The greatest trick Pep Guardiola ever pulled was to convince the world that club DNA exists. Football changed when Guardiola was appointed Barcelona manager in 2008. It’s not just that the world’s eyes were opened to the full potential of possession football or that goals a game shot up in the knockout stages of the Champions League – although both did happen – but that a model was presented of how things could be.
Here was a coach with no first-team experience who immediately offloaded two big-name foreign stars in Ronaldinho and Deco and, in his first season, won the Champions League, La Liga and the Copa del Rey with a side featuring seven players who had come through the same youth ranks that had produced him. It was successful, it was beautiful and it was cheap: what club executive wouldn’t want to follow the model?
