Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography Read Online Free Page B

But every conflict, even the most trivial, was chipping away at the bridges Pep had so
delicately constructed with his squad.
    There were still high points. Barcelona eliminated Real Madrid in the quarter-finals of the cup in February and Guardiola appeared to have gone back to being the Pep of previous seasons:
energetic, challenging, inexhaustible. The team was still fighting for every trophy and the board thought that success would convince him to stay, even though his silence on his future had started
to become the subject of criticism from some directors who referred to Pep as the ‘Dalai Lama’ or the ‘mystic’. In a way, the club was a hostage to Guardiola’s
decision.
    Little by little, Zubizarreta was trying to find common ground to get Pep to put pen to paper on a new contract. Then, in November, the director of football proposed Tito Vilanova as Pep’s
successor, an almost logical Plan B, perhaps, but also a tactic to get Pep to visualise his departure and, perhaps, make him think twice about it.
    Secretly, the club calculated that Pep’s birthday could be the turning point. Two years before, on his thirty-ninth birthday, Pep went with his girlfriend Cris to see the Catalan band
Manel. His lack of renewal had become national news and the band, and the audience, changedthe words of a song to wish him a happy birthday and demand his signature. The next
day, Pep announced he was staying for another year.
    By 18 January 2012, on his forty-first anniversary, Tito Vilanova had returned to the team, Barcelona had destroyed Santos in the FIFA Club World Cup final in Tokyo and the club thought the
conditions were right for Pep to change his mind. But the confirmation wasn’t forthcoming.
    Over the course of the following months, up until 25 April 2012 when he announced that his decision was final, both the director of football and the president Sandro Rosell would subtly
introduce the conversation even in private dinners.
    ‘So, how are things going?’ Sandro asked him at an event in February, surrounded by figures from Catalan politics and society, perhaps not the best moment to raise the issue.
    ‘Now’s not the time, President’ was Pep’s blunt response. He never let his guard down.
    Rosell had won the presidential elections in June 2010 after Joan Laporta ended his final permitted term. Months before, Pep had agreed to stay on for a season but wanted the new man in charge
to confirm the details. Two weeks after Rosell was voted in the contract had not been signed, agreed, negotiated or even talked about. In the meantime, Dmytro Chygrynskiy, signed the previous
season for €25 million, was sold for €15 million back to Shakhtar Donetsk, from where he had originally come. Guardiola was not pleased. He didn’t want his centre back to go but the
club, he was told, needed to pay wages, having run out of cash, thus shrewdly proving the point that Laporta had left the club in a poor financial state.
    The response came quickly. Johan Cruyff, Pep’s mentor, returned the medal given to him by Laporta as a President of Honour, a very public gesture that amounted to an official declaration
of war between the two presidents. A throwing down of the gauntlet. And Guardiola was going to be placed in the middle of it all.
    It was clearly not the beginning of a mutual friendship.
    Life in the directors’ box had been infernal since Rosell’s arrival: false accusations of doping against Barcelona made on nationalradio; the Champions League
semi-finals against Real Madrid and its implications; the future of the manager. But the new president preferred to keep a low profile in contrast to the loquacious Laporta, partly because he felt
out of place. Rosell sensed his hands were tied by a club that had elevated to an idol, whether or not he wanted it, the figure of Guardiola, so he had to follow the coach’s line in many
issues he would have argued against if he had had more authority: the vast number of