THE DAY PEP GUARDIOLA TRAVELLED 5,000 MILES JUST TO TALK FOOTBALL (AND FILMS) WITH ‘THE BEST COACH IN THE WORLD’
PEP GUARDIOLA was thinking of the future. He was 32 and playing out an unhappy season at Roma. His team-mate, Gabriel Batistuta, turned to him and said: ‘If you want to be a coach, you have to get together with this guy.’ He meant Marcelo Bielsa: a man Guardiola came to regard as the best coach in the world. It would take Guardiola three years to meet him. In 2006 both men were in a lull in their careers. Bielsa had not worked since resigning as manager of Argentina after taking them to the gold medal at the Athens Olympics. Guardiola was playing for Dorados de Sinaloa in northern Mexico. Guardiola did not play much for Dorados. He had not really gone to play at all but to learn from their manager, Juanma Lillo, whom Guardiola was to consider the best coach he had played under, better even than Johan
Cruyff. At the age of 29, Lillo had become the youngest manager in La Liga in 1995 when he took Salamanca to promotion. He owned a library that contained 10,000 newspapers and magazines about football. He and Guardiola would talk almost every day about the theories of the game. In October 2006, Guardiola made the 5,000-mile journey to Argentina and Bielsa’s ranch near Rosario, which contained as many books, videos and articles as Lillo’s library. Bielsa had prepared an Argentinian barbecue, called an asado, where haunches of meat are roasted over an open fire. Guardiola was accompanied by the Spanish film director and novelist, David Trueba, who broke the ice. Bielsa was fascinated by the cinema and when not working would sometimes get through two films a day. One morning, his