Page 98 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

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THE SIX TITLES IN ONE CALENDAR YEAR

During the four years that Pep Guardiola was in charge of Barcelona he did not give interviews for
publication, with the exception of one that was supposed to end up on the history of Brescia DVD and

somehow ‘mysteriously’ found its way on to the Italian television channel RAI!
Talking to Pep for this book was the only way I could open a hitherto closed window on his
private world; to reveal what motivates him, what took him to where he is now, what fed his intuition
to make the right football decisions; ultimately to try to comprehend what was taking him away from
all he adored, or had once adored.
Before I met him privately, I felt like a naughty kid peering over a high wall to try to catch glimpses

of a life, a mind, that, I was certain, was not exactly the same as the one that was discussed frequently
and analysed to death. Clearly, as we all know, there are many Guardiolas: the public Pep, the
passionate Pep, the fragile Pep, Pep the leader, visionary, role model and so on. In order to convey
anything close to the real Pep Guardiola, it was important to try and peel away the layers, to work
around the public profile and understand the man behind the finely tailored suits and the cool exterior.
Typically, meetings with Pep would be a planned twenty-minute chat at the end of a training
session. More often than not, the press officer would return eighteen minutes after I’d arrived, with a

knock on the door and a ‘do you want a coffee?’, code for: ‘time’s up’! If Pep brushed him off with a
‘don’t worry, we are OK’, it was a small success.
His private words mould this book. In any case, since the day he took over the first team at FC
Barcelona, Pep has done enough talking in front of the press – at his 546 press conferences – to fill an
encyclopaedia with his insights. By his own account, he has sat in front of the media for 272 hours, or
eleven full days. That amounts to around eight hundred questions a month. Can you imagine? Every

single word scrutinised, every gesture picked up on, every utterance interpreted and extrapolated by
the world’s press.
He has been asked if he believes in God, if he writes poetry, about his politics, about the financial
crisis and at least a hundred times if he was going to renew his contract (‘although I don’t really care
if you do or not,’ one journalist once told him!). The pre-game press conferences, at least half an hour
long, always became the story of the day, but there was more to take from them if you were an
advanced follower of both the politics within the media and the character himself – you hardly ever

got a clue about the team, but if you were intuitive you would find out about Pep’s state of mind.
So stop leaping around trying to see what’s on the other side of the wall. Take a seat, if you haven’t
already, in one of the front rows of today’s empty press conference. You will be the only journalist
present. Imagine Pep clutching a bottle of water, hurrying to the front table and eagerly taking his seat,
nervously touching the microphone, prepared to offer you an insight into his mind. The answers to

many of the questions you’d hope to ask might be revealed in the following paragraphs. Or maybe not.