Pep talk from Bielsa helped make a managerial legend
HOUSE VISIT LIT THE BLUE TOUCH PAPER
PEP GUARDIOLA has always looked up to Marcelo Bielsa because he loves his style of football.
The Spaniard was stunned when Bielsa presented him with a tactical analysis of his side after they beat the Argentinian’s Athletic Bilbao team 3-0 in the 2012 Copa del Rey final, admitting: “You know more about Barcelona than me”.
Six years earlier, Guardiola had sought out ‘El Loco’ at his home in Argentina before launching his coaching career.
Guardiola wanted to learn from him, as Tim
Rich writes in the new biography of Bielsa: “In October 2006 a visitor came to Maximo Paz searching for Bielsa. He was in a lull in his career. He had finished playing for Barcelona in 2001 at the age of 30.
“There had been two frustrating seasons in Italy, at Brescia and Roma, and a lucrative one in Qatar.
“Now he found himself in northwest Mexico, playing for Dorados de Sinaloa in a city on the PanAmerican Highway called Culiacan.
“It was obvious Guardiola would want to talk to Bielsa. When he and Gabriel Batistuta were playing together in Rome, Batistuta advised him to look him up. ‘If you want to be a coach, you have to get together with this man’, he said.
“Guardiola, accompanied by Spanish film director and novelist David Trueba, met Bielsa. The first hour was taken up with Bielsa questioning Trueba, who had just finished his second film Bienvenido a Casa [Welcome Home].
“He only stopped when Trueba said, ‘You haven’t come all this way to talk about films, have you?’ The talk switched to football. ‘They started and they could not stop,’ said Trueba, who recalled frantic conversations about teams, tactical planning and anecdotes about the game. Bielsa’s computer was used to check facts and settle arguments. He positioned Trueba between two chairs to act out a move in a match.
“They turned to the practicalities of management such a dealing with the press. Bielsa explained why he never gave exclusive interviews. ‘Why am I going to give an interview to a journalist at a powerful paper and deny one to a little reporter from the provinces?’ When he became manager of Barcelona two years later, this was a policy Guardiola would follow.
“It would be the same in Munich and Manchester. He would not grant one-on-one interviews but talk to the media only via press conferences.
“Then Bielsa turned to Guardiola: ‘Why do you, who knows about all the garbage in football, the dishonesty of people in the game, want to return to that environment and manage? Do you like blood so much?’ Guardiola replied, ‘I need blood’.”