Messi (68 page)

Pep Guardiola described how the relationship between footballers and coaches is built to Albert Puig in his book
La fuerza de un sueño
(‘The Strength of a Dream’). ‘However professional they are, they are also scared of losing, and look for a figure to give them the key, to say to them: “Listen! Come this way …” This is what we coaches have to do. We have to transmit confidence and assurance through our decisions.’ Messi recognised that the new coach was not only demanding, but also capable of finding solutions that not even the players were capable of seeing. Guardiola was creating the conditions in which he could be at ease, and Leo was willing to be taken down that path.

But Pep had not arrived alone: he introduced dieticians and nutritionists to the first team to change the squad’s habits. The objective was to improve output and prevent muscular injuries by eating well. In a nutshell it was also to modernise training, at a time when more and more work was being put into the personal analysis of footballers.

Messi’s tears after tearing his femoral biceps against Celtic had been imprinted on Guardiola’s memory. The injury to the muscle that enables an individual to sprint was the Argentinian’s eighth in two years with the first team, more than half of them affecting that same muscle: in Rijkaard’s last season he was out for a total of two and a half months because of physical problems.

‘At a certain time eating habits change,’ says Juanjo Brau. ‘As you increase the demands, the fuel must be equally refined. As he grew both physically and as a footballer, he gradually had to make a few adjustments to his life. To go at fifty miles an hour, a normal lifestyle suffices; but to go quicker you need to function perfectly, and that requires refinements in your lifestyle.’

A holistic, global study of Messi’s physical condition was conducted, and deficiencies were revealed. ‘Leo started to see that Pep worried about improving his output, his nutrition,’ remembers Joan Laporta. ‘Back then he was still a boy who ate, as youngsters do, frankfurters, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and the like. We detected
it and assigned him a nutritionist who did a spectacular job, and remember that Leo hardly got injured during the Guardiola era. I’m of the opinion that Leo really valued that.’

Guardiola made all the players eat together at the training ground, breakfast before training and then lunch before going home. It was as much to do with the need to build a team spirit as it was about controlling their diets: out of three meals, the club provided two.

For Leo, that was the end of his favourite sweets, the end of fizzy drinks, Argentinian barbecues, pizzas, the Milaneses from Las Cuartetas, which he stopped going to after Pep’s arrival. He discovered fish, which he had always refused up to that point. Almost nothing fatty, lots of glucose, fruit, vegetables … Pep applied the tactics he’d learned earlier to communicate with Leo: he ‘recommended’ Leo follow the instructions. ‘From what I can see, this would be good for you …’ And Leo accepted with a certain ‘reluctance’, because of the obligation to vary his routine: we know that man is an animal of habit. But the results were decisive: free from injury, Messi saw the benefit of those strict changes and they ended up becoming a lifestyle. Leo gradually learned how to look after and listen to his body, as Frank Rijkaard had asked him to do years earlier.

Leo would hydrate himself and tone up as requested, he would rest as much as demanded – he was always a fan of the siesta but they were going to be taken at a regular time and not for long periods; one hour would do. With Juanjo Brau he would follow a personal training routine that he had already started under Rijkaard. ‘At the end of the day he is a different player and different players must be treated differently,’ insists Brau. ‘As long as it doesn’t affect the stability of the group, of course.’ The group accepted the difference: they knew it was going to help them win.

Since then, Brau has been with Leo before matches to do specific warming-up exercises and stretches, so that he can then join his team-mates on the pitch for some group work. Juanjo hardly speaks to him during these sessions. He just gives him short, snappy orders: ‘Control this. Pay attention.’ If there’s danger of injury but it’s an important match, one of those in which it is necessary to play, Brau will remind him that he must be aware of how his body is feeling. ‘Don’t drive yourself mad, only make the necessary runs, listen to yourself, your body will tell you, if you notice anything, raise
your hand …’ Footballers have to follow much more than tactical instructions.

At the end of training or a match, Brau goes up to him again and asks him about his muscular requirements. ‘Should we do anything today? We should warm down your legs.’ It is a question of asking him for a translation of what his muscles demand from him and working the miracle of readjusting his body to prime settings on the treatment table. If strength and speed are worked on with the team, injury prevention is in the hands of Brau and down to Leo’s lifestyle. Those are the keys to physical preparation.

The study of Messi’s morphology also produced a change on the pitch. He is often accused of resting during matches, of not pressing and of drifting. There was a scientific explanation for this that Pep asked him to apply to his game after a particular condition was identified. Leo has a muscle typology with a very high energy consumption; his muscles empty themselves of energy very quickly and recover almost as swiftly. But the gap is extreme and that means a period of rest before another effort. ‘He can’t be up and down all the time because his muscular typology is not suited to such physical demands,’ explains Juanjo Brau.

Messi was asked to expend his energies more sparingly. It was explained to him that, as they are all so finely tuned and so physically demanding, he could not permanently be looking for excellence in every passage of play. Not that he would be unable to find it, but it was better for his body for him to choose the moments. ‘Leo has a professional and footballing maturity level which helps him make his efforts fruitful,’ concludes Brau.

And so a fragile body gradually became a top athlete’s physique. From that injury against Celtic in March 2008 until Guardiola’s departure four years later, ‘the Flea’ was only out from injury for ten days. He played 219 games in those seasons. Guardiola, almost like a sergeant major on such issues, was constantly monitoring him so that his good habits were maintained.

If the youth team gave Leo collective mentality and formation, and Rijkaard gave him confidence, Pep Guardiola added order to his life. When he arrived in Barcelona, Leo was 1.43 metres tall and weighed 35 kilos. With Pep he stabilised at 1.69 metres and 69 kilos, but, more importantly, he discovered body language.

‘There is one thing that I’ve repeated many times in the conferences I’ve given on leadership,’ adds Ferran Soriano. ‘Messi described Pep Guardiola to me in one short sentence: “He’s awesome, because he’s strict but right.” He added work to the group following a period when nobody worked much.’

After the win over Sporting Gijón, a cycle began which required all the elements of the Camp Nou dressing room: the local hero, Pep, who found footballers who were fed up with the best players’ poor discipline, a group of home-grown players who established very high standards, and Messi, who was reaching his peak.

The perfect storm was brewing.

3. 4
–
0 VICTORY OVER BAYERN MUNICH. BUT ISSUES REMAIN

Pep Guardiola discovered one of Leo’s pressure points early on in his tenure. As he admitted to Martín Souto, Messi got annoyed because he was replaced in the eighty-first minute by Pedro. With the match already wrapped up with an emphatic 4–0 lead, Pep wanted to give him a rest in preparation for the Real Madrid match seven days later. Thierry Henry had scored a hat-trick but Leo was quiet. According to Catalan radio station RAC1, ‘the Flea’ turned
up at the training ground the following day but did not get changed and was clearly mad about the match and substitution.

Messi gets angry when he is replaced and also when he is not given the ball when he thinks he should get it. But, as Estiarte once said to Leo, other footballers simply do not see the game as he does: ‘I used to be like you. I would see it clearly, but the thing is it is not that obvious to the others. They aren’t as good as you.’

‘Look, I also get annoyed when they don’t pass it to me, if I see an opening and I don’t get the ball,’ explains Gustavo Oberman, the Argentine international who won the Under 20 World Cup alongside Messi. ‘Maybe his anger is more noticeable with so many cameras on him. But it is something that every player does, from the best in the world to the village boys having a kickabout with friends. I do it because I think the best option is down my side and there are times when I don’t pass because I can’t see the other openings. It isn’t out of selfishness or personal ambition, because he provides many assists, too, he doesn’t just score.’

That was the same Leo whom Pep discovered to be competitive to the extreme, even in friendlies. Diego Milito tells of how Messi used to shout: ‘Pass to me, I’ll sort it out’ if his team was losing in a kickabout in training. He also followed football codes that he had learned in Argentina: in the book
When We Never Lost
Juan Villoro tells of a training session in which Sergio Busquets went hard in on the ball and gashed Messi’s leg. The session continued and in the dressing room the midfielder went to apologise to him. ‘The victim answered in a measured voice,’ Villoro continues, ‘pointing to the wound: “it says Sergio Busquets here”.’ Leo was not going to forget that; he owed him one. ‘Days later, the incident apparently forgotten, he tackled Busquets very hard and smiled with almost childish glee: it had been payback time.’ Villoro explains that in a game against Espanyol, the city rivals, at their stadium in Cornella, he celebrated the 5–1 victory by patrolling the wing nearest to the benches, occasionally throwing sidelong glances at the rival coach, fellow Argentinian Mauricio Pochettino.

And every now and then if a winger or forward, those around him, didn’t pass him the ball, he would also show his disgust. Guardiola understood that those were two faces of the same coin. And he was learning how to handle it.

Since starting his career in the game, Pep has always known there are footballers who have to be treated differently. He saw it in the Barcelona dressing room as a player with Hristo Stoichkov and Romario. When he started to think as a coach, he reflected on how such supposed favouritism could be applied without affecting the group. While at Brescia in 2003, he decided to call the Argentina volleyball coach Julio Velasco, a two-time world champion, for advice.

‘There is an Argentine coach, Julio Velasco, who revolutionised volleyball in Italy and won absolutely everything,’ explained Guardiola in a Banco de Sabadell interview. ‘One day I was very keen to meet him, and when I did he told me that he had always got other coaches to repeat to him: “all players are the same, for me you are all the same.” That is the biggest lie in the sport, Velasco told me. They are not all the same, nor do they all have to be treated the same; with the same respect, yes … To get the best out of someone, you might have to invite him out to eat away from the workplace; or you might have to summon him to your office; or maybe you should never speak to him about tactics; or you might speak to him about what he does in his free time all day long. You have to find the way with each one, that is the fascinating part of our job; what to say to him, or what to do to him, or how to trick him or how to seduce him to bring him to your field and get the best out of him. We appear to be above them, that is how they see us. In reality we are below, because we depend on them and we want to “trick them” to get the best out of them, to get what we hope for.’

‘He told me he had seen me speak on television and wanted to chat to me. We ended up meeting in Rome,’ remembers Velasco on the website
canchallena.com
. ‘He asked me loads of questions and I understood, because I also developed like that. He especially wanted to know how to manage groups and I told him what I’ve always professed, that not everyone should be treated in the same way, because every man has different psychological characteristics. Managing a group is an art and I see that he applies these key principles.’

Juanjo Brau knows how to handle Leo’s less diplomatic side. He does not impose anything on him, he merely suggests. ‘He knows what I am to him, so at the very least he will pay attention,’ says the physiotherapist.
Leo gets the message. And if something has to be negotiated one day, perhaps about exercises, massages or whatever, Brau allows Leo to make the choice: ‘When does it suit you to do it?’ he will ask. By putting him in charge of his own decisions, Brau makes work seem less like an imposition; he makes it more easygoing.

Pep found out quickly that, in fact, the best way to deal with Leo was to manage his silences. Some players express themselves very openly, but Messi is a man of few words. If he is angry, it is the coach’s job to find out why. Messi rarely says what is wrong, what he is thinking, it has to be drawn out of him; his attitude, behaviour and moods need to be interpreted. You have to get it right in order to be able to apply the solution. That is what Pep refers to when he speaks of understanding all his players: each one is a world unto himself.