Pep Guardiola sits in the Barcelona dressing room listening, rapt, to some harpsichord variations by Johann Sebastian Bach. The players watch their coach in mute bafflement. When the music ends, Guardiola stands up, wipes the tears from his cheeks, turns to the players and, in no way diminishing their confusion, urges them to improve their minds by reading. “The whole of life is contained in books,” he enthuses, “the poetry, the prose…”
This is not real life. It is a sketch from a very funny Catalan TV comedy show called Crackovia that routinely sends up the Barcelona coach. Like all good satire, it starts from a kernel of truth, in this case Guardiola’s known devotion to fine music and good books (some of his best pals are novelists), as well as his conception of football as art. The chief football writer of el País, Spain’s leading newspaper, summed him up on the morning of last season’s Champions League final against Manchester United in one word. Guardiola, he wrote, is an “aesthete”.
Sir Alex Ferguson might have allowed himself a splutter of disdain before that match took place, but certainly not after it. Barcelona’s defeat of Manchester United in Rome, more comprehensive than the 2-0 scoreline suggested, completed a treble of European Cup, Spanish Cup and Spanish league championship that the Catalan club had never before achieved in its 109-year history. And never, as last year’s Real Madrid coach Juande Ramos observed, had Barcelona produced a better football team. Not even the ‘Dream Team’, when Johan Cruyff was in charge, in the early Nineties, was as good as this.
Guardiola is a modest character, hushed and priestly in his demeanour off the pitch, who said at the end of last season that without the fabulous players he had, he would have won nothing; whereas those same players, with another coach, would still have triumphed. “What’s my secret? The players are very good,” he said.
True, but the midfield trinity of Leo Messi, Xavi Hernández and Andrés Iniesta who made monkeys out of Manchester United, and practically every other team they played last season, were all at Barcelona the season before, when they won nothing. The players are very good, but Guardiola made them into a magnificent team. That is the point about Barcelona: they may have the world’s most talented individual in Leo Messi, and three or four more of the top 10, but the game they play is the one it was supposed to be when it was invented: not just football; association football.
There’s a piece of nonsense one has to put up with every now and again from small footballing minds in England: that Barcelona may be excellent with the ball, but they are ’suspect’ in defence. The truth is they are excellent in defence too. Not only do Guardiola’s Barcelona keep possession of the ball longer, unfailingly, than any team they play against, they recover possession faster than anyone too. The team has the quality of a perfectly co-ordinated living organism, all the parts moving with one purpose, seemingly organised by a single controlling mind. In possession, they fan out in all directions, offering each other clear and varied passing options; lacking possession, they pursue the ball like a swarm of very determined bees.
So, repeating the question Guardiola asks himself, what is the secret?
The starting point is the philosophy – or, as they prefer to call it in Spain, the ideology – that Guardiola inherited from Cruyff, who is to Barça as Lenin was to the Russian revolution. It derives from Holland’s ‘total football’ innovation of the 70s and is translated into Spanish in the phrase “amor por el balón”: love of the ball. In the case of Guardiola and his team, it is a jealous love. They cannot tolerate being without the ball; they seem to madden without it. That is why they get it back so quickly, that is why a Barcelona defender will never hoof the ball upfield, that is why they often succumb to the semi-suicidal lunacy of playing the ball deftly out of their penalty area, even when they are being hounded by opposition forwards. And it is all at Guardiola’s express insistence. The players know that if they do not play the ball neatly and purposefully out of defence, their place in the team will be in jeopardy.
It is art at the service of efficiency. If Guardiola has been so successful in his very first season as Barcelona coach – his previous managerial experience having amounted to one year in the Spanish third division – it is because there is cold, deliberate method behind the romantic ideals. Going forward his team is a dream, yet every forward receives instructions from Guardiola to act as the first line of defence, to play as holding midfielders when the occasion requires it. Yet the occasion rarely does require it. More often it is the holding midfielders who become the attackers, pinning opposition teams in their own halves, game after game. This in turn frees the defenders, to whom the message from Guardiola is, “If our forwards and midfield have practically the entire opposition tied down, then you ought to be able to take on and beat the one or two forwards they abandon up front.”
Love for the ball is the rock on which Guardiola has built his temple to good football. To that he adds the relentless hard work and ferocious attention to detail of a man who, like all successful coaches, is an obsessive football nut. Rigorous in his attention to his players’ fitness and diet regimes, meticulous in his study of his opponents’ strengths and weaknesses, he combines an unsmiling discipline (Messi was fined for arriving one minute late for training last May) with a manifest respect for his players, whom he treats (unlike, say, Ferguson with his) as adults. As important as anything else, he has created at Barcelona what Xavi, his midfield general, describes as a tremendous solidarity between the players, a team spirit which subordinates individual brilliance to the team cause.
Guardiola’s team are aesthetes, but they are also battlers. As he himself said before the final against Manchester United, “I don’t know if we will defeat them, but what I do know is that no team has beaten us either in possession of the ball or in courage. We will try to instil in them the fear of those who are permanently under attack.”
In the end, they instilled in United’s players more than fear; they inspired awe too, as expressed by Wayne Rooney and others when they acknowledged they had not played against a team so good; the finest blend in recent times, as Guardiola (if not Rooney) might have put it, of poetry and prose.
) And they dont try to get younger players, for example they gave beckham a contract, beckham is totally bad today, in the past he was one of the best players, but today he is comperable with a player from barcas second team 
![[FCB]Messi[10](/data/avatars/m/1/1964.jpg?1681148121){kind=avatar}
