RIP Johan Cruyff

“I would not be able to do what he did. You hear all these people saying, ‘Oh Pep, what a good manager he is.’ Forget about it. Cruyff was the best, by far. Creating something new is the difficult part. To make it and build it and get everyone to follow? Amazing. That’s why, when I was Barcelona manager, I went to see Johan many times. I made especially sure I went a lot in my first year when we won everything, absolutely everything.”

At the end of that 2008-09 season, when Guardiola was 37 and after he had spent the previous year, his first as a coach, looking after their B team, Barcelona completed the treble of the Copa del Rey, La Liga and the Champions League – beating Manchester United 2-0 in the final. Guardiola’s reputation was sealed during that extraordinary managerial debut but he stresses that: “I always went that season to see Johan to try make him feel how grateful I was to him. Of course I wanted to talk to him about new ideas, but the main feeling I always had when I said goodbye was that he might feel how pleased I am and see how deep my gratitude goes.”

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I’ve heard that Cruyff, even as a coach, played beautifully on the training pitch. “Better than us,” Guardiola exclaims of himself and his fellow players in Barcelona’s Dream Team that won the club’s first European Cup at Wembley in 1992. “He was much, much better than us. He explained what we have to do and showed us how to do it. It was a masterclass every single training session, every single game, analysing why we play good or bad. It was like going to university every day.