Page 44 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

gain if I leave, and it was fuller than the one containing things if I stay.’
Pep said goodbye two months before the season finished at an emotionally charged, packed Nou
Camp press conference. He took his place in front of the microphone alone, without the customary
presence of a representative of the board. The president at the time, Joan Gaspart, someone who

seldom missed an opportunity to share the limelight, was conveniently away on business. Pep, his
voice cracking with emotion, announced: ‘I came here when I was thirteen years old, now I am thirty
and a father of a family. My career is slipping through my fingers and I want to finish it abroad,
experiencing other countries, cultures and leagues. I feel quite liberated: a little calmer, a bit more
comfortable.’
On 24 June 2001, after eleven seasons in the first team, Pep Guardiola, Barça’s captain, the most
decorated player in the club’s history and the last iconic symbol of the Dream Team still playing at

the Camp Nou, walked away from the club he loved. He had played 379 games, scored just ten goals,
but won sixteen titles, including six leagues, one European Cup, two cups and two Cup Winners’
Cups. He also departed as much more than just another great player: he left as a symbol of the team’s
Catalan identity in an era defined by an influx of foreign players.
After his final match at the Nou Camp, the return leg of the semi-finals of the Spanish Cup against
Celta that saw Barcelona knocked out, Pep waited until everyone else had left the stadium. Cristina,

his partner, came to support him, just as she had done from the day they first met when he walked into
her family’s store in Manresa – when a simple shopping trip to try on a pair of jeans led to a
relationship that would become a source of strength and comfort to Pep throughout the toughest
moments of his career. Moments like this. The couple, alongside his agent, Josep María Orobitg,
made their way from the dressing room, down the tunnel and up the few steps that lead to the Camp
Nou touchline; where he stood, for the very last time as player, to say goodbye to the pitch he’d first
laid eyes on as a ten-year-old boy sitting behind the goal in the north stand some two decades earlier.

He soaked up the silence in the empty stadium, but he didn’t feel like crying. The overriding emotion
was that of a great weight being lifted from his shoulders.

An Italian village, the dining room of a house. Luciano Moggi sits down to lunch
surrounded by bodyguards. Midday, summer 2001

‘When Pep left, it was a difficult time,’ recalls Charly Rexach. ‘They called him everything
imaginable, he got a lot of stick without being to blame for anything that had gone on. The home-

grown players were always on the receiving end. He was burned out and he suffered a lot. Guardiola
suffers, he’s not the type of person who can shake these things off. He was overloaded, he felt a sense
of liberation when he moved on.’
Pep was thirty years old when he played his last game for the club and was still in good shape, so
it was inevitable that people expected him to move to one of Europe’s leading clubs. Offers started
pouring in. Inter, AC Milan, Roma, Lazio, all came calling from Italy. Paris Saint-Germain and even a
couple of Greek clubs expressed an interest. In England, Pep’s availability aroused the interest of

Tottenham, Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester United, Wigan, West Ham and Fulham. But Pep wanted
to play for the team that had captured his imagination as a small boy kicking a ball around the village
square. He wanted to sign for Juventus, just as Platini had, his idol on the poster on his bedroom wall
in Santpedor.
According to Jaume Collell in his excellent biography of Guardiola, Pep’s negotiations with