Page 73 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

Barcelona for a long time: the club was now in the hands of those who understood it and truly cared
for it. It also meant that Guardiola was giving the home-grown players and the academy set-up a
boost: a vote of confidence. He’d worked and even played with many of them, others he was friends
with. Now they had to repay his trust and faith in them through their performances, hard work and

their commitment.
Johan Cruyff was among the first to endorse the new coach’s policies: ‘Guardiola knows what
Barcelona is all about, you need twenty eyes. Guardiola can control these things because he has been
through them. I can see that he is capable of doing it because he has made a great deal of decisions in
a short space of time.’
When he was Barça’s captain under Louis Van Gaal, Guardiola once said, ‘We always have to
respect the guidelines set by the coaches – but it is brilliant for a team that a player can get involved

and take on a role on the pitch.’ Van Gaal refused to allow the players a free rein to take the initiative
and he was unable to rectify things that were going wrong as they were happening. Guardiola
believed in handing greater responsibility to the footballers, trusting that their intuition could help
solve a great amount of their problems. As a coach, Pep remained true to this idea and was
determined to let his charges take the initiative.
Pep also promoted Pedro from the B team to the first team. He needed him for his style of play, a

winger who ran into space but who understood the need to give his all at all times, both in training
and during matches. Pedro’s parents, as Pep often reminds people, had a petrol station in Tenerife
and they could rarely see their son play because they didn’t have a television in the shop. At the
beginning of the summer, Pedro was preparing to go out on loan, but a player who had his feet planted
firmly on the ground suited Pep’s vision perfectly.
Pedro was moved to the first team alongside Sergio Busquets, another footballer who had shown in
the B team the previous season that he had intelligence, focus and a fundamental understanding of his

role as a central midfielder. For Pep, it also helped that he didn’t have a ridiculous haircut or tattoos
– and the new first team coach believed that ‘Busi’ would at some point prove to have the character
to continue in Xavi’s and Puyol’s footsteps as captain of the team.
Busquets and Pedro were the first of twenty-two players promoted from the youth system to the
first team during the four years with Guardiola at the helm. The pair went from playing third division
to Champions League football in a matter of weeks, and went on to win the World Cup the following

season.
The squad was complete, the balance re-established in terms of authority and credibility. But there
was to be an interesting contrast in terms of salaries.
Guardiola would earn one million euros a year gross plus bonuses, nine million less than Eto’o and
seven less than Messi. Pep had agreed to join the first team without negotiating his contract. When he
signed it, he was the fourth lowest paid coach in Spain. He didn’t care.

And finally the first day of pre-season arrived. As Xavi recalls: ‘The holidays really dragged out
because I wanted to join up with the team.’
Two trophyless years had passed them by. A change was needed. Important decisions had to be

made. But, first and foremost, Pep had to get the team on his side. A face-to-face meeting with the
squad as a whole was still pending.
It took place on the first day of training at the world-famous St Andrews, in Scotland, in a basement
conference room of the hotel where they were staying during the first week of pre-season. It turned