Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography by Guillem Balagué

that had gone on. The home-grown players were always on the receiving end. He was burned out and he suffered a lot. Guardiola suffers, he’s not the type of person who can shake these
things off. He was overloaded, he felt a sense of liberation when he moved on.’
    Pep was thirty years old when he played his last game for the club and was still in good shape, so it was inevitable that people expected him to move to one of Europe’s leading clubs.
Offers started pouring in. Inter, AC Milan, Roma, Lazio, all came calling from Italy. Paris Saint-Germain and even a couple of Greek clubs expressed an interest. In England, Pep’s
availability aroused the interest of Tottenham, Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester United, Wigan, West Ham and Fulham. But Pep wanted to play for the team that had captured his imagination as a small
boy kicking a ball around the village square. He wanted to sign for Juventus, just as Platini had, his idol on the poster on his bedroom wall in Santpedor.
    According to Jaume Collell in his excellent biography of Guardiola, Pep’s negotiations with Juventus played out like something from a mafia movie. The tale begins with a phone call to the
player’s agent, Josep María Orobitg, informing him that somebody from Juventus wanted a secret meeting with him. Consequently, a car arrived to collect the agent in Barcelona and took
him, via a number of B roads, to Turin. Barely a word was spoken in the car until they finally arrived at a modest hostel in a remote spot. ‘Orobitg went up the stairs and Luciano Moggi came
across, the general director of Juventus,’ Collell explains. ‘He was sitting at a round table, surrounded by shaven-head bodyguards, wearing the typical dark glasses. A chubby waitress
served abundant amounts of pasta but said little. Suddenly, the bodyguards left together. Alone, Moggi and Orobitg reached an agreement in less than three minutes.’ Orobitg says it took
forty-fiveminutes but agrees with the description of the scene. The fact of the matter is that nothing was signed on paper.
    Manchester United had been interested in him while he was still at Barcelona, but his agent could only listen to what they had to say at that time because Pep refused to allow him permission to
negotiate with another club while he was still wearing a Barcelona shirt. Sir Alex Ferguson put a lot of pressure on the agent, as he was planning for the season ahead and saw Pep as a key player
in his plans. Ferguson even presented them with an ultimatum: he wanted a face-to-face meeting with the Barcelona midfielder. Guardiola was hesitant and he turned Sir Alex Ferguson down. That was
the end of the matter. Ferguson was angry but Pep had no regrets. ‘Maybe the timing I chose was wrong,’ Sir Alex says now.
    In the press conference ahead of the 2001 Champions League final at Wembley, when Pep said Ferguson had done the right thing in not signing him, he was really hiding the reality of that failed
transfer: after six or seven months of negotiations, meetings with Ferguson’s son and the agent Francis Martin, and after the player rejected huge financial incentives, Manchester United
moved on. In his place, Ferguson signed Juan Sebastián Verón along with Ruud Van Nistelrooy and Laurent Blanc. And United went on to finish third in the Premier League that
season.
    Inter, Arsenal, Liverpool and Tottenham pressed on with negotiations. Inter showed considerable interest, but Juventus remained Pep’s preferred club. Yet, three months after the
aforementioned trip to Turin and continuing contact between the Juve president, Umberto Agnelli, Moggi and Pep’s representatives, something strange happened: the Italian club denied that the
secret encounter – even the pasta, the bodyguards and car ride from Barcelona – had even taken place and that no agreement had ever been reached.
    The logical explanation for Juve’s U-turn was that Moggi had just dismissed the coach Carlo Ancelotti, who had given