Page 68 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

On 17 June in the Paris Hall of the Camp Nou, Pep Guardiola, at thirty-seven, was officially
unveiled as the new manager of FC Barcelona. On the way to the room a confident Pep told an
anxious Laporta again: ‘Relax. You’ve done the right thing. We are going to win the league.’
The president had every reason to be worried. Despite Guardiola’s self-belief, in spite of the faith

placed in the new coach by the football brains at the club, it was still a huge gamble and these were
troubling times for the president of an institution in the doldrums. A team that had dazzled Europe a
few seasons earlier had collapsed spectacularly, the squad needed a major overhaul, brave decisions
had to be taken over some of the biggest stars in the game and Laporta’s popularity was at an all-time
low. Disastrous performances and results in the club’s other sports sections – such as basketball and
handball – combined with the humiliation of finishing eighteen points behind Madrid in La Liga,
together with concerns about Laporta’s leadership style resulted in a motion of censure that triggered

a vote in the summer. Exit polls showed that 60 per cent of the 39,389 votes cast were against the
president. However, even though he lost the overall vote, the necessary two-thirds majority required
to force him to stand down was not achieved. Laporta survived. Just.
‘That summer nobody outside the club had any faith in Pep, nor the team,’ Gerard Piqué, one of
Pep’s first signings, recalls now. The papers were full of negative opinions about Pep’s controversial
appointment: ‘it was too soon for him’, ‘surely he was too inexperienced’ went the consensus. But

then again, FC Barcelona and Pep Guardiola didn’t do things like everyone else.