Page 76 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

team. And they became a tandem. ‘I would mention something to Tito,’ Pep says. ‘If he keeps quiet, I
know I have to convince him. If his face doesn’t change it is probably because I got it wrong.’
Always in the corner of the shot when the cameras zoom in on Guardiola during matches, Tito was
there in his tracksuit, giving opinions and advising Pep on the bench. They complemented each other

perfectly, as Tito points out: ‘I am really at ease with Pep because he gives me a kind of lead role, he
listens to me and gives me a voice within the team.’
Watching the players train one morning while still in Scotland, Pep pointed at Puyol and asked
Tito, ‘What do you make of what he did just then?’ ‘First, we need to know why he did it,’ Tito said.
Pep halted play. ‘Not like that!’ Pep Guardiola, ‘the coach’, took over. ‘Puyi! You shouldn’t leave
your marker until the ball is released for the pass.’ But Barça’s captain did what no one else did. ‘I
did it because the other forward had managed to pull away from his marker,’ he replied, while

inviting Tito to join in the debate: ‘Isn’t that right, Tito?’ Pep listened to the reasoning and then went
on to explain: ‘You’re right, but ..., proceeding then to give Puyol a lengthy, profound talk about how
he should position himself on the pitch. A talk like so many others he would give during his first pre-
season at St Andrews.
‘We all know how to play football, but very few of us know the type of football that the coach
wants us to play,’ Dani Alvés said at the time. ‘At first, he would halt many training sessions to

correct us, to explain what he wanted from us,’ Piqué recalls; ‘but we are grateful to him for that
because we’ll soon be coordinated and we will be able to transfer his ideas on to the pitch.’ With a
special focus on Messi (Pep spent a great deal of time working on his defensive game), the new
coach had one overriding message he wanted to transmit to the entire squad: ‘I want them all to
understand that they can be much better as a team.’
Although he wanted an element of democracy within the group, with players using their initiative,
making suggestions and keeping an open mind to new ideas, Guardiola did not delay in imposing a

number of strict rules in his first few days in charge: such as insisting upon the use of Castilian and
Catalan as the only languages spoken among the group, arranging a seating plan at meal times to
encourage the players to mix and to prevent the team forming up into different cultural or national
groups and cliques. However, his rules and the imposition of fines for those breaking them were not
introduced as a measure to keep the players under strict control, but, rather, as a means to encourage a
stronger sense of solidarity and responsibility. Two years later, Pep abolished his own system of

sanctions and penalties, feeling that they had become unnecessary with the group exercising an
impressive degree of self-discipline.
In life there are two ways of telling people what to do: either give them orders or set an example
and encourage them to follow it. Pep is very much of the latter school of thought. In the modern game,
if a coach does not know how to handle the different characters and varying individuals’ needs, then
he will struggle to lead. Guardiola has a psychological edge, experience and intuition, which helps
him detect any problem and in Barcelona’s dressing room he surrounded himself with people he

could trust who were capable of helping him intervene at the right moment.
‘I didn’t know the boss or how he worked,’ Eric Abidal remembers. ‘The first month was difficult,
because I’m a father, I’m thirty years old, and you don’t speak in the same way to a young player who
has just started in professional football, as you would to a veteran. And he was doing exactly that! He
made us change who we sat with at meal times and he made me speak in Castilian with Henry when
we were with the group. I went to speak to the president, Laporta, to tell him that I wouldn’t tolerate

it, that I wanted to leave, but he told me to calm down, that it was his way of doing things and that
everything would go well. Now, I still laugh with the boss when we think about it.’