Page 50 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

Late at night in an apartment in Culiacán, north-west Mexico, 2005

After dinner over a glass of wine, Pep and Lillo would stay up until the small hours of the morning
discussing the beautiful game even if they had training the following day. Pep sometimes worries that
he can bore his friends to tears with his one-track conversations about football, football and more

football. He had no such fears when it came to his relationship with Lillo, who had always been at the
end of the phone to discuss the finer details of the game and had been a frequent visitor to Pep’s house
while he played in Serie A. Pep hasn’t talked football anywhere near as much as he has done with
Lillo – who, along with Johan Cruyff, represents the biggest influence upon his evolution as a
manager.
Pep used to feel unprepared when it came to certain topics like defensive concepts or particular
training methodologies. When he needed answers he would turn to Lillo at any time of day: ‘How do

you solve this type of situation?’ ‘If I do this what will happen?’ According to Pep, Lillo is one of the
best prepared coaches in the world and a leader in his field when it comes to developing a vision of
the game, despite the fact that the world of elite sports hasn’t been kind in rewarding him.
Guardiola’s Mexican adventure finished in May 2006 when he returned to Spain, to Madrid, to
complete a coaching course, and in July of that same year he had earned the right to call himself a
qualified football coach. So, on 15 November 2006, Guardiola confirmed via a radio interview on

the Barcelona station RAC1 that he had retired from professional football. He was thirty-five years
old.
Unlike many former professionals, Pep had no desire to walk straight into the role of first-team
coach at a big club and, as he said at the time, he felt he still had a great deal to learn. ‘As a player,
the fuses have finally blown,’ said Pep, ‘but sooner or later I will be a coach. I’ll train any level
offered to me, someone just has to open the door and give me the chance. I’d love to work with the
youth side, with the kids, because I’ve no pretensions that I’m ready to work at a higher level yet. You

have to respect the fact that this is a process, a learning curve. The first steps are vital and there are
no second chances once you step up.’
In that public and emotional farewell as a player, he paid homage to what football had given him.
‘Sport has served me as my influential educational tool; I learnt to accept defeat; to recover after not
having done things well. It has taught me that my team-mate could be better than me. Taught me to

accept that my coach can tell me I’m not playing because I’ve behaved badly.’
Pep may have finished his playing career but he wanted to continue learning about the game. It
wasn’t enough for him to have had first-hand experience of the methods of Cruyff, Robson, Van Gaal,
Mazzone or Capello, so he travelled to Argentina to deepen his knowledge. There, he met Ricardo La
Volpe (a former Argentine World Cup-winning goalkeeper and the former coach of the Mexican
national team), Marcelo Bielsa (the much admired former Argentina and Chile national coach, and
Athletic de Bilbao manager) and ‘El Flaco’, César Luis Menotti (the coach who took Argentina to the
World Cup in 1978) to talk at length about football. Menotti said after his visit, ‘Pep didn’t come here

looking for us to tell him how it was done. He already knew that.’
With his friend David Trueba, Guardiola drove the 309 kilometres from Buenos Aires to Rosario
to meet Bielsa. The meeting between the two football men took place in the Argentinian’s charca, or
villa, and lasted eleven intense yet productive hours. The pair chatted with wide-eyed curiosity about
each other. There were heated discussions, searches on the computer, revising techniques, detailed

analyses and enactments of positional play which, at one point, included Trueba man-marking a chair.
The two men shared their obsessions, manias and the passion for the game – and emerged from the