When Pep Guardiola, then 31, had his locker assigned in the Roma dressing room, he was closely observed by those around him. It was an intriguing transfer, in the summer of 2002.
In that period, Spanish players had something of unhappy history in the prestigious Italian Serie A of the time. Yet Guardiola, who had just spent a year of ups and downs at Brescia, seemed unlike many of his compatriots.
Fabio Capello, the Roma coach back then would quickly realise Guardiola seemed unlike many footballers. “He’s one of the few intellectuals I have come across in a dressing room,” Capello later said. “He was an intellectual in the sense he thinks about literature and other cultural things.”
Capello, an art collector, might have identified a like-minded soul, a potential friend outside the confines of the pitch, were it not for his firm concepts of coach-to-player authority and distance.
Guardiola was observing and assessing Capello, too, in an intellectually studious, and professional way.
Guardiola was already a coach-in-waiting. He returns to a Roma dressing room on Tuesday night in charge of Bayern Munich. His most cherished memories of the Stadio Olimpico are of the May evening in 2009 when he galvanised a Barcelona side whom he had taken over 11 months earlier and played them scenes from the movie Gladiator before overseeing a 2-0 victory in the Champions League final against Manchester United. But he may also reflect that his brief episode in the Italian capital as a player was formative.
A Barcelona footballer most of his career, he had wanted to experience the Italian game. Part of what drew him to Roma had been Capello, a manager with an expert reputation, tactical subtlety and authority. In the six years since Guardiola began to establish his own expertise from the dugout, with Barcelona and then at Bayern, there have been only faint indications of Capello-like tendencies in his coaching style.
Guardiola teams play expansively, usually; Capello is caricatured as a cagey, conservative type. But although their time as boss and employee was short and the midfielder’s injury problems prevented his gaining much momentum as a Roma player, a few management techniques rubbed off on the would-be young coach.
As for Capello, he soon saw where Guardiola, the elegant passer of the training pitch, was heading in his life.
“At his peak, Guardiola was one of the quickest thinkers on the field, a player who knew what he was going to do with the ball before it reached him, and a great positional intelligence,” Capello said. “He was a true leader, calm, always had the right words at the appropriate moment. There are a lot of players who talk a lot and say nothing. Guardiola would find the right things to say. I could see all the ingredients there for a good coach.”
The rest is history, though not such ancient history that Guardiola will find the current Roma unrecognisable from the one he was a part of: Francesco Totti was there then, as now, never portraying himself as an intellectual but evidently a leader. Daniele De Rossi, with whom Guardiola shared space in central midfield, was also a colleague.
And the Roma whose tactical strengths his Bayern need to combat in what is a competitive Champions League group – Manchester City have lost narrowly to the German champions and drawn with Roma so far – are the kind of team Guardiola admires: they pass smoothly, switch formations fluidly and clearly like the same sorts of footballers he does.
Bayern snatched the defender Mehdi Benatia for €26 million (Dh121.7m) from Roma in the summer; Roma then recruited midfielder Seydou Keita, one of Guardiola’s first signings when he began as a coach at Barcelona in 2008, and an individual, Guardiola says, he admires on a human level as much as anybody he has worked with.
Keita misses out on Tuesday with injury, though De Rossi’s return to the first team in Saturday’s 3-0 win against Chievo, after fitness problems, compensates.
Bayern meanwhile are buoyant after their 6-0 demolition of Werder Bremen at the weekend. But Guardiola knows Roma have the attacking pizazz to hurt them, and that the Olimpico, once his home ground, can be a rousing, intimidating place.
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