Some of Guardiola’s political leanings are incongruous when he has links to Qatar and the UAE, where human rights are severely restricted
Last week, Guardiola was just over the road from the Olympic Stadium, on a stage in Barcelona’s Palau Sant Jordi for a Palestinian charity event, where he wore a keffiyeh and told an audience about the children abandoned in Gaza. In a press conference in Manchester on Tuesday, Guardiola expressed anger about the wars in Palestine, Sudan and Ukraine, and dismay at the ICE killings in Minnesota. “I’m sorry, but it hurts me,” he said.
The scope, and perhaps confidence, of Guardiola’s politics may have widened in recent years but he has had a political voice for more than three decades now, albeit with a selective ear, given his connections to Qatar and employment by Abu Dhabi. Guardiola was the boy who grew up in Santpedor in rural Catalonia, and was moulded in La Masia with its Blaugrana world view, before finally stepping forward as a figurehead of Catalan nationalism, first as a Barcelona player and then, even more fervently, as the club’s fêted head coach.
Those interventions in the toxic debate around Catalan independence were hugely divisive, with Guardiola vilified by conservatives in Spain as much as he was celebrated by separatists. In 2018, an opinion piece in the Madrid newspaper El Pais compared Guardiola to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister for public enlightenment and propaganda, writing that “Goebbelsdiola takes advantage of his press conferences . . .to confidently distort reality”. Meanwhile, in 2022, the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia ran a story headlined “¿Guardiola president?” in which various ministers and analysts were quizzed on the traits they felt might enable Guardiola to seek a career in politics.
Only Guardiola knows if that was an avenue he ever wanted to explore but even before Spain’s constitutional crisis of 2017, he was curious about politics and fascinated by its leaders. After he finished playing in 2006, Guardiola briefly tried his hand as a political journalist, conducting a series of little-known interviews with Spain’s centre-left prime minister of the time, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. In the now-crowded field of former star players morphing into interviewers and podcasters, even here Guardiola was ahead of the curve.
He travelled with Zapatero on a plane to Senegal, met him in New York and watched a game with him in Ponferrada. The documentary, produced by Mediapro, was supposed to air in 2007, but the footage has never been seen. Guardiola was appointed coach of Barcelona B that year, at the same time Zapatero’s popularity in Spain was diminishing. “There was a documentary with Guardiola but we didn’t do anything with it,” said one longstanding Mediapro employee. “In the end, the timing wasn’t right.”
Guardiola grew up in Santpedor, a small town 70 kilometres northwest of Barcelona, where the Senyera, the Catalan flag, hangs from balconies and the surrounding Bages region has traditionally been a stronghold of the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC). His father, Valenti, was a bricklayer, who told Cadena Ser in 2016 he could see his son coaching a Catalonia national team one day but never Spain. Guardiola’s sister, Francesca, has held senior positions in the Catalan government, including director of foreign relations.
Santpedor itself is synonymous with the idea of resistance. The town’s main square, the Plaça Gran, houses “a statue of the Timbaler del Bruc”, the drummer boy who, according to legend, thwarted Napoleon’s troops in 1808 with the help of a booming drum, which convinced the enemy his army was larger than it was.
At La Masia, Barcelona’s famed academy which Guardiola joined when he was 13, there was no formal political ideology but there was a holistic, Catalan view of life, in which core values were as much a part of the teaching as Johan Cruyff’s rondos and 4-3-3.
“At Real Madrid, they call the academy La Fabrica [the factory] and we all understand what that means, it’s more of a football machine,” says Miravitllas, author of the book, La función política del Barça. “At La Masia, the civic education of the footballers is more carefully cultivated. It’s more of an indoctrination.”
If Guardiola had started to be influenced by Barça ideals at La Masia, he also became entwined with Catalan culture more generally, as he forged personal connections that would stay with him for life. Lluís Llach, the singer, and Miquel Martí i Pol, the poet, were particularly formative, with Guardiola telling the BBC in 2018 that Llach was “one of my inspirations, a Catalan singer and a legend in Catalonia” whom he “discovered as a teenager, my first and second love”. In 2015, Guardiola read Martí i Pol’s poem, Ara mateix (Right Now), to a German audience at a literature event in Munich, a poem that includes the line, written in Catalan: “We barely have what we have and that’s enough . . . and a tiny territory to live with it.”
As a Barcelona player and then captain, Guardiola was never shy about projecting his personal opinions, even if he became increasingly aware of his own image. “Pep would call people at home asking, ‘What was on that programme? What was said about me?’ ” recalls one Barcelona official. “He had that special ego, between inquisitive and worried, especially about anything that could be detrimental.”
Yet he had a talent for finding the right words too. After Barcelona won the European Cup in 1992, Guardiola shouted from the balcony of the Palau de la Generalitat to the celebrating fans below: “Citizens of Catalonia! The cup is here!” words that echoed those of Josep Tarradellas, Catalonia’s former president, after he returned in 1977 at the end of Franco’s rule. In 2004, Guardiola spoke about playing for Spain. “Catalonia is my country,” he said. “The law told me I had to play for the Spanish national team because the Catalan national team isn’t officially recognised. And I was happy to play, but you can’t deny what you feel, what you love.”
Guardiola’s political views became more forthright after his playing career had finished. He endorsed the cause of Catalan independence with words, actions and votes, first as coach of Barcelona, under a pro-independence president, Joan Laporta, and then from afar, during his so-called “exilio”, his exile, in Munich and Manchester. In fact, the success of Guardiola’s all-conquering Barcelona team coincided so neatly with the surge of support for Catalan nationalism, many have wondered which movement — the football or the politics — was the initial spark. Perhaps each provided rocket fuel for the other.
Some of those connections between club and cause became explicit, such as the addition of a Catalan-coloured kit in 2013-14, with its yellow and four red stripes, and the trophy celebrations, complete with the Sardana, a traditional Catalan dance, on the pitch. Some were driven directly too by Guardiola who, in his 2011 press conference retort to José Mourinho, invoked the language of Catalan resistance. “We’ve fallen so many times as a team and as a country but we rose again,” Guardiola said. And in 2017, before the illegal referendum, when Guardiola joined an independence rally in Montjuïc, telling a crowd of thousands that Catalan people were “victims of the state”.
Yet Guardiola’s views on oppression have not been universally applied, given he attached his name to Qatar’s 2022 World Cup as a paid ambassador, despite Qatar’s record of discrimination against women and LGBT people. His reasoning, that he “basically lived there” after two seasons playing in Qatar, sounded vacuous amid widespread abuse of migrant workers. At Manchester City, those inconsistencies are no less jarring given City’s owner, Sheikh Mansour, is vice-president of the United Arab Emirates, where Amnesty International reports “pro-Palestinian expression is suppressed” and freedom of expression is “criminalised”.
Guardiola’s comments about Gaza have drawn criticism, with the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester and Region saying in a statement they were “especially galling given his total failure to use his significant platform to display any solidarity with the Jewish community subjected to a deadly terrorist attack a few miles from the Etihad Stadium”, in reference to the Manchester synagogue killings in October. Asked about such criticism on Friday, Guardiola said: “If innocent people are being killed, I condemn them all without putting a selection on one being more important than the other.”
In Barcelona, the expectations are higher that Guardiola will return one day as the club’s president rather than for a second term as coach. Those revolutionary instincts and that “special ego” would be a powerful combination, especially at a club where presidents rely on votes. Yet others who have worked with Guardiola see his politics another way: that transcending the game has always been his core aim, from forming the perfect match and iconic team, to being remembered as a coach whose reach extended beyond players and pitch. “I will not change anything,” he said on Tuesday, “but I try.”
