Page 82 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

As a coach, a teacher, Guardiola believes that when one of his pupils truly understands why they are
required to act in a specific way, they believe more in what they are being asked to do. It also means
that this increases their capacity to take the initiative, or question what they’ve been told to do, in a
more responsible way when the need arises.

This is how one of his pupils, Gerard Piqué, put it: ‘The coach makes us understand football. He
doesn’t just give us orders, he also explains why. That makes you a better player, since you know the
reasons behind the instructions. That way everything has a meaning.’ While at FC Barcelona,
Guardiola introduced a new approach to coaching and learning; he paid a lot of attention to detail.
Piqué goes further: ‘He has absolute conviction in what he believes and the team has taken on a rich
football manual, from a tactical point of view, with pride.’ On the field of play, in the heat of the
action, it enabled Guardiola’s Barcelona to switch formations or positions as many as five or six

times in the same game. When players understand why, it is easy to react to what is being shouted
from the touchline in the heat of battle.
However, Guardiola also drilled patience into his sides, because, despite that ability to get his
team to react, he and his players also had enough faith in their strategy to know when to avoid a knee-
jerk reaction to a tough passage of play or an opposition goal. In his own inimitable way, Charly
Rexach has a peculiar analogy: ‘sometimes there are games where in the sixth or seventh minute you

say “that plan is not working”. But it is like preparing a plate of beans, some are hard, some perfectly
tender, badly placed. Then you move the dish and the beans start falling into place gradually.
Patience. Football is the same. You see the game and you see that a player isn’t working. And you
say, “relax, give it time to fall into place.”’
Evolution, as opposed to revolution, is a word we’ve used many times so far. Because, for all of
Pep Guardiola’s innovation, he was also very careful not to start out by tearing down all that had
gone before. Many of the foundations for success were there already, and he knew that a process of

gradual adjustment was necessary, of fine-tuning, coaxing the best out of what was frequently already
in place. Step by step, he introduced mechanisms and alternatives, subtle adjustments and repairs to
what Cruyff had set in motion a generation or so earlier. Pep was very careful to preserve the model
and its spirit (pressure, position, combination, go out to win every game) but evolving and expanding
its possibilities and potential to previously unimaginable extremes.
But new things have certainly been created on the pitch since his appearance on the scene. Villas-

Boas compares Pep Guardiola’s Barça to the celebrated chef Ferran Adrià: but rather than
gastronomic experimentation, we are witnessing molecular football. Their recipe for success is
innovation: they defend with three at the back in an era when everyone has signed up to the back four
doctrine; they pioneer diminutive players in the centre of midfield when the rest of the world has
tilted towards the pace and power principle in the engine room. What others might perceive as
weaknesses, Barcelona have provided as solutions: tiny midfielders mean you cannot win the ball, so
you make sure you always have possession.

Frequently the logic might appear counter-intuitive. For example, according to widespread
conventional logic, without a six-foot-four powerhouse striker you can’t score from headers.
Barcelona turned that theory on its head: so the wingers still provide crosses, but it’s the positioning
and timing of the attacker that makes up for their lack of physical presence.
And the player on the receiving end of a cross may not even be a striker, because Barcelona
frequently play without one. And then there’s the added ingredient of a goalkeeper who touches the

ball with his feet as often as a centre back – and frequently more often than an opposing midfielder. In
fact, you might describe Valdés as a centre back who occasionally picks the ball up.