Page 58 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

on the pitch in every single game. He wanted the team to act as professionals even if they weren’t yet
considered so and to be competitive in everything they did. ‘The aim is to gain promotion and in
order to do that we have to win and we can’t do that without effort,’ he said to them. He also pointed
out that the attacking players would need to become the best defenders; and the defenders would have

to become the first line of attack, moving the ball forward from the back.
And that no matter what happened, the playing style was non-negotiable: ‘The philosophy behind
this club’s style of play is known by everyone. And I believe in it. And I feel it. I hope to be able to
transmit it to everyone. We have to be ambitious and we have to win promotion, there’s no two ways
about it. We have to be able to dominate the game, and make sure that we aren’t dominated
ourselves.’
The club had bagged a prize asset. He was useful for the institution, and not just because he won

games but also because he understood and applied what La Masía had taught him; La Masía, the
academy that had shaped him and made him strong, that had accentuated his strengths and hidden his
weaknesses, ultimately leading him to success.
Pep settled into his new role by surrounding himself with a team of assistants whom he knew he
could trust, a group of colleagues who had been inseparable since the time they had first met at La
Masía: his right-hand man, Tito Vilanova; the rehabilitation coach, Emili Ricart; and the fitness

coach, Aureli Altimira. The group quickly became aware that the technical quality of the players they
had at their disposal in the B team was never in doubt: because of the selection processes involved,
every player at La Masía had above average technique after more than two decades favouring
intelligent youngsters who could play the ball rather than being considered for their physiological
characteristics. However, Pep realised that in order to make the team a success he needed to add
intensity and an increased work rate to their technical abilities.
And, above all else, they had to learn to win. Instilling a fiercely competitive, winning spirit into a

team, an academy already blessed with an abundance of talent, represented something of a watershed
for grass-roots football at FC Barcelona.
The B team’s relegation to the fourth tier of the Spanish league was symptomatic of a club that had
prioritised its philosophy, but lacked the skill to implement it competitively at youth level. Pep set
about disbanding the Barcelona C team, which had been playing in the third division, combining the
pick of the players from the squads and taking the revolutionary step of allowing players over twenty-

one to join the new B team structure for a maximum of two seasons before being sold. In allowing
older footballers to play alongside the under-21s in the B team, Pep was breaking with tradition in the
hope that he would raise standards and make them more competitive.
In combining the B and C teams, Pep had to trim a group of fifty players down to just twenty-three,
resulting in a great number of players being released from La Masía – an unenviable task, as
described by David Trueba: ‘Pep wanted to find teams for the players he was letting go; he had to
arrange meetings with their parents, holding back tears, dissolving the childhood dreams and

vocations of those boys who thought that football was more important than life itself, who had put
their studies on hold because they were boys who were called to succeed. Creating that squad was a
“bricks and mortar” job, of intuition and strength, a dirty and thankless task. From one day to the next
you had to decide if you were letting a lad called Pedro leave the club to go to Gavá or if you were
keeping him.’ The decisions also had to be made quickly, after only half a dozen training sessions: a
risky business, with the potential for mistakes. But, again, Pep could live with the mistakes, because

they were his mistakes.
Guardiola immediately set about introducing a series of habits, working practices, systems and