THE CRUYFF LEGACY
My dad would be a Manchester City fan now says Jordi... it’s only a matter of time before Pep is successful here
IT IS ALMOST as if the man himself is there. The question has been raised as to whether Johan Cruyff, shortly before his death in March this year, would have had any concerns about Pep Guardiola adapting to English football. In the room is his son, Jordi, and he says his father was able to talk with Guardiola about the new challenge in his career shortly before he died.
‘My father never had doubts,’ he says. ‘For him it wasn’t a question mark. It was just a question of time.’
And then comes the point which could almost be his father’s.
‘It’s not that coaches have to adapt to English football. It’s that English football has to adapt to the different, the new things of football. It’s not a coincidence that most of the so-called title contenders of bigger clubs are coached by foreigners and managed by foreigners.’
It shouldn’t be a surprise. Cruyff junior, the former Manchester United player, now sporting director at Maccabi Tel Aviv, is very much his own man, but he retains his father’s capacity to tell it how it is.
The most influential man in modern football, as a player, coach and then mentor to the likes of Guardiola, died of lung cancer. Jordi says he only suffered badly for two days, which came as a relief of sorts amid the tragedy.
His father spent his last few months finishing his book, Johan Cruyff: My Turn, which is his last testimony and explains the thoughts and feelings behind the Total Football philosophy.
It is a doctrine that has already transformed football three times: in 1974, with Holland, when Cruyff drove his team to the World Cup final; then again when he became the first coach to win the European Cup with Barcelona in 1992; and, most recently, rebooted by Guardiola, at Barcelona in 2008.
For Jordi it must be an odd experience. He has to talk about the football mentor and influencer, the great player, at length, while mourning the death of his father.
‘I think it’s nice,’ he says. ‘At moments I have a little bit of an emotional touch on it and I need to breathe in. But the way people have been reacting — so much passion, energy and love and positive feelings — everyone has something to say.
‘So I think it enlightens the pride inside of me. This man lives and left something inside of me. I relate to a lot of the things and his way of his thinking.
‘I have grown up and listened every day to his way of thinking and the reasons why he did things, his free spirit.
‘He doesn’t owe anything to anyone and he can speak freely and he has the power, the luck — I don’t know what to call it — the destiny, to do it on the field and then do it as a coach and as a human being doing good things. The book is pure him.’
Deeply entwined in the Cruyff story is Guardiola, almost like a surrogate son.
To see Guardiola sitting and talking with Cruyff’s widowed wife, Danny, and his younger daughter Susila, Jordi’s sister, in a group on Thursday, it almost seemed as though he was a member of the extended family. They go back so far.
Cruyff once said that when he became coach of Barcelona, he heard great things about a skinny teenager playing in the youth ranks. He searched for him in the reserves, the youth team and then the third youth team, where eventually he found him. Bewil- dered, Cruyff asked the coaches what he was doing in such a lowly team if he was one of the best technical players. ‘He’s too small,’ came the reply. ‘Put him in the first team,’ insisted Cruyff. ‘He will grow.’ That was, of course, a 17-year-old Guardiola.
There was another pivotal moment where you could detect the hand of Cruyff senior in the ascent of Guardiola.
In 2008, Barcelona came to a clear fork in the road, with Frank Rijkaard departing. Two candidates were being considered: Jose Mourinho, already feted and iconic, a former assistant manager at the Nou Camp, a Champions League winner with Porto and twotime Premier League winner with Chelsea; and then there was Guardiola, a man with just one year’s experience of managing the Barca B team.
In terms of respective CVs there was no comparison. Yet Barca president, Joan Laporta, a friend of Cruyff’s, and the director of football, Txiki Begiristain, now at Manchester City and also a friend of Cruyff, opted for Guardiola. The suspicion is that they leaned heavily on Cruyff’s counsel.
‘Knowing Barcelona as it is, it’s not a oneman decision,’ says Jordi. ‘Presidents are not football specialists, they run a club but they don’t know how to make a specialist decision. Obviously there was Txiki there but also my father and I’m quite sure that they all influenced each other and were supportive of each other. What they would feel is that this was the right step.’
It seemed a grotesque risk at the time. There was a motion of no confidence in Laporta among the membership of the club which saw 60 per cent vote against him, just six per cent short of the threshold required to force him to resign. But Jordi insists that his father was sure about the decision.
‘For him it was not a risk, because he knew Pep since the age of 17 and followed him also when he was in Barcelona B for one season, which at that time was the third level of football,’ he says.
‘My father saw what he saw and he was 100 per cent convinced this was the right choice to make. And in life, if you don’t risk, you don’t live.’
Whether Cruyff explicitly vetoed Mourinho is less clear but, given the Cruyffian principles of playing expansive, creative football to entertain whatever, it seems unlikely he could have endorsed the man
Pep and my dad have the same principles: passion, style, a way to play
who is now Guardiola’s rival at Manchester United. ‘You never know,’ says Jordi (below). ‘Managers adapt themselves to clubs and clubs adapt themselves to managers. Maybe it would have been possible. But I think Barcelona is a very romantic, idealist philosophy and most people just don’t fit.
‘It doesn’t mean they’re good or bad. It's just it’s hard to find the right fit for Barcelona. It's hard for I Barcelona to find who the next coach will be. If Luis Enrique goes, then what?
‘There are not many who actually understand the club inside out, the necessity, the pressure points. It’s a tough job. You think it’s easy with all the stars but it’s tough her than oyu think. Barcelona is a special club, you cannot compare to other clubs, the necessity and the exact profile that matches the Barcelona manager; that's a hell of a job.'
For now, it is Manchester City who carry the Cruyff torch. There are others who absorbed many of the ideas — Wim Jonk has a special mention in the book and Cruyff’s dying wish was for him to take charge of the training of young players at Cruyff academies.
Mauricio Pochettino, who absorbed similar ideas from Argentinian Marcelo Bielsa, comes up in conversation. ‘Poch is a clear example of the guy who has Argentinian passion and intensity and has a little bit of his Spanish passing football and mixes it well,’ says Jordi.
But no one bears the imprint of the vision deeper than Guardiola.
‘They both have words that appear in the same vocabulary: ball possession, angles, dominate the game, control the game, the goalkeeper has to play from behind, high pressure, immediately recover the ball. Those are words that are not in all coaches’ vocabulary.
‘Most would like to. But you have to know how to implement that and you have to have the backing from owners and the right players but above all you have to have the right mindset, that this key is going to open the door. So they do have a lot of similarities in their vocabulary and their passion. And in the way they can convince players: “This is the way we’re going to do it.” In a positive way. You can also do it in an authoritarian way. But he tries to get the players passionate about the way that they play. I think they have those similarities.
‘Of course, you’re talking about different times: one is the 90s and now 20-odd years further, so things modernise. And football starts to be specialist.
‘You have a goalkeeping coach, you have a physical coach, the stats, the data analysts. You have the defence coach, the attacking — there is so much specialisation going on. Thirty years ago it wasn’t there. You have to put a lot of stats in your philosophy.
‘Football has modernised and I think a lot of coaches that maybe have the romantic philosophy that my father had, they share the philosophy. But they have added their own percentage of personality in there.’ And the conviction from the Cruyff family is undiminished. Jordi — and doubtless his father would have agreed — is sure Guardiola will have the same impact in England as he did in Spain and Germany, where he was a serial trophy winner.
‘Absolutely,’ says Jordi. ‘I don’t have any doubt about that. Of course there will be days, three, four games in a row when the results are not good, but he will convince them that this is the way that we’re going to follow and we’re going to continue to do it. And I think in the end City is the club with potential to attract big players. So if you put all this together, then you have a good formula.’
Earlier Jordi had clasped Guardiola’s hand and told him that if his dad were alive, he would be a Manchester City fan today, a dif- ficult position for Jordi, as a former United player.
‘I would argue with him a bit on that,’ he says, smiling. ‘I will not convert, for sure, but on the other hand I have reached the point when I’m actually super happy when Pep wins. All my family, my father last year was watching a lot of his games in Bayern Munich. I’ve never seen my father watching the Bundesliga so much. Pep was there. I’m sure if he was alive he would be watching most of the Man City games, knowing that they would speak and he would give a few of his thoughts.’
In many ways though, his legacy is clear and seemingly prevailing, even i n the Premier League, despite his death.