Leadership lessons from a Catalan hero

author: Simon Kuper
source: Financial Times
date: 21 March 2009
editing: fcbtransfers.blogspot.com





A year ago, one of Barcelona's vice-presidents mused over lunch at the Nou Camp stadium that perhaps Josep "Pep" Guardiola should be the club's next coach. Guardiola then 37, had never managed a professional football club, let alone the biggest on earth. True, replied the veep, but Guardiola was a Catalan, and "Barça" longed to have a home-grown coach.

Months later Guardiola got the job. He then transformed last season's jaded Barça team into what the great Italian coach Arrigo Sacchi calls "the most beautiful footballing cause of recent years". Guardiola's inspired appointment offers two lessons to any company: how to choose a boss, and how the boss should choose his team.

The key point about Guardiola is that he has been identified with Barcelona almost from birth. As Jimmy Burns writes in Barça: A People's Passion , locals still remember Guardiola as a skinny 15-year-old ballboy illegally running on to the pitch and hugging a player during a European semi-final in 1986. They remember him as a skinny playmaker, standing on the balcony of the Generalitat building in 1992, holding aloft the European Cup, and saying in Catalan, " Ja la teniu aquí " ("Here you have it"). The phrase, deliberately echoed the legendary " Ja soc aquí " ("Here I am") of Josep Tarradellas, the Catalan president, when he returned from French exile after General Franco died.

But most Barça fans always hoped that one day, the man known as The Myth would return, as their skinny coach. In other words, Guardiola, a reader of Catalan poetry, is the perfect Catalan hero. This background matters because it helps Guardiola govern with the essence of the club culture. Guardiola understands how the fans want Barcelona to play: the attacking, quick-passing football down the wings that the Dutchman Johan Cruijff introduced, that is to say, Cruijff painted the chapel, and subsequent coaches must merely restore and improve it.

The fans agree. By governing with the grain, Guardiola wins instant acceptance. It's like the unknown from the ranks who is chosen as CEO because everyone likes him and he understands the company. He contrasts with the "star" CEO or coach from outside, who often tries to overturn the existing corporate culture: José Mourinho, for instance.

Star players obey Guardiola because they know they have no chance of forcing him out. They stick to the three-page "code of good conduct" he wrote before the season, stick to their zones on the field, and when the great striker Samuel Eto'o dares talk back at training, he is banished to the showers. Barcelona's players are so good that as long as they serve the collective, they will win prizes.

And that is the main lesson from Guardiola's work: he kept his best players. A year ago everyone expected Barcelona to sell the difficult, underperforming Eto'o and Thierry Henry. But Guardiola knew that football's scarcest resource is talent. Instead of buying lesser, more dutiful players, he dared to persevere with class.

Only one step remains in Guardiola's career path: displace Sant Jordi as the skinny patron saint of Catalonia.

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