Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography Read Free

winning a European Cup in almost
the same esteem as he does his shirt signed by his idol Michel Platini. You are also a member of Pep’s particular hall of fame.
    As the pupil listened, soaking up every word, his respect for you was transformed into devotion: not only because of the symbolic content of the chat, your vision of the profession. It
wasn’t just the insight. It was the stature of the man who was doing the talking.
    He is in awe of the longevity of your tenure at Manchester United: the resilience and inner strength required to stay in the job for so long. Pep has always thought that the pressures at
Barcelona and Manchester must be different. He yearns to understand how one sustains the hunger for success and avoids the loss of appetite that must inevitably follow successive victories. He
believes that a team that wins all the time needs to lose to benefit from the lessons that only defeat can bring. Pep wants to discover how you deal with that, Sir Alex; how you clear your mind;
how you relate to defeat. You didn’t have time to talk about everything, but those issues will be raised next time you cross paths, you can be sure of that.
    Pep venerates your composure in both victory and defeat and the way you fight tooth and nail to defend your own brand of football – and you also advised him to keep faithful to who he is,
to his beliefs and inner self.
    ‘Pepe,’ you said to him – and he was too respectful to correct you about getting his name wrong – ‘you have to make sure you don’t lose sight of who you are.
Many young coaches change, for whatever reason – because of circumstances beyond their control, because things don’t come out right at first or because success can change you. All of a
sudden, they want to amend tactics, themselves. They don’t realise football is a monster that you can only beat and face if you are always yourself: under any circumstance.’
    For you, it was perhaps little more than some friendly advice, satisfying a fatherly instinct you have often had for the new faces on the scene. Yet, unintentionally perhaps, you revealed to Pep
the secrets of your enduring resilience in the football profession, yourneed to continue and your strange relationship with the sport, where sometimes you feel trapped and at
other times liberated.
    Your words came back to him more than once while he was agonisingly deliberating his future. He understands what you were talking about, but, nevertheless, he could not help changing during his
four years leading the Barcelona first team. Football, that monster, transformed him.
    You warned him against losing sight of his true self, but he changed, partly due to the pressure from a grateful and adoring fanbase, who forgot he was only a football coach; partly because of
his own behaviour, eventually being unable to take decisions that would hurt him and hurt his players – the emotional toll ended up being too much, became insurmountable, in fact. It reached
the point where Pep believed the only way he could recover some of his true self was to leave behind everything that he had helped create.
    It turned out that, as much as he wanted to heed your advice, Pep is not like you, Sir Alex. You sometimes compare football to a strange type of prison, one that you in particular don’t to
want to escape. Arsène Wenger shares your view and is also incapable of empathising with or understanding Guardiola’s decision to abandon a gloriously successful team, with the
world’s best player at his disposal, adored and admired by all.
    On the morning that Pep announced his departure from Barcelona, three days after Chelsea had shocked the football world by dumping them out of the Champions League in the semi-final, Wenger told
the media: ‘The philosophy of Barcelona has to be bigger than winning or losing a championship. After being knocked out of the Champions League, it may not be the right moment to make this
decision. I would have loved