Page 191 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

Never before have the ideas of one individual had so much influence at FC Barcelona. Pep was
more than Messi, more than the president. The challenge for the Catalan club had always been to
convert their irregular access to success into a methodology that guaranteed its continuity. Not only
the continuity of success – that can often depend on things beyond your control – but mostly of the

integral working of the club.
And with Guardiola the club became stronger. He converted an idea into method and planning,
always with a flexible point of view, always based upon the central philosophy: as he repeated
hundreds of times in the corridors of the Camp Nou, of the training ground at Sant Joan Despí, ‘if we
have doubts, we attack, we get the ball and we attack.’ He knew better than anybody that he didn’t
know everything about modern football, so he showed the need for a powerful group of specialists
who helped deconstruct the complex puzzle of this game. Another legacy: the many pairs of eyes.

Under Pep, football became entertaining for his players, too. Every job, when it becomes
professional, loses the essential amateur feeling, the ludic sense that every occupation should have.
His footballers, though, enjoyed playing as they used to as kids. Pep reminded them that the person
who thinks ‘I am going for a few hours of training and that is it’ will fall much earlier than those who
enjoy what they are doing. ‘Being amateurs at their job is what makes them special,’ Pep says. But it
was he who made them fall in love with football again, helped them create that Corinthian spirit.

On one occasion, English midfielder Jack Wilshere revealed that the former England coach Fabio
Capello had prepared a special video session: ‘We paid attention to Barça and how they put pressure
on.’ Similar videos have been viewed in dressing rooms of Championship teams, and other of
Leagues One and Two, and clubs of first and second and third divisions everywhere.
That is the big inheritance Pep has left us with. But there are small legacies, too.
At the beginning of the press conference at Stamford Bridge prior to the first leg of the semi-finals
against Roberto di Matteo’s Chelsea, a translator asked Guardiola if he could have a minute with him

at the end of the media proceedings. When all the questions had been answered, this slipped his mind
and Pep hurriedly left the press room. The translator, a young Spaniard living in London, ran after
him: ‘Can I have a minute with you?’ ‘Ah, yes, sorry, forgot.’
‘I am a coach here at Chelsea, Pep.’ And Guardiola listened to him for a minute, two or three even,
looking into his eyes, attentively. ‘I understand now why you translated so well the tactical concepts,’
Pep told him. That minute will last a lifetime for the young trainer.

The value of a minute, of a gesture.
Guardiola mixed, as Mascherano said that night, work with feelings. He wanted to transfer the
indescribable pleasure of caressing the ball. Outside Catalonia, Guardiola was seen as someone who
breathed life back into a game that had become stagnant and soulless.

In his last day in his office at the Camp Nou, Pep Guardiola gathered up a bunch of personal objects
he had been accumulating over four years. It is the place where, on so many occasions, that magic
moment appeared before him, where so many videos have been watched. Where he studied the words
he would utter to the press.
The laptop, books, CDs, photos of Maria, Màrius, Valentina, Cristina, all placed in cardboard

boxes. Should he leave behind the wooden table lamp, the paper one by the sofa, the rug?
As the last item went in the box, a thought. ‘We have made many people happy.’
And a memory: his son Màrius repeating his gestures in the technical area on the day of the Camp
Nou farewell, when all the spectators were on their way home and Pep was watching him from the