme success, had allowed the public to

think that Pep, his image, his private life, were public property. Sometimes he dreams of having
failed, or tries to imagine what that would be like, even how healthy that could be.
‘From failure you learn ten times more. Victory gives you ten minutes of peace, but then it makes
you stupid. In victory you have to realise what is not going right. I have many fears and insecurities, I
don’t like people that can and offer to sort everybody’s life. I want to be happy in my microcosm.’
‘It can be put very simply,’ argues one of the people who has had the greatest influence on Pep:

‘Guardiola fights against himself in the same way that Barça fights against Barça. The club is never
happy with itself, is it?’ Until recently, Barcelona has always had only very brief moments of
stability; the rest of its history is a succession of cycles: success, crisis, success again. The fight has
been to bring about a degree of stability. Pep was cast from the same mould. He wants to be, and
demands of himself that he be, the same coach who made his debut in 2008, but instead of finding
answers he finds more questions, a victim of his own dedication and perfectionism, and also of his
own torments and the difficulty he has in allowing people to help him.

Managing: one of the hardest and most solitary professions. Rich in victory; orphaned in defeat.
Guardiola treated defeat and victory with equal respect, but always kept a healthy distance from
both. But no matter how he wants the epitaph of his career at Barcelona to read, nobody is about to
usurp him from the most prominent place in Barça’s roll of honour and that of world football.
Ramón Besa uses some wonderful words to describe Pep’s legacy. ‘The football put in practice by

Guardiola stemmed from childhood romanticism, from the shots in the main square of Santpedor, and
is based on a cold and detailed analysis. It is consumed by the passion of returning to his childhood
and it is carried out with the precision of a surgical knife.’ As his friend David Trueba wrote,
‘Guardiola is always looking for “the perfect match”, that certain “El Dorado”, that paradise that isn’t
conceived without his impeccable conduct on and off the pitch.’
It is simplistic to reduce Pep’s influence to mere numbers, but the stats are extraordinary: 177
victories, 46 draws, 20 defeats. He gave twenty-two kids from the lower ranks the chance to make
their debut in the first team. He was the youngest coach to win two Champions League trophies; the

sixth to win it as both player and coach.
Without doubt, the best coach in the history of FC Barcelona.
The style, criticised in the past for being too baroque, irregular, unbalanced and often ineffective,
was still enjoyable and now also successful.