Page 38 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

Presidency of Catalonia. It was no accident that Barcelona’s returning heroes presented their first
European trophy to the city on the exact spot from where, almost fifteen years earlier, the former
Catalan president Josep Tarradellas had used a similar expression to announce his return from exile
(‘Ciutatans de Catalunya, ja soc aquí’, ‘I am finally here’). Guardiola, a Catalan referent of the

team, of the club, understood the significance of FC Barcelona’s coronation as a European
superpower and its role now clearly established as an iconic symbol of the nation.
‘That night at Wembley was unforgettable: my greatest memory. It turned into a party that carried
on through the following Liga matches,’ remembers Guardiola. Just a few days later, Barcelona, led
in midfield by the young Pep, won an historic league title in truly dramatic fashion. On the final day of
the season, Real Madrid travelled to Tenerife as league leaders needing a win to secure the title,
something that many saw as a foregone conclusion. Yet after taking a 2-0 lead in the first half, a

shambolic second-half collapse saw Madrid lose the match and, with it, surrendered the league
trophy to their rivals in Barcelona.
Cruyff was transforming a club that had, before 1992, been successful on the domestic front yet had
failed to impose itself upon the European stage and established Barcelona as a genuine international
power. In fact, Cruyff did more than set a unique footballing model in motion: he challenged
Barcelona fans to confront their fears, to overcome the sense of victimisation that had been a constant

feature of the club’s identity since the beginning of the century. This team, a collection of brilliant
individual talents such as Ronald Koeman, Hristo Stoichkov, Romário, Michael Laudrup, Andoni
Zubizarreta, José Mari Bakero and Pep Guardiola pulling the strings in midfield, combined to
become synonymous with beautiful, yet effective, fast and free-flowing football that became
universally known as the Dream Team.
The year 1992 continued to be a magical one for Pep as a footballer and, not long after the
European Cup success, he found himself celebrating a gold medal win at the Barcelona Olympic

Games. Yet, Guardiola has bitter-sweet memories of the experience with the national team: ‘It passed
me by like sand slips through your fingers,’ he recalls.
The Spanish Olympic football squad convened almost a month before the tournament at a training
camp some 700 kilometres from Barcelona, near Palencia in northern Spain, where, according to Pep,
he behaved ‘like a complete idiot. I say it that clearly because that is just how I feel when I remember
that I was distant and made myself an outsider from the group. I didn’t show any intention of

integrating, nor sharing in the solidarity that team members who have a common objective must show.
My team-mates, despite being kind, would have at the very least thought that I was full of myself: a
fool. In the end, when I woke up from my lethargy, I ended up enjoying playing football with a team
full of excellent players: guys with whom I managed to forge strong, consistent friendships that have
lasted until this day. The friendship, a triumph, as much as the gold medal we won.’ Some of the
players in that Olympic Spanish side – Chapi Ferrer, Abelardo, Luis Enrique (then at Real Madrid),
Alfonso and Kiko – would go on to form the backbone of the senior national team throughout the

following decade.
That summer Guardiola earned a reputation for being a little strange, a bit different from your
average player: a label that, within certain football circles, he has been unable to lose. If the distance
he placed between himself and the rest of the national squad upset some, his intensity in games and
training frightened others, distancing him even further from those who had little interest in
understanding the game. José Antonio Camacho, his national coach for three years, shares that view.

‘I saw Guardiola as a mystical type of person. The way he dressed – always in black – he was
sometimes very quiet, constantly analysing things, thinking things over: why we won, why we lost,