Guardiola in Barca B

Josep Guardiola’s greatest achievement: Barça B (Part 1/4 )
January 21st, 2013


A couple of weeks ago it became clear that Europe’s most wanted coach, Josep Guardiola will coach Bayern Munich next season. Guardiola has had his share of fans as well as his critics. According to some he is the best coach in the world, to others he didn’t have to do anything at Barça to achieve success, his players did it for him. During his four years coaching FC Barcelona, Guardiola would win 14 trophies. Some say he never had to make hard decisions, he’d never been really challenged. It’s easy to win titles if you have the best team in the world at your disposal.

But what if you are in charge of a fourth division team lacking desire, a team without a soul, without a future. That’s how Barça B was described in 2007, the year Guardiola became their coach.

“What Pep did with Barça B is still of greater merit than what he did later with the first team” – It’s the words of Juanma Lillo former coach and considered as Guardiola’s mentor.

Juanma Lillo speaks the truth, however not many really know the story of what Pep did and what he achieved his first year coaching in charge of a fourth division team. Because even if Josep Guardiola would come to win fourteen trophies and become the most wanted coach in Europe, it’s a story that shows his talents coach. I will try to take you through it in a series of four parts.

- The begging for a ticking time bomb
- The letting go and building of a team
- The rules
- The success

The begging for a ticking bomb

In the first part, we will look back to how Guardiola got the job no one wanted. A job that was described as hell, as the biggest mistake he could make, they said it would ruin his coaching career before it even started. But it was the job Pep wanted, the job of coaching Barça B. But to get it, he had to work hard.

After getting his football education at La Masia, being a key player in Johan Cruyff’s dream team, and being falsely accused of doping in Italy. Guardiola enjoyed some fun time in Qatar and earned his coaching credentials in Mexico while playing under Lillo in Dorados de Sinaloa, Josep Guardiola decided to hang up his boots in 2006. Seven months later he was appointed head coach for FC Barcelona B.

Guardiola first broke the news that he’d been offered a job at FC Barcelona to his right hand man and best friend Manuel Estiarte, the Messi of water polo during his active days. He did it while the two enjoyed their vacation with their families on a beach in Pescara, Italy. However, the job Guardiola been offered was not the job he wanted, and would come to beg for.

Pep told his friend that he’d been offered a job at his childhood club as they walked down the beach. “Wow, Barcelona!” answered Manuel a bit shocked at the big news. Pep went on to describe that the job he’d been offered was to work as a technical director of the youth categories. As Manuel knew his friend well and that he liked to organize things and was great working with kids, he was a bit shocked when the next words from Guardiola that came out where, I don’t know, I don’t know. “What do you mean you don’t know!? You are going back to FC Barcelona!”. The problem was just that, Pep wanted to coach, “I want to work with the b-team, the second team. I see myself coaching them I want to start off there”. Manuel’s response was like many other would respond when Pep told them about his desire to coach Barça B; “But didn’t they just get regulated and are now in the fourth divisions!!??”.

However he knew when Pep had made up his mind that it could not be changed. Even though Manuel like many others thought his friend was about to commit a big mistake.

In the summer of 2007 Guardiola and Txiki Beguirstain meet to discuss Guardiola’s potential return to the club as Txiki wanted to make the former captain, the future director of youth football at the club. Guardiola politely thanked for the offer but said he wanted to coach.

Txiki: ‘Where? There is no vacancy for you in the first team even as an assistant to Rijkaard…
Pep: Give me the B team, in the fourth division.
Txiki: What?! You must be crazy. It’s a no-win. It’s easier to win the league with the first team than to gain promotion with Barça B.
Pep: Let me have control of the B team; I know what to do with them.

Txiki kept on insisting that the job they were offering him was way better than just the b-team, on a financial level as well and he would be in charge of the academy something a lot more prestigious. At the same time he tried make Pep realize that the B-team where in the fourth division!



It is worth remembering that back in 2007 Barça’s B-team was not that diamond mine of talents that it is today. It was a team in chaos that for the first time in thirty-four years had dropped down to the fourth division. But Guardiola knew what he wanted, he wanted to coach, and kept on saying that if they wouldn’t give him the b-team he could coach what ever team, what ever level, whether it be it juniors, infants, or any other team. “I could even work with the toddlers on a potato field” he would tell Txiki.

But Txiki was sure that the B-team was more or less a ticking time bomb he just couldn’t put in the hands of Guardiola, a legend and symbol at the club. “You could get your fingers burned trying to rescue that B team, you must be mad. And another thing: what will it look like if we dump Pep Guardiola, the club’s icon, in the fourth division? It doesn’t make sense!” he insisted.

His players have many times described Guardiola as someone with the power to change your mind. Xavi once said “If he believes something is white and you think it is black, you will en up believing that it is white”. While Dani Alvés expressed “If Pep told me to jump off the third tier of Camp Nou I would think there’s something good down there”. So in the end he would win over even Txiki, with his enthusiasm and ideas for the reserves. The director of football left the meeting and started digging, to see if Pep was as ready for the job as he insisted. He spoke to members of the academy set-up who had been on coaching courses with Pep and also his tutors. They all agreed that Pep had been one of the most brilliant students they had ever worked with. Soon the decision was taken. And Josep Guardiola was made head-coach of FC Barcelona B.

As Guardiola has been coaching the best team in the world at the Camp Nou during the last few years and now signed for Bayern Munich, his critics have accused him of being, scared, always taking the easy way out. That he’d always had a team of superstars that could be able to play the piano even without him, that he hasn’t been challenged yet in his career, and has always been surrounded by the Catalan media that take it upon themselves to protect him no matter what. Those critics have no clue about his year in the fourth division. There just can’t be many former top players who have turned down a big director’s role overseeing an entire academy set-up, in order to beg for the chance to take over coaching a failing reserve team. His friends would ask him if he was out of his mind, that the fourth division was hell and had nothing to do with the football he knew. They’d ask him if he really knew what he had gotten himself into. They made sure he knew he was in for an bumpy ride, this would not be easy. Pep always gave them the same response ‘I just want to coach’.

The second part will look into how Guardiola built up his team. And the tough decisions that had to be made, crushing a few dreams.

*Fourth Division = Tercera División
Sources:
“Pep Guardiola Another Way Of Winning” – Guillem Balague

 
Josep Guardiola’s greatest achievement: Barça B (Part 2/4 )
January 23rd, 2013


The building of a team

Josep Guardiola was presented as head coach of FC Barcelona B at Camp Nou on 21th June 2007.
“I am no one as a coach, that’s why I face this opportunity with such uncontrollable enthusiasm. I’ve come here prepared to help in any way necessary. I know the club and I hope to help these players and the idea of football that you have to grow. In fact, the best way of educating the players is to make them see that they can win. I hope the sense of privilege I feel is felt by everyone in the team.” – Guardiola to a full media room at the Camp Nou on his first day as head coach of FC Barcelona B on June 21, 2007 that day.

He knew the challenge he had taken on wasn’t an easy one, and he had been reminded by everyone around him that the fourth division was; hell. And it wouldn’t take long before his first and one of his hardest challenges as a coach came. As the B-team had been regulated to the fourth division the C-team had to disband. Meaning that Guardiola’s first order of business was consolidating two squads of players into one.

Between the two squads Pep had a total of 43 players, he would end up creating his new B-team squad consisting 24 players. From the C team he would keep six players while letting 17 go, while from the B team another six were kept and 15 had to leave. Two players, Bojan and Giovani dos Santos, were promoted to the first team. Adding to those 12 players, Guardiola brought up four players from the Juvenil A team, among them a certain Sergio Busquets. The other eight would be brought in from other clubs, later in his first season he would promote Cadet A player Gai Assulin. By bringing players over twenty-one to join the team for a maximum of two seasons Guardiola was taking a revolutionary step. He was breaking with traditions in the hope that he would raise standards and make the team more competitive. The so called back-bone players would become an important part of the b-team, they were part of system introduced by Guardiola that is still used today at MiniEstadi. But let’s take a closer look at that system.

By taking over at Barca-B, Josep Guardiola had no other choice than to let players go. It was one of the most difficult decisions he had to take as a coach, who to keep and who’s dream to crush. It was even tougher because of the young ages of the players which makes it is hard to know who would make it and who would not, for instance the club wanted to let Pedro go but Guardiola decided he would stay. Five years later Pedro has won everything possible to win in the world of football with Barça. There were other payers Pep had to turn down, and we will never know if any of their futures had looked different had they been kept.Anyway it was something that had to be done, and Guardiola was the one that had to do it. It was an unenviable task that had to be made after only six training sessions.

In a total 32 players would have to leave the club. That was 32 dreams of 32 kids that got crushed. From day one, Guardiola did not shy away from the tough decisions. As described by David Trueba in El Pàis, Guardiola did what he could to help those who no longer could stay:

“Pep wanted to find teams for the players he was letting go; he had to arrange meetings with their parents, holding back tears, dissolving the childhood dreams and vocations of those boys who thought that football was more important than life itself, who had put their studies on hold because they were boys who were called to succeed. Creating the squad was a “bricks and mortar” job, of intuition and strength, a dirty and thankless task. From one day to the next you had to decide if you were letting a lad called Pedrito leave the club to go to Gavá or if you were keeping him.”



La Masia – Guardiola’s greatest legacy.

In May of 2007, Barça B went into the hell of the fourth division. Barça B was a team without soul, nor future, without concrete and measurable objectives. It was a team that had been compromised by a lack of direction of a club that was solely concerned with the success of the first team. Everything was done with the short-term success of the club in mind. This practice meant that the youth system at Barça had hit a rock-wall, it was doomed with it’s b-team in a forgotten fourth division. The step from the b-team to the first team had never been bigger.

The youth team lacked a plan. Josep Guardiola arrived with one, and transform a doomed b-team and youth system to a diamond mine. I will not go into detail on how the plan Guardiola and his men designed in 2007 looked like; but you can find it explained by Martí Pernarnau here .

I will however explain in short the most vital part of the plan; the players. Guardiola and his staff would divide the squads players in to two categories; The ‘backbone’ players and the pearls.

The ‘backbone’ players were those players Guardiola often signed from other teams. They were the ones to hold the team together competitively. In general they were a bit older, experienced, restrained and without excess, placed by strategic form to maintain the competitive rhythm without holding back the growth of the ‘pearls’. In order to define the ‘backbone players’ one has to take into account their age, their type, their player profile, and their durability. They have to be between 21 and 26 years old, they should share similar distinct lines, in order to act as a support structure for the younger players. And they will stay at Barça B for no more than two years, to avoid holding back those below them. The individual objective will be for them to shine in the second team of the ‘Barça brand’ to later achieve a relevant professional exit. During Guardiola’s B-team season he’d have backbone players like; Córcoles, Chico, Dimas, Abraham, Espasandín, Xavi Torres and Victor Vázquez.

The pearls were those players that came from within the club from the Juvenil level. They would be grouped into two blocks: youth completely formed (those who between one and two years should take the jump to the first team) and youth in their last year (still at Juvenil), that would have a margin between 1.5 to 2.5 years to confirm themselves. The pearls would have three different phases to go through before joining the first team permanent.

Phase 1. Under their first phase their only obligation is to compete. Nothing is expected from them and they are not penalized for their errors. But are expected to get to know the professional method and acquire minutes.

Phase 2. In this phase the player should feel like he forms a permanent part of the structure and his contribution is decisive: he is responsible for his general performance.

Phase 3. The last phase defines the future of the pearl. He will enter the group of players closest to the first team and acquire the status of key player in the b-team. He now has the obligation to carry the team and guarantee its competitiveness. He is also directly responsible for the evolution of the team. It’s in this phase his future will be decided.

Each of the phases is seen as a period between six to nine months. A player that arrives at the B team will do so after finalizing his junior stage in the Juvenil teams and will then have two years to show his worth in the B-team. The progress, potential and possibility of moving to the first team will be evaluated in detail. If that is not possible, the player will have acquired a recognizable profile and excellent values that will allow him to continue his career with other clubs.

If their talent is extraordinary the progress can be accelerated, but they can never avoid the three phases. During Guardiola’s B-team season he’d have pearls like: Marc Valiente, Victor Sánchez, Jeffren, Urbano, Rueda, Marc Crosas, Toribio, Pedro, Pau Torres, Oier, Iago Falqué, Botía, Sergio Busquets, Gai Assulin and Thiago Alcántara. Some of them took the step to the first team, some arrived and could not confirm their talent, and others would later come to leave the club. Oier is still at the B-team.

This is a system, a plan that is still followed today and in the past years the pearls in the B-team have included players like: Fontàs, Montoya, Planas, Rochina, Oriol Romeu, Bartra, Muniesa, Sergi Gómez and Sergi Roberto among others.

The success experienced by Barça B and the club’s youth system in the last few years is thanks to Guardiola and his staff. It is now not just a bunch of players that come and go, but an authentic formative school, with plans and strictly programmed and measurable phases and with its objectives laid out. What Pep laid the ground to is today seen as the most important strategical decision made by Barça in the past decade. And thanks to it we are today witnesses to an explosion of promising youngsters arriving to the first team to win a spot. And in 2012 we witnessed FC Barcelona play a game with eleven home-grown players.With a B-team like the one that got regulated in 2007, that would never have been possible.

The third part will look into how Guardiola made his fourth division team more professional, the rules he sat and what happened when players didn’t listen to him.

*Fourth Division = Tercera División
Sources:
“Pep Guardiola Another Way Of Winning” – Guillem Balague
El Pàis
El Mundo Deportivo
totalBarça
FCBarcelona.cat


Josep Guardiola’s greatest achievement: Barça B (Part 3/4 )
January 25th, 2013

The rules

Barcelona B were a fourth division team, but that did not mean that Guardiola did not create an atmosphere as close to a first division team as he could. From the start Guardiola made sure of this by introducing a series of routines and working habits, systems and methodologies. He wanted to control everything, the players diets, rest and recuperation time. He would make sure to scout opponents by recording their games and using his assistants and staff to compile detailed match reports. On occasions if he didn’t feel he had enough information about a team he would simply go to their matches himself. He would come to be just as demanding with himself as he was with his players and always explain to them why he was asking them to do something. Just as he would later on with the first team, Guardiola is a perfectionist, addicted to getting things right. He would always be the first to arrive and last to leave. He would demand daily reports and updates from his staff. Nothing was left to chance. Once again to remind you, this was the fourth division!



The newest crop of youngsters benefiting from Guardiola’s legacy.

In his book “Pep Guardiola, Another way of winning” Guillem Balague explains that Guardiola in his first speech as a coach would tell his players that: He could live with them playing badly now and again, but he demanded 100 per cent on the pitch in every single game. He wanted the team to act as professionals even if they weren’t yet considered so and to be competitive in everything they did. “The aim is to gain promotion and in order to do that we have to win and we can’t do that without effort” he told them. He would also point out that the attacking players would need to become the best defenders and the defenders would have to become the first line of attack. And what no matter what happened, the playing style was non-negotiable. “The philosophy behind this club’s style of play is known by everyone. And I believe in it. And I feel it. I hope to be able to transmit it to everyone. We have to be ambitious and we have to win promotion, there’s no two ways about it. We have to be able to dominate the game, and make sure we aren’t dominated ourselves.”

Pep is a perfectionist and one who will never leave anything to chance. Therefore he had to trust the people surrounding him. So it was natural that his staff would consist his right hand man Tito Vilanova; the rehabilitation coach Emili Ricart; and the fitness coach Aureli Alimira a group of colleagues who had been inseparable since the time they first met as kids at La Masia. As Guillem Balagaue goes on to explain in his book; the group quickly became aware that the technical quality of the players they had at their disposal was never in doubt: because of selection processes involved, every player at La Masia had above average technique after more than two decades favoring intelligent youngsters who could play the ball rather than being considered for their physiological characteristics. However, Pep realized that in order to make the team a success he needed to add intensity and an increased work rate to their technical abilities. And above all they had to learn to win.

Just like would later happen when Pep coached the first team, he would lose his first game coaching Barça B. At both occasions it would get the critics going. Guardiola “had more style than power” would one journalist write while others questioned if he really was ready to be a coach. Soon after the stumbling start to the season, Guardiola went to meet Johan Cruyff asking for advice. He had two players he didn’t know what to do with, he couldn’t control them, they wouldn’t listen to what he said and he had noticed that it had started to affect how the rest of the squad received his messages. The problem was that it was two of his leaders in the dressing room and the best players. “Get rid of them, you might lose one or two games but then you will start winning and by then you would have turfed those two sons of bitches out of the team” was the advice from the dutch legend. Pep listened to it and got rid of the pair, establishing his power in the dressing room and sending a clear message to the rest. He would later make a similar decision in the first team getting Ronaldinho and Deco to pack their bags. The team would start to play better and win games.

If the b-team had been sloppy before that would not happen under Guardiola. He would make sure from the start what he expected from his player, if a telling off was needed he would give one. If a fine had to be given he would give it. In December 2007 Barça B were leading 2-0 away to Masnou going into the second half. But they would throw away their lead and allowed the opposition to salvage a point. One of the players would later recall to El País that “The telling-off was tremendous” from Guardiola that day. “He closed the dressing room door and told us that many of us didn’t deserve to wear the shirt – that these team’s colors represented many people and feelings we hadn’t done them justice. We we terrified” the player remembered.

When the Catalan daily newspaper Sport in October 2007 revealed what Guardiola had said to his players on another occasion in the dressing room. One of the players explained that “When he saw his words repeated in print, he went mad and said that divulging dressing-room tales to the press was betraying team-mates”

On another occasion Guardiola would drop one of his star players and captain Marc Valiente simply because the player had left the gym five minutes early. “No weights, No games” were the words Guardiola justified his decision with.

As the season went on some of his players would be called up for games and training sessions with the first team. But it would not change their status nor prevent Guardiola from making an example of them. Just three games into the season he hauled off Marc Crosas in the forty-sixth minute of the match. According to a player “Crosas got a right telling off at half-time for not running. As soon he lost the ball in the second half he was taken straight off”. It gave an indication to the rest of the team, as one of the younger players in the squad explained “We saw him doing that to a first-teamer and thought, what would he do to us?”.



The study room at the old La Masia. Inspiration for the next generation.

“This isn’t the fourth division, this is the Barça reserve team – not anyone can be here” Guardiola once told his players. Yet the honor of playing for the club was way beyond wearing the shirt at match days. Pep would demand high standards from his players at all time, both on and off the field. he would ban the use of mobile phones at the training ground and on the team bus. Players would be fined €120 if they were late to training and had a twelve o’clock curfew, if they were caught breaking it once they’d be fined €1,500, twice and it went up to €3,000 a third time and they were out of the door. The reserve team goalkeeper coach Carles Busquets was once asked how it was to have Pep as his boss.  “You’d be scared” was his answer. Only now will he admit that he used to sneak round to the parking lot for a cigarette as Pep had banned everyone from smoking in or around the training ground.

If you haven’t already realized it, Pep took his job extremely serious almost like every game was about life or death. And occasionally the mask slipped from the cool, calm, collected coach. Which led to even Guardiola having fines to pay as he was shown three red cards during the season. However he quickly decided that instead of trying to bottle up his emotions at the touchline he would simply use his Italian so that match officials couldn’t understand the tirade of four-letter abuse that was being directed at them.

Guillem Balague explains in his book that: One of the reasons that Guardiola had been so eager to test himself and his ideas with a team in the lower divisions was because he wanted to confirm a personal theory: that a reserve team, like any other, could serve as a university of football; because all teams behave, react and respond the same way. Whether superstars or Sunday league, there’s always a player who is jealous of a teammate, another who is late, a joker, an obedient one fearful of punishment and eager to please, a quiet one, a rebel… It was also education because it helped prepare for the fact that every opponent is different: some are offensive, others timid, some defend in their own box, others counter-attack.Working with the B-team gave Guardiola the perfect opportunity to try and find solutions to the kind of problems he would encounter working with a higher profile team: yet enable him to do so away from the spotlight and glare of the media.

The fourth and last part will look into how Guardiola motivated his team to get the absolute best out of themselves, their success and how Txiki begged Pep to take over the first team.

*Fourth Division = Tercera División
Sources:
“Pep Guardiola Another Way Of Winning” – Guillem Balague
El Pàis
Sport


Josep Guardiola’s greatest achievement: Barça B (Part 4/4 )
January 27th, 2013

The success

Growing up at La Masia himself, Guardiola knew exactly how to motivate his players to get the most out of them. He would often play the “It’s an honor to play for Barça” card, or similar. Making his players take note of the shirt they were wearing and ensuring they knew they were not only representing a fourth division team, they were representing Barça. As the season went on Pep would find solutions to the teams problems, relying on instinct and experience to motivate, inspire and get the best out of them. When the team reached the promotion play-offs, he told them “We’ve made it this far together, now it’s time for YOU to win promotion.”

Another way he would motivate his players was by taking them to lunch if they won three games in a row. It became more expensive than he’d thought as he would end up taking the team out three times that season.
Sometimes he would motivate his players by given them challenges. When the youngster Gai Assulin returned after making his first team debut with the Israeli national team, Pep would tell him: “This weekend – go out and score a goal.” Gai would make two assist and score the third goal in the game that weekend.

Guardiola had a lot to transmit to his players, but he was still humble. And knew that defensive work wasn’t his strong side, so when needed he would take help. Juanma Lillo saw all the games of Barça B team that season and directly after each game Guardiola would call him for advice. Each week Pep would also go to the defensive training session set up by Rodolf Borrell (now at Liverpool) who coached one of the clubs youth teams. Pep went there to observe and learn.



Txiki Begiristain and Pep Guardiola, the architects of the current FC Barcelona.

If the B team had been neglected in recent times, then Guardiola’s influence saw it transformed and given a makeover, blowing away the cobwebs and raising its profile, while instilling a new regime of professionalism that was missing even at the first team. The B-team went on to win the fourth division after 25 wins, 8 draws and five losses.  In the play-offs they would draw 0-0 away to Castillo CF before trashing their opponent at home with 6-0. They would then go on to win 2-0 away and 1-0 at home against UD Barbastro as they won promotion to Segunda division B, just as Pep had promised Txiki while he begged for the job a few months earlier.  On the road, the youngster; Sergio Busquets brought up from the Juvenil A team had worked his way from the bench into the team to become their best player. From four tiers down in the Spanish league, Pedro and Busquets would become household names and world champions within two years under Pep’s guiding hand.

Guardiola’s success would also bring Txiki Beguristain to the MiniEstadi watching more reserve games than he had done in his four years as director of football at Barça. Txiki realized that he was watching the development of something that later could be used in the first team. As Pep would occasionally use a 3-4-3 system, a system that hardly been used at the club since the days Guardiola himself was playing, the days of the dream team. Pep would play with a false number nine, a position best illustrated if you look back at Lionel Messi’s match at the Bernabeu in Barcelona’s 2-6 victory? Sometimes Pep would even deploy Busquets, a central midfielder as a striker with three playing behind him. Pep’s do-or-die attitude from the sidelines as well as his off the pitch behavior. Suggested for Txiki that he was a leader, ready for management. Ready to lead at any level any team.

At MiniEstadi, Barça B were met by the biggest crowd in years, people had come to see the youngsters celebrate their promotion on the pitch like they had won a Champions League final. People had started to take notice of Guardiola’s achievements. Juanma Lillo was one of them “What Pep did with Barça B is still of greater merit than what he did later with the first team. You only have to see how the side played at the start of the season in the fourth division with “terrestrial, earthy” players and how they were playing by the end. The group progressed as a whole, but also the players as individuals. I still laugh when I remember that people said Pep was too inexperienced to take over Barça B, let alone the first team.”

When the celebrations at MiniEstadi were ongoing, with players who had improved and behaved professionally. The first team had been declining. It’s players had got lazy, discipline did not exist, and Barça would end the season at third place 18 points behind Real Madrid.



Frank Rijkaard and Pep Guardiola

It would not take long until it was Txiki that begged Guardiola, who wasn’t sure he was ready, to take over the first team. Pep would change his mind as he witnessed the collapse of the first team. He would come to the conclusion that Txiki was right, Barcelona needed a change. It was the day his youngsters played behind closed doors against the first team. Pep would discover that Rijkaard was smoking, Ronaldinho was taken off after ten minutes, Deco was clearly tired and the reserve boys still in the fourth division were running the first team ragged. After a while one of Rijkaards staff members went up to Guardiola and asked him to tell his players to ease off a little.

Pep had doubted if he was ready to manage the first team but this told him that he could do a better job then what was currently being done.

And so the next story, the famous one of the coach Josep Guardiola would start.

*Fourth Division = Tercera División
Sources:
“Pep Guardiola Another Way Of Winning” – Guillem Balague
futbolme.com

Nguồn: footballcantera.com

How Pep Guardiola set out to change Barcelona from day one in Spain's third division
Apr 27, 2012 1:30:00 PM

As Goal.com learned from an extract from Graham Hunter's book on the Blaugrana, the 41-year-old's decision to step down comes as no surprise

Pep Guardiola won it all as coach of Barcelona before confirming his intention to resign at the end of the 2011-12 campaign but his announcement will not come as a shock to those who have followed his career closely

In 2003 there were epoch-defining presidential elections at Camp Nou. Joan Laporta would win, and the good times would roll, but his closest rival was Luis Bassat.

Bassat had been smart enough to identify Pep Guardiola, then still playing with Roma, as a brilliant asset for the club. The candidate for the presidency of FC Barcelona wanted him to become coach, aged only 32.
He remembers: “When I ran for the presidency in 2003 I went to Rome to sign Pep. I knew he was a clever guy who loved Barca and would work hard for the club. We talked for six hours and he convinced me that he wasn’t coach material yet. He hadn’t sat the coaching licence by then.

“So I changed my mind and decided that he would be better as my future director of football.He would have been brilliant, just as he is a brilliant coach now.”

Bassat finished second in the polls and Guardiola went back to playing and preparing for his future. He achieved his coaching badges and, almost immediately, was appointed coach of Barca B.


A Catalan symbol | Pep Guardiola is revered in Barcelona

When, in June 2007, a brains trust of Laporta, Johan Cruyff, Txiki Begiristain, the director of football, and Evarist Murtra, a board member, decided that Guardiola should be repatriated, there was a horrible atmosphere around the club, because the decline of Frank Rijkaard's Barcelona, in one year, had been so steep.

Guardiola, though unproven, already had the air of a fresh, urgent, hungry leader. At his presentation as Barca B coach, he said: “What I was as a player is gone. As a coach I’m nobody and I’m starting from zero. Only winning will bring me credibility, that’s my only way to grow as a coach.

“The priority here is to continue producing first-class footballers, but if I don’t win, if we don’t achieve promotion, then I won’t be allowed to continue here. That’s the way things are.

“I didn’t have any other offer and for that I must thank Barca, because if they hadn’t come looking for me, I’d be sitting at home. The first thing I want to do is transmit the pride and honour that I feel at being involved with this club again. I don’t view this as working in the third division, but working for Barca B. The players shouldn’t think they are playing in the third division, but pushing at the doors of the first team.”

Guardiola, though unproven, already had the air of a fresh, urgent, hungry leader.At his presentation as Barca B coach, he said: Only winning will give me credibility, that's my only way to grow as a coach

Laporta, never short of a bon mot, later recalled: “From what we could sense, Pep would probably have accepted coaching Barca B without a salary.”

There was a telling moment before the first home game, in the 15,000-capacity Mini Estadi about 100 metres from Camp Nou. His enthusiastic players were trying to impress in training and Guardiola could be heard shouting: “I don’t want you all trying to dribble like Leo Messi - pass it, pass it and pass it again. Pass precisely, move well, pass again, pa.ss, pass, and pass.

“I want every move to be smart, every pass accurate – that’s how we make the difference from the rest of the teams, that’s all I want to see.”

Much of what we see now was available at a cheaper ticket price then. Full-backs became wing-backs, wingers cut inside to make five forwards when the wing-backs overlapped, Sergio Busquets cut his teeth at pivote and often dropped back to help at the back when the original 4-3-3 went to a 3-4-3. The central striker and the two interiors (right and left midfield) combined to press if the opposition tried to play the ball from the back.

Pass it, pass it and pass it again. Pass precisely, move well, pass again, pass, pass and pass

Barca B went 21 games unbeaten at home and won the third division by a point. There was also the emergence of what would become most famous in the pre-match build up to the Rome Champions League final in 2009 – the motivational video. Fifteen minutes before the final game of the season, the decisive second leg of the play-off with Barbastro, Guardiola showed a video of a 60-year-old father and his son, who suffers from cerebral palsy, competing together in an Ironman contest. In many of the events, the father has to carry his son. Some players later admitted that they went out to play with tears nipping at their eyes.Ten thousand fans in the Mini Estadi saw a Victor Vazquez goal seal promotion back to the Segunda B division.

By then, Guardiola had known for a few months that he was likely to succeed Rijkaard the following season, so this was one hell of a way to sign off from his first coaching job.

Nguồn: goal.com