Pep Guardiola’s Grand Design
Inside the mind behind FC Barcelona’s 2009 side, where principles of football and design melded to create one of the most dominant — and aesthetically pleasing—teams in recent football memory.
Originally published in 2015 in Sports Illustrated’s The Cauldron
2009, the world looked on as FC Barcelona — Barça for short — collected an astounding six European trophies, becoming the first soccer club in history to do so. Using a possession-based style of play called “Tiki-Taka,” the Catalonian side sucked the life out of opponent after opponent. Lauded by some, despised by others, the system came to define the tenure of then-Barcelona manager Josep “Pep” Guardiola, who was widely praised for taking an under-performing side and transforming them into a dominant football force.
As a 20-year-old soccer fan, watching Barça in 2009 could be a frustrating exercise. They seemed to slow the game to a glacial pace, completing pass after pass until their ball-chasing opponents were exhausted. Where was the high-paced, physical, counter-attacking style I loved to watch? Luckily, that apprehension was more than tempered by the team’s weird invincibility, triggering a unique underdog-loving streak I still hold dear today.
Since then, watching Barcelona has become an altogether different experience. I still see the Tiki-Taka, the slow pace, the steady decimation of opponents. But these aspects somehow seem secondary. What stands out to me now, in hindsight, is the genius of Guardiola. How had this onetime defensive midfielder so utterly transformed such an oft-underachieving side — faulty system and all — into something so functionally beautiful?
Looking back through my current occupational lens, the answer has suddenly become clear: Guardiola wasn’t merely a great manager; he was a brilliant designer.
He Put People First
Compelling design almost always strikes a delicate balance between the quirks of human nature and the efficient use of data. Marrying the quantitative and the qualitative is seldom easy, but when it works, it’s beautiful.
Over the past few decades, designers have increasingly emphasized the importance of people and the need to more seamlessly incorporate them into the design process. This is particularly critical when designing for people, of course, whether it be a piece of software, a service, or even a strategy for a soccer team. Whatever the designed product, its success or failure rides on human factors: cognition, emotion, and so on.
At the same time, we live in a world where information has become the principal communicative currency. Not using metrics and data to inform design isn’t just wasteful; it’s irresponsible. As a designer working in healthcare, data is all around me, and in some ways it runs the show. I couldn’t present a project to my stakeholders without supporting data, nor would I want to.
Sport, like design, is an arena wherein the quantitative and qualitative collide. Here, we often frame it in terms of tangibles and intangibles. The various statistical means by which a player or a team can be evaluated? That’s the quantitative. Factors relating to ways in which human nature influences outcomes? The qualitative. Athletes might be professionals — bundles of data darting and dodging around a field, a court, a rink. But they’re still people. Quirks and all.
For those who love statistics, American sports possess a veritable embarrassment of riches. Baseball, for instance, has statistics going all the way back to the 19th century. As a result, metrics like batting average (BA) are so well-known in the States, they’ve even found their way into contemporary vernacular: I’m batting a thousand! (I’m doing great!)
Of course, true baseball fans know the numbers go much deeper than batting splits. ISO, or ‘isolated power,’ for example, refers to a hitter’s ability to hit for extra bases, calculated by subtracting batting average from slugging percentage. Baseball is riddled with obscure metrics like ISO.
These metrics vary not only in their obscurity, but in their tangibility as well. A casual observer could probably estimate a batter’s average over the course of a game. After all, hits and at-bats, the two numbers that make up a batting average, are readily apparent. ISO, on the other hand, is less apparent, and more complicated to calculate. No viewer, no matter how experienced, is going to extemporaneously remark on a batter’s ISO.
Some of the stats used to track pitching performance (via ESPN)
While baseball has been arguably the most quantified American sport, it’s by no means alone in its analytic appeal. Like it’s bat-and-base counterpart, American football is steeped in numbers. This isn’t a coincidence; both sports are subdivided into easily-defined units — yards, plays, hits, throws, and so on. This segmentation makes them ripe for statistical analysis.
For other sports, statistical analysis is more challenging. Take ice hockey. Compared to baseball and football, hockey yields far fewer stops in the run of play, thereby making it more free-flowing and — as a result — more difficult to carve out metric units.
As any hockey fan will tell you, each player on the ice possesses certain elusive qualities that profoundly impact the outcome of games. These qualities — intangibles — are what differentiate players from machines. Human quirks like attitude, personality, determination, and so on. These so-called intangibles are difficult to measure, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying.
In the 1950’s, the Montreal Candiens developed the plus-minus system, a remarkably simple (yet amazingly innovative) way to measure a player’s impact on the ice, intangibles (somewhat) included. When the Canadiens scored a goal, each of the players on the ice earned a point. When the Canadiens conceded a goal, each of the players on the ice lost a point. Theoretically, over the course of a season, each player’s plus-minus would approximate their sum impact.
While every team in the NHL has since adopted the plus-minus system, many hockey fans have grown critical of it, pointing out — rightly — the metric’s relative lack of context. Indeed, while a player’s plus-minus score might give a general sense of his impact, it doesn’t identify or measure any specific intangibles.
Like hockey, soccer is difficult to quantify. As a result, fans, coaches, and media alike have historically been reluctant to track statistics. As an avid soccer fan myself, I sympathize with this resistance. Over the course of 90 minutes, a typical soccer match will only contain three minutes or so of stoppage. The resulting lack of definable plays and actions only further emphasize the relative importance of the kinds of intangibles the Canadiens grappled with in the 1950’s.
As such, professional soccer managers are seen as being able to identify intangibles simply by virtue of their expertise. Arsenal’s Arsène Wenger, for instance, is no doubt keenly aware that Alexis Sanchez is fiercely competitive, thus driving the striker to put heaps of pressure defenders, forcing poor passes and dangerous giveaways. There’s no easy way to quantify this, of course, but it’s one of many factors Wenger considers when choosing a lineup and devising a strategy.
Which brings us back to Guardiola. When he assumed the reins back in 2008, Barça had just come off a disappointing season in Spain’s top flight. By all accounts, the squad had all the tools they needed to be successful: a history of greatness, extraordinary fan support, money, world class facilities, and — most important of all — incredible talent. Still, Barcelona were struggling, and whatever the problem may have been, it wasn’t readily apparent. At least not to Frank Rijkaard, whose slot Guardiola had been tasked with filling
Right from the start, Guardiola made it abundantly clear he would rebuild Barça along a much different blueprint. To the shock of many, his new team would not feature the likes of Edmilson, Zambrotta, Dos Santos, Thuram, Oleguer, Crosas, Ezquerro, or Deco. Even more surprisingly, Guardiola let go of Ronaldinho, the Brazilian star who scored in nearly half the matches he played during the 2007–2008 season.
To many on the outside looking in, Guardiola was either stupid, crazy, or some nefarious combination of the two. All the while, a third way was suddenly in play: In revamping Barça’s side, Guardiola was going beyond mere statistics.
Before long, reports began to emerge from Camp Nou that Guardiola was becoming a kind of ‘psychological maestro’, with a keen interest in players’ personal qualities and the dynamics between them — on and off the pitch. The intangibles. When asked about his management style, Guardiola’s response was unequivocal.
“I am not dealing with footballers, he said. “I am dealing with people. They have fears and worries […] without each other they are nothing.”
Guardiola was by no means the first manager to take these intangibles into consideration, and nor will he be the last. What made Barça’s rebuild so special, though, was the extent to which its manager prioritized human elements. Guardiola’s decisions often made little sense on their statistical face, and the resulting criticism could be unduly harsh. As a designer, when I look back on Guardiola’s approach, I see a brilliant manager, to be sure. But I also see something else entirely: someone with an almost anthropological appreciation for the human condition.
He Designed For Extremes
Managers, like designers, work under constraints. Budget, facilities, personnel — these and other factors all come into play. In the world of design, we often talk about how working within constraints can be a positive thing. In short, it forces problem-solving to become more creative.
To that end, designers will often self-impose extreme limitations in order to bring about new, innovative solutions. There are a number of examples this, including the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project, the development of which was led by Mary Lou Jepsen in 2005. Tasked with creating a super-cheap laptop that could be used in developing countries all around the world, extreme cost constraints forced Jepsen and her team to be remarkably resourceful. Rather than using a spinning hard drive, for instance, Jepsen’s team chose instead to use flash memory because it required less power and wouldn’t break when dropped. Similarly, they used an outdated AMD Geode processor because while it wasn’t very fast, it was cheap and required little power.
Much to the surprise of the OLPC development team, their ultimate design did much more than provide people living in developing countries with unprecedented access to computing. Many of the design choices her team made in the face of extreme constraints trickled up into the consumer technology industry of developed countries. Netbooks and tablets, the grandchildren of OLPC, did not exist prior to 2005, but now make up a sizable proportion of technology sales today.
Like OLPC, Guardiola began his design process by self-imposing constraints. After the mass exodus at Camp Nou, Guardiola rebuilt his side around three central players: Xavi, Iniesta, and Messi. All three were valuable assets prior to Guardiola’s arrival, but their respective roles took on new significance under the new regime. Messi, for example, went from scoring 16 goals under Frank Rijkaard to an astonishing 38 under Guardiola in the very next season.
To the extent the trio was extremely skilled, it wasn’t surprising that Guardiola set out to build a team around them. What was surprising, however, was the way in which Guardiola seemed to willingly exacerbate one of Barça’s greatest perceived weaknesses: physicality. At only 5-foot-7, the average height of Guardiola’s core trio was a full four inches below the league average. Not only that, the average height of European soccer players writ large was also rising, and has continued to do so.
His side’s main weakness now further emphasized, the “x” Guardiola needed to solve for began to crystalize. In that sense, by self-imposing constraints, he forced himself to design for an extreme — much like Jepsen’s design team did in 2005. And, like OLPC, designing for an extreme forced Guardiola to be creative in his problem-solving.
Indeed, Guardiola found a very clever way around his constraints, electing to adopt a style based on skillful dribbling, quick passing, and intelligent movement off the ball — talents his three stars had in spades. Over the course of a game, Tika-Taka had the devastating effect of exhausting opposing players, who were suddenly chasing the ball for what felt like a full 90 minutes. This allowed Barça to gradually move up until they were passing the ball deep in the opponent’s half, waiting for an opportunity to pounce. Not only that, this strategy worked on opponents of all shapes and sizes, making his team’s lack of physicality a virtual non-issue.
As Guardiola was quick to point out, though, Barça’s Tiki-Taka — a term the manager himself despised — wasn’t merely passing for the sake of passing, but rather passing with intention.
He Repurposed Existing Tools
The OLPC team, working under cost constraints, made bold decisions and found clever ways around the challenges they faced. What they didn’t do, however, was develop new technology. Flash memory and AMD Geode processors already existed, but the OLPC team repurposed them in a novel way. They even opted to use Linux, an open-source code, to run their software rather than develop something new. The final product was innovative, yes, but constructed primarily using preexisting components. The same thing could be said of Guardiola’s transformation of Barça.
OLPC’s kid-friendly interface, powered by Linux
In a way, it’s unfair that Guardiola received so much credit for implementing Barça’s strategy. In fact, Tiki-Taka is widely seen as having grown out of the tactical theory known as Total Football, which has roots going all the way back to 1965.
The foundation for Total Football was laid by Jack Reynolds, who managed the Dutch club Ajax beginning in 1915. Decades later, Rinus Michaels, who played under Reynolds, would further enhance the style. During the 1960's and 70's, Johan Cruyff, Ajax’s brilliant Dutch forward, thrived. A retired Cruyff would later take the manager position at Barcelona.
While Cruyff was at Barça, a young Catalonian was rising through the ranks of the club’s youth development team. Before long, Pep Guardiola was playing Total Football for Cruyff’s senior team, helping Barcelona lift its first ever European Cup title at the ripe age of 21. By the 1990’s, Cruyff’s Barcelona side was idolized throughout the country, including by a young talents Xavi and Iniesta.
Though it began with a bang, Guardiola’s career ultimately fizzled out at 35, following a brief stint in the top Mexican league. In a 2004 interview, he lamented the way the evolution of soccer seemed to leave him behind. “I haven’t changed… my skills haven’t declined,” Guardiola said. “It’s just that football now is different. It’s played at a higher pace and it’s a lot more physical.”
When Guardiola began his tenure as Barça’s helmsman three years later, he didn’t try to reinvent the wheel. Rather, by evaluating at the players at his disposal and the limitations they possessed, the 38-year-old moved to implement a strategy with which he was intimately familiar. Though some have tried to credit Guardiola with developing Tiki-Taka himself, he was really recalibrating an old design for a new purpose.
Possession is retained in part by forming triangles in the midfield, opening up many lanes of passing
That said, Tiki-Taka suited Guardiola’s needs perfectly. It was also a bold decision, as soccer had been slowly but steadily evolving away from Tiki-Taka, favoring a more fast-paced, physical style in its stead — the same evolution that forced Guardiola into retirement. Once again, Guardiola was going stubbornly against the grain. Not a surprising choice, perhaps, for a man who once said, “I have learned that when you’re in the right you should fight the world.”
He Defined Success and Made it Visible
In design, we talk a lot about the importance of defining success, and then measuring it. After all, without the means of measuring success, we’re essentially working in the dark. In my field, I use design as a tool for making people healthier. And, like any responsible designer, I want to know when and why my designs are successful.
Here’s a brief aside to help illustrate this point. When our team at The Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation set out to reduce hypertension among Penn Medicine employees, we needed a way to measure our success. One of the metrics we used was the blood pressure of hypertensive employees we’d screened and subsequently prescribed medication. Blood pressure readings allowed us to make sure the medication was having the intended effect, to make changes when needed, and to hopefully see our employees’ blood pressure go down over time.
When we asked our physician partners how often they needed blood pressure readings from patients, they made it clear that in order to effectively titrate the medication, they would need daily readings. Unfortunately, we knew that it was unrealistic to ask employees to go to a clinic on a daily basis to be cuffed. In other words, we had our success metric, but what we needed was near-constant feedback, not intermittent readings.
Patients spend the vast majority of their lives outside of medical settings — roughly 5,000 hours each year. During those 5,000 hours, patients are making life decisions that have a profound impact on long-term health outcomes. Our challenge, then, was to remotely engage with hypertensive patients during those 5,000 hours.
We started to hand out remote blood pressure cuffs to hypertensive employees to take home with them. We then texted patients with daily reminders to take their readings. Once the reading was complete, the data was automatically uploaded into the cloud where our physicians could interpret the data and titrate medication as needed, all without having the patient physically present. As a result, we were able to turn an intermittent source of data into a constant stream, allowing us to more easily monitor the success of the project.
In soccer, there are myriad statistical means of measuring success. Wins, losses, goals for, goals against, and shots on goal are just some of the ways fans, media, and coaches evaluate a team’s performance. At the same time, soccer is a fluid, low-scoring sport, one where these metrics can be few and far between, making it difficult to see the immediate impact strategic changes have on the pitch.
Great managers overcome this challenge by defining what success means for their team and translating it into an identifiable style of play. When Guardiola developed his strategy, he considered all the intangibles at play and responded by implementing Tiki-Taka — a crystalline, tangible style. In other words, Tiki-Taka was Guardiola’s success metric, and it provided him with a constant source of feedback.
In 2009, Guardiola didn’t have to wait until his side scored or conceded a goal to measure success. When Guardiola put his strategy into action, all he had to do was watch his team play their iconic Tiki-Taka style to know that they were on the right track. When the Tiki-Taka broke down, it was clear a change needed to be made in order to put Barça back on the rails.
In implementing Tiki-Taka, Guardiola not only defined what success would look like for his team, he also gave it a highly visible, tangible form that provided him with constant feedback on the pitch.
I doubt Pep Guardiola would call himself a designer. Looking back on the way he transformed Barça, though, it’s clear he’s a brilliant problem-solver. Embedded in his process are some familiar principles of design: putting people first, designing for extremes, repurposing existing tools, defining success, and making that success visible.
I’ll never play soccer or manage a side like Pep Guardiola. None of us will. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn to think — and design — like him.
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