pressure – and that Charly’s calculation was correct.
Johan Cruyff, who regularly shared long meals with Guardiola, understood that as well and had already warned Pep that the second year was harder than the first, and the third harder than the
second. And if he could relive his experience as boss of the Dream Team, he would have left the club two years earlier. ‘Don’t stay longer than you should,’ Cruyff told Pep on one
occasion.
So Zubizarreta knew it was going to be difficult to convince him to stay, but would give it his best shot. The director of football mixedprotection with silence, and
sometimes a bit of pressure in search of an answer. The answer never came. Guardiola’s responses to Zubi’s questions about his future were always the same: ‘You already know what
I’m going through, it is difficult’ and ‘We’ll talk, we’ll talk’.
At the start of the 2011–12 season, after the league and the Champions League had been won, Guardiola called a meeting with his players to remind them what every coach has told his
successful team since the day football was invented: ‘You should know that the story doesn’t end here. You must keep on winning.’ And the team continued winning silverware: the
Spanish Super Cup, the European Super Cup and the World Club Championship in December.
With limited weapons in his armoury due to the absences of Villa and Abidal, and after having built a small squad, Barcelona paid a high price in La Liga for the energy they put into the Copa
and the Super Cup (games in which they celebrated wins over Real Madrid). Barcelona’s fanbase supported Pep, obsessed as they all were with halting their bitter rival’s revival.
In September, the game against AC Milan in the group stage of the Champions League was a turning point and an omen for the season ahead. The Italians drew 2-2 in the last minutes of the game at
the Camp Nou – the equaliser the consequence of a poorly defended corner – and Guardiola reached the conclusion that his team had lost its competitive edge and there was a lack of
attention being paid to the finer points that had made Barcelona so special. This was followed by a run of relatively poor away form in La Liga, that included that 1-0 defeat to Getafe in
November.
Pep periodically asked himself if the players were getting his message the way they were a few years ago; he debated the reasons why the 3-4-3 system he had been using that year wasn’t
working to plan. He took risks with the line-up, as if he knew that there wouldn’t be a fifth season. He sensed that it was getting increasingly difficult to control his players, some of whom
could even lose their way in the world of football if they didn’t start correcting their bad habits. Dani Alvés, who separated from his wife during the summer and made the mistake of
returning late from his holidays over Christmas, was given the unexpected surprise of a week off mid-season to clear hismind – an unprecedented move, at least one done so
openly, in the history of Spanish football’s greats.
Furthermore, there were a couple of occasions when the full back would receive a telling-off in front of his team-mates for not paying attention to tactics, something Pep rarely did. ‘A
defender, first and foremost you’re a defender,’ he told him after a game in which he got involved in the attack more than he should have done. The Brazilian, meanwhile, was unimpressed
when he was left on the bench. He wasn’t the only one. Seeing their distraught faces during games upset Pep. He spoke indirectly to the players who were angry about being left out of the team
by praising the behaviour of players such as Puyol and Keita when they weren’t starting. ‘I’m sure they’ve called me everything, but the first thing they did when they found
out was support the team,’ he told them.
Logically, those kinds of problems multiplied as the seasons went by, commonplace in any dressing room.