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

of doing things well.’
    Moving from task to task, from deadline to deadline, is when he feels most alive, totally immersed or dashing between several projects, addicted to the adrenalin rush
generated by it. And that way of understanding his profession fulfils and yet consumes him, but it is the only one possible for him and the one pledged to the fans:‘I promise you that
we’ll work hard. I don’t know if we’ll win, but we will try very hard. Fasten your seat belts, you are going to enjoy the ride’ is what he told them at the presentation of
the team in summer 2008.
    That work ethic, instilled in him by his parents, is very much part of the Catalan character: saving the soul through industry, effort, honest labour and giving your all to the job. In a
suitably symbolic place (the Catalan Parliament), and on being awarded the Nation’s Gold Medal, the country’s highest accolade for a Catalan citizen, in recognition for his
representation of Catalan sporting values, he said in his acceptance speech: ‘If we get up early, very early, and think about it, believe me, we are an unstoppable country.’
    But at the same time Pep sets impossibly high standards and is beset by a sense of never being quite good enough. Guardiola might look strong and capable of carrying a club and a nation on his
shoulders but he is very sensitive about the reaction of the team and about disappointing the fans by not meeting their expectations. Or his own.
    He once confided to a close friend: ‘I can imagine the most amazing solution to a problem and then sometimes players come out with something better during the game that I hadn’t
thought of. Then that for me it is like a little defeat, it means I should have found that solution earlier.’
    The club, the director of football and the coach try to reduce the element of surprise, of unpredictability, in a game through training and analysing the opposition. Before a game, the manager
wants to know which approach to take, but in the end it comes down to the player, it can’t be directed and, what’s more, there are infinite variables on the pitch. How else can
Iniesta’s goal at Stamford Bridge in 2009 be explained, when Barcelona seemed to have lost the game? For Pep, that is the wonder of football. And the frustration, too: trying tomake something so unpredictable, predictable. No matter how hard he works, he is fighting a losing battle.
    ‘Guardiola loves football,’ his friend the film director David Trueba wrote. ‘And he loves winning, because that is what the game is about – but particularly by doing
justice to the approach. He proposes a system and he only asks for you to trust him, that you are faithful to him. The day he notices players who are uncommitted, apathetic, doubtful, even after an
irrelevant training session, he is a sad man, demoralised, willing to leave everything.
    ‘No one should be confused about this,’ Trueba continues. ‘He is an obsessive professional, who pays attention to detail, knowing that details can decide a game. He reveres the
club he works for and has imposed a rule not to be more than a mere piece in the structure, to earn his salary and never ask for as much as a coffee without paying for it. He doesn’t aspire
to be recognised as an indoctrinator, a guru or a guide. He just wants to be recognised as a coach: a good coach. The other things, the good and the bad, are burdens put on him by a society in need
of role models. Perhaps everybody is tired of cheats, of profiteers, of villains, people who impose selfish values, opportunism and selfishness, from the privileged platform of television or the
media, business or politics. He belongs to that society. But he dignifies it, in a very simple way, trying to do his job well, helping to make common sense prosper from his place in the public eye,
with the same quiet dignity with which a good bricklayer, without anyone looking or applauding, lays bricks.’
    ‘A manager’s