Page 194 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

Appendix 1

LA MASÍA

The modern FC Barcelona with an idea, a philosophy, a way of playing, a particular type of
footballer, started as far back as the mid-seventies.

In 1974 Laureano Ruíz became general coordinator for youth football and one of the first things he
did was to tear down a notice next to the entrance of his new office that read: ‘If you are coming to
offer me a youngster who measures less than 1.80 metres, you can take him back.’
‘Laureano prioritised the technical quality of a footballer, reaction times and, above other factors,
intelligence, to learn and understand the game,’ explains Martí Perarnau, former Olympic highjumper,
journalist and now the leading analyst of the Barcelona youth system. ‘He wanted players who

controlled the ball with their first touch, who had quick feet, who retained the ball and created
superiority from individual technique and group work. He said that if you pass the ball well, you
receive it well and have good control; then you have far more possibilities. He stood against the
established rules, which emphasised tall and strong players even if they were clumsy. Winning one
battle after another, he steadily planted the first seeds of that philosophy in the club.’
The training sessions were based on the use of the ball and not on the physical exercises and
continuous running that were fashionable at that time. When asked why Laureano’s kids ran so little,

he would explain, ‘If we spend all our time running, when will they learn to play with the ball?’ After
all, footballers never run constantly in a game, do they? They do short sprints, stop, change direction,
long sprints … Emphasis on physical exercise alone isn’t necessary; it should be incorporated into
training and practice with the ball.
In Perarnau’s fascinating book The Champions Path, Laureano explains how he introduced the
drills known as ‘rondos’ (a form of piggy-in-the-middle, also known as Toros) that would

encapsulate and instil the essence of a club philosophy still practised by the kids at La Masía
endlessly, even today: ‘No one else did it in Spain, it was the fruit of hours and hours of reflecting
about football. I started with 3 against 2. I saw that way two of the three moved wide and there was
always one free. I thought, why not do 4 against 2? Or 9 against 3?’
The Barça of the 1970s had an English trainer, Vic Buckingham, who asked the president Agustí
Montal to close the academy and invest the money in buying top-class players for the first team.
Thankfully, Montal refused, so Laureano Ruíz persisted with the idea of organising and establishing a

unique style of play and a common methodology throughout the club.
When Johan Cruyff said, just after becoming manager of Barcelona in 1988, ‘This is what we are
going to do: the ball will be the starting point, I want to dominate possession and I will always go out
to win, which means it forces my players to conquer the ball, to have it and not lose possession of it’,
it sounded familiar to those at La Masía because they had heard Laureano saying similar things

twenty-six years earlier. Despite the fact that all big clubs are under pressure to win and prioritise the