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on aggregate) in Barcelona playing with ten men for almost an hour, Guardiola met the president, Sandro
Rosell, at the Camp Nou. ‘Come and see me at my house tomorrow morning, President,’ the coach said.
    Pep also talked to his assistant, Tito Vilanova, telling him that, as Vilanova already suspected, he was not going to continue. Guardiola also surprised him with a prediction. ‘I think
they are going to propose that you take over,’ he said. ‘And I will back you up with whatever decision you take.’ Unbeknown to Vilanova,his name had first
been proposed in a conversation between Zubizarreta and Guardiola the previous November. ‘Do you think Tito can replace you if you decide to leave?’ the director of football asked.
‘For sure’ was Pep’s answer even though he had no idea if his friend was going to take the job – or if Zubizarreta was being serious.
    At 9 a.m. the following day, Pep Guardiola held a meeting at his house with Sandro Rosell, Andoni Zubizarreta, Tito Vilanova and vice-president Josep Maria Bertomeu. It was then that he broke
the news to the club hierarchy that he would not continue at FC Barcelona.
    The meeting lasted for three hours as Pep explained his reasons for calling it a day. ‘You know all those things we have been talking about during the season? Nothing has changed. I am
leaving. I have to leave,’ Pep told them. The defeat to Real Madrid and the loss against Chelsea weren’t the cause, but both had served as the catalyst for the chain of events.
    The following day he told his parents and, although his mother, Dolors, believed that her son’s ‘health comes first’, she also felt that her ‘heart shrank’ on
hearing the news. He needed, according to Dolors, ‘a place of rest and relaxation’. That is also how his father, Valentí, saw it: his son felt ‘overwhelmed by so much
responsibility towards the members, the fans and the club’. His dad – according to Ramón Besa in
El País
– understood and even predicted the outcome, having
said back in September, when Guardiola received the Gold Medal from the Catalan Parliament, that ‘as soon as the tributes start pouring in, it’s time to start packing your
bags’.
    As journalist Luis Martín, also from
El País
, discovered, many tried to change Pep’s mind in the two days leading up to the formal public announcement. SMS messages
from Valdés, Iniesta, Xavi, and especially Messi, flooded his inbox. Even Vilanova asked him to reconsider. Zubizarreta ended up having a crazy idea, one of those forlorn hopes that you have
to express even when you already know the answer: ‘There’s a vacancy in one of the youth teams. Why don’t you take it? What you like most of all is training the kids, isn’t
it?’ Pep looked at him, trying to work out what was behind the question. Heanswered him with the same sense of ambiguity: ‘God, that could be a good idea.’
The two friends laughed.
    Two days after announcing his departure to the president, it was time to tell the players.
    Nobody in the squad was sure of the outcome. Following the Champions League semi-final defeat to Chelsea, Carles Puyol, waiting around after the match to give a urine sample for a routine drugs
test, saw that Pep was stalling his arrival at the press conference. He thought it was a positive sign. So he told a team-mate: ‘He will tell us this week he is staying, you will see. He
doesn’t want to leave us now.’ Puyol, as he now admits, doesn’t have a future as a clairvoyant. After the Champions League game, the players were given two days off. They had
heard the rumours and knew about the meeting with Rosell but were unsure about what was going to happen.
    The morning papers came with headlines which confirmed that nobody outside the club had a clear idea of what was about to take place; the front page of
Mundo Deportivo
split its front
page in two, one half with the headline ‘Pep to leave’ and the other with ‘Pep to