Page 48 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

‘I have closed the file and will leave it in a box. I don’t want to talk about it but if one day someone
wants to investigate, it’s all filed and it can be checked out,’ Pep told his good friend the journalist
Ramón Besa.
The overwhelming feeling was a mixture of relief and happiness, of course, but much more than

that. Guardiola had been carrying a huge burden on his shoulders and now felt suddenly weightless.
We are never far from the glare of public scrutiny, from the feared question, ‘What will people say?’
Suspicion and doubt assailed him during that period, and he wanted them gone. He just craved
confirmation of his innocence and demanded that the judicial system admit its mistake. A mammoth
task which was inevitably doomed to failure – no one embarks upon a judicial case without the
stigma of suspicion remaining, without a trauma of some kind enduring. It’s the accusation that’s
remembered, not the final judgement.

Yes, he had proved his innocence, and had fought hard to do so. He was cleared finally, and his
reputation and integrity restored, but he was determined to ensure that no one close to him would ever
undergo a similar ordeal. So, in a way, the battle continued.
The captain of the Barcelona B team he was coaching at the time came to his office on behalf of the
whole squad to congratulate him on the tribunal’s decision. While he was listening to him he realised
that he had, unconsciously, developed a very close bond with his players, a safety net he applied to

his pupils and one that would eventually become all-consuming, a fatherly feeling that probably
originated from the isolation and sense of abandonment he had felt during that long legal process.
The Italian federation took until May 2009 to officially accept the tribunal’s acquittal ruling, when
Pep was already enjoying success as manager of FC Barcelona. The beginning of the doping case had
been a front-page story, but was only a brief side note when he was cleared.
After a season at Brescia and while the court case was in progress, Guardiola signed for Roma in
the summer of 2002, motivated less by the opportunity to play for a bigger club than to be coached by,

and to learn from, Fabio Capello, a manager he greatly admires despite their differing approach to the
game. Pep was eager to experience Capello’s defensive rigour and discover his secrets in terms of
how to apply pressure upon an opponent. While he played little during his time at Roma, he learnt a
great deal. ‘He didn’t play much because, by then, he was coming to the end of his career,’ says
Capello. ‘He was a very well-behaved player. He never asked me for explanations as to why he
didn’t play. He knew what my idea of football was, but he was slow, he had some physical problems.

He was a quick thinker, he knew what to do before the ball reached him and was very clever with
positional play. And he was a leader.’
A lack of playing time in Rome eventually saw Guardiola return to Brescia in January 2003, where
he shared the dressing room with Roberto Baggio and Andrea Pirlo.
As his second spell at Brescia was coming to an end that same year, Pep received a call from Paul
Jewell, the Wigan manager at the time. ‘He’d always been one of my favourite players,’ Jewell says.
‘I got his number from his English agent. I called and left a message, “Hello, Pep, it’s Paul here”,

something like that. About ten minutes later he called back. He knew all about us. He’d watched us on
TV and talked about our midfield short passing. He knew [Jimmy] Bullard and [Graham] Kavanagh.
His wages were £10,000 a week. Then he got this mind-blowing offer from Qatar. He could have
played for the mighty Wigan, but ended up in some poxy job in Barcelona.’
In the meantime, before his move to the Qatari side Al-Ahli, Pep was presented with an
opportunity to work alongside Lluis Bassat, a candidate in the 2003 FC Barcelona presidential

elections with the backing of some of the most influential political and financial Catalan powers.
Bassat approached Guardiola, asking him to become the sporting director of his project and Pep