Jonathan Wilson’s The Barcelona Legacy: Guardiola, Mourinho and the Fight For Football’s Soul couldn’t have been timed better. Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho are now in Manchester, involved in a renewed battle to settle the long-standing debate on what’s the right way to play football. For now, it’s easy to see who is winning. Guardiola’s Manchester City set the record for most points (100), most goals scored (106) and most wins (32) en route to the Premier League title last season while Mourinho’s Manchester United has often looked dreary and is almost on the brink.
‘Translator’, midfielder
Yet, as Wilson shows through 319 pages of immaculate research and lucid prose, it is a question which has no straight answers. He chronicles, in vivid detail, the overarching influence of the legendary Dutchman Johan Cruyff and his footballing idealism, and also the trajectories of those who sought to move away from his principles and still charted out highly successful careers. The connecting link is FC Barcelona, where under manager Louis van Gaal (1997-2000) Mourinho worked as a ‘translator’ and Guardiola played as a midfielder.
The core of the book is the juxtaposition of two of the foremost ideas in football. Cruyff’s philosophy, which took root at Ajax and Barcelona under the famed coach Rinus Michels, and subsequently trickled down to Guardiola, was to win possession and retain it. “There’s a ball and either they’ve got it or you’ve got it,” he said. “If you have got it, they can’t score. If you use the ball well, the chances of a good outcome are greater than the chances of a bad outcome.” But Mourinho slowly became its anti-thesis. “He who has the ball has fear,” he declared.
Riveting stories
Wilson’s exploration of this clash, through Mourinho’s days at Inter Milan and Real Madrid and Guardiola’s at Barcelona, form the most riveting portions of the book. Guardiola’s Barcelona always seemed to win the battle of perception but Mourinho’s famous victory over the Catalan in the 2010 Champions League with just 19% possession and the wresting of the Spanish La Liga title in the latter’s last season (2011-12) provided thrillingly discordant notes.
As much as the book is about the two men, it also places van Gaal on a deservingly high pedestal. Wilson calls the time when Barcelona was under van Gaal’s tutelage ‘The Greatest Seminar in History’. Not just Guardiola and Mourinho, it also had Luis Enrique, who helmed Barcelona from 2014 to 2017 and is currently in charge of Spain, Julen Lopetegui, the current Real Madrid manager,and Frank de Boer, who later won a record four Dutch titles with Ajax, as players and Ronald Koeman, now the Netherlands head coach, as the assistant. The story is of how this proud lineage shaped the course of the modern game.
Joining the dots
To those who are acquainted with Wilson either through his columns or podcasts, many of the individual details in the book will be familiar. But joining the dots is what he does best. It is evident in the way he locates Cruyff’s ideas about football in the very first international game played in 1872 between England and Scotland. It comes to the fore again when he explains the vulnerability of teams based on the Cruyffian model to concede goals in clusters. From Cruyff’s Barcelona, which lost to AC Milan 4-0 in the 1994 UEFA Champions League final, to Guardiola’s outfits at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City, that succumbed to the likes of Real Madrid, Leicester City and Liverpool, the flaw is unmistakable.
It is in fact the two crushing defeats to Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool early this year and Guardiola’s response to them that lead us to the present. After Mourinho, Klopp has been Guardiola’s biggest nemesis. When he moved to Bayern Munich in 2013, he had to finetune his Cruyffian tenets to take on Klopp’s then side Borussia Dortmund which specialised in rapid transitions from defence to offence. It was only two weeks ago, in the 0-0 draw against Liverpool, that the Catalan finally found a way to neutralise Klopp, another marker in the evolution of Cruyffian football.
Ode to Cruyff
Contrast this with the stagnation of The Netherlands, which failed to qualify for both the 2016 Euros and 2018 World Cup, something that Wilson deals with in the last few chapters. Cruyff was so important to the country’s psyche in the 1960s that journalist Hubert Smeets said, “Cruyff was to the Netherlands what the Beatles were to Britain.” Now, according to Dutch football expert Simon Kuper, The Netherlands has simply stopped thinking.
Twenty years after that confluence of great minds at the Camp Nou, the best Dutch football is seemingly being played in England, as maverick coaches in Guardiola, Klopp, Maurizio Sarri and Mauricio Pochettino, all of whom have been influenced by the principles of pressing and possession in varied forms, sing a fresh ode to Cruyff. But as Wilson concludes, “Even those like Mourinho have been in some way moulded by it. That’s where the reach of Cruyff’s philosophy is really seen.”
The Barcelona Legacy: Guardiola, Mourinho and the Fight For Football’s Soul ; Jonathan Wilson, Ebury Press, ₹1,501.
