He has been told by stadia of 60,000 that he’s a failure, and interprets it as 60,000 watching his team play. Before the Premiership season starts, the story of failure of last season Pep Guardiola takes on questions of what and what all went wrong for Manchester City.
Speaking to GQ Espana, the maverick manager struck a defiant tone while philodophising failure, saying, “Are there people waiting for me to fail? Yes, yes, definitely. And delighted to welcome them. Delighted. That gives you energy. In competition, you need people who say, ‘Yes? You’ll see.’”
In a long ranging interview with the lifestyle major, Guardiola would start off when asked what he feels his age to be when Cridtiano Ronaldo said he reckoned he was 28. “I’m now, I’m 75 years old [laughs]. I’m a wreck, everything hurts right now. So, if it’s my biological age… Maybe if I take the test, it’ll come out younger. I hope to be better than I am now in a while. That’s why I need places like this to get better,” he would say on the sidelines of a longevity, neuroscience facility in Barcelona.
Speaking about last season’s woes, Guardiola told GQ, “I don’t think I’d attribute it so much to last year, but rather to the last seven years. When you win six Premier Leagues, there comes a time when you go downhill. It’s human nature. Back then, we probably should have moved more players, but it’s very easy to say that after the fact. It’s a process that had to be experienced, which happens, which took longer to happen, and when it happened, it went deeper than we could have imagined. Not deep in the sense of ending badly, because in the end, we reached the Copa del Rey final and finished third, not twelfth. It hasn’t gone so badly. In retrospect, we’ll see that it hasn’t been such a bad season. But we have gone for many months without winning games. We’ve gone like 13 or 14 without winning, and that was… It had never happened before. But it puts you in your place.”
Guardiola would cackle about schadenfreude felt by many watching him struggle. “In the Premier League, when you’re doing poorly, when you’re really doing poorly, you finish twelfth or thirteenth… Ah, what are they waiting for me? Yes, yes, definitely. And I’m delighted to welcome them (laughs). Delighted. That gives you energy,” he told GQ.
However Guardiola said sport was tightly wound up with failures, even the most successful careers. “In sports, you can’t always win every competition you play. You know why? Because it’s impossible. Impossible. So you lose sometimes, well yes, that’s part of sports. Michael Jordan was the greatest. He won six rings playing for fifteen years. He lost more than he won. Tiger Woods was the greatest. He won fourteen Grand Slams. Do you know how many he’s played in his life? More than a hundred. He lost more than he won. In sports, you lose more than you win. I’ve played in 16 leagues and won thirteen. So, well, yes, I’ve lost some. But it hasn’t gone badly. And then, as part of sports, part of the process is thinking that the others are also good, that they also do well, that they also prepare, that they also have the people to do well. Ah, this year, if we give up, I’ll tell you, we’re twelfth, and we’re not giving up. We were very bad, very bad, but we were there, we were there… And in the end we finished third, which in the Premier League, I can tell you, isn’t bad,” he told GQ.
Guardiola would philosophise about not winning, and failing, grandly bigly even to GQ “I’m delighted to have failed. I love failures. In this society where everything has to be perfect, where you have to post your food on Instagram… ‘Oh, how good, how happy I am.’ Every day we have to prove that we’re happy. Well, yes, I’m sad, I fail, and I lose. So? So? Name one who doesn’t do it. The important thing is to do it, give it your all, and do it well. And I haven’t given up on that. I’ve done poorly, we’ve had worse results than I expected, but hey, the next day there’s another one, and I’m going to try again. And next year I’m going to do better. That’s what it’s all about,” he said.
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At one point Guardiola would spring one rough bouncer on the GQ interviewer, “It’s just that even when I was winning, I didn’t feel like we were anything special, and now that we haven’t won, I don’t feel like a failure. Are you trying to judge me or something? No, no, no, no, I’m not saying you’re sitting here… (laughter). Does that seem right to you? If you want to put your frustrations on someone else’s mind and you’re calmer because things haven’t gone well for someone else, that’s your problem. It’s your problem, the problem of the people who want to put the frustration of their lives on me and are happy because things haven’t gone well for me. It’s going well, no problem.”
Would you like to return to Barcelona one day, or is this a phase of your life over?, Guardiola is asked by GQ. “It’s over. It’s over forever. It was very beautiful, but it’s over now.”
