Page 33 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

‘The kids only want to play football, live football, and La Masía allows you to do it,’ Pep recalls.
‘Any time of day was ideal to get the ball and have a kickabout or to go and see how the others
trained. Occasionally, when I’m asked to do a talk in La Masía, I use the following example: each
night when you are going to sleep, ask yourselves if you like football or not; ask yourselves if right

then, you’d get up, grab the ball and play for a bit.’ If ever the answer is ‘no’, then that is the day to
start looking for something else to do.
There were other benefits to living in the football school. The Masía kids had the opportunity to
become privileged spectators in the Nou Camp by handing out club leaflets on match days or, after a
long waiting list, becoming ball boys. There is a picture of a young Pep on the pitch, gleefully
clapping alongside a couple of Barcelona players with Terry Venables carried aloft on their
shoulders in celebration after the final whistle the night FC Barcelona beat Gothenburg to reach the

European Cup final in 1986.
Pep learnt an unexpected lesson as a ball boy when the teenager waited for his idol Michel Platini
to come out for the warm-up before a Barcelona–Juventus game. He had been dreaming about it for
weeks, his first chance to see his childhood hero in the flesh, and he had a cunning plan to secure
Platini’s autograph: pen and paper tucked away in his pocket, Pep planned to pounce on the French
star as he walked across the pitch to join his team-mates in the warm-up on the far side – he knew it

was the only chance he was going to get without getting into trouble. Cabrini, Bonini, Brio jogged out,
then Michael Laudrup. But no Platini. It transpired that the French superstar didn’t always come out
with the team to do some stretching. ‘Ah,’ Pep thought, ‘so not all players are treated as equals; it
turns out they’re not all the same.’ The pen and paper stayed in his pocket, unused.
The Platini poster that hadn’t accompanied him to La Masía stayed on the wall of his bedroom in
Santpedor for a few years, but gradually another player, this one far more accessible, took centre
stage: Guillermo Amor, future midfielder of the Johan Cruyff side, four years older than Pep and also

resident at La Masía.
‘At the time, when I started to pay attention to everything that you did, I was thirteen years old,’
Pep wrote a decade ago in reference to Amor, in his autobiography My People, My Football. ‘I
didn’t just follow every one of your games, but also the training sessions; I paid attention to your
attitude, because you faced everyone as if your life depended on it. I used to have my practical
football lessons at 7 p.m. on an adjacent pitch; but I used to turn up two hours earlier, so I could listen

in on the theory class on pitch number 1: seeing how you carried yourself, how you encouraged your
team-mates, how you asked for the ball, how you listened and how you earned the respect of everyone
around you. I pay tribute to you today for every one of those moments you gave us back then at La
Masía on pitch number 1, during mealtimes, in the dressing room, throughout the holidays, away at
hotels and even on television.’
When Amor returned from away games with the B team – a side that also included Tito Vilanova,
Pep’s future assistant and successor in the Camp Nou dugout – Guardiola would pester him for the

score and details of how they’d got along. ‘We won,’ would be the standard answer. Over the next
few years, Amor, who embodied all the values instilled in players at the club right through to the first
team, became like a big brother to Pep, who intuitively understood that the club is not only about the
bricks and mortar of the stadium or training facility, but mostly about the footballing DNA shared by
Guillermo and others like him. So when Pep took his first major decisions as a Barcelona manager,
selling Ronaldinho and Deco or approving Amor’s appointment as director of youth football, he did

so with a desire to return the focus of influence in the dressing room to home-grown players.
Guardiola remained a lanky teenager with little muscle mass, the opposite of the ideal footballer’s