Juanma Lillo, mentor to Pep Guardiola, explains his thinking on clubs, coaching and why society is sick By Sid Lowe

1. 47Theory
“What enriches you is the game, not the result.
The result is a piece of data. The birth rate goes
up. Is that enriching? No. But the process that led
to that? Now that’s enriching.”

2. The Brain in Spain
The Brain in Spain
Juanma Lillo, mentor to Pep Guardiola, explains
his thinking on clubs, coaching and why society is
sick
By Sid Lowe
The youngest man to ever coach in
the Spanish First Division and the
‘inventor’ of 4-2-3-1, blessed of an
inquisitive and inventive mind, Juanma
Lillo has always been considered
something of a fooballing philosopher
— even by those critics who think that
theory is one thing, reality another.
This is the man that regularly turns
the relationship upside down — a
footballer manager berating journalists
for using meaningless clichés. A man
who loves a dialectic battle, boasts
a library of 10,000 volumes and a
complete collection of the world’s
foremost football magazines and
newspapers, and talks at length
on theories of complexity, he is a
determined defender of an expansive
footballing style, placing positioning
over all else, especially brute force. It
is a style given expression, many years
later, by Barcelona and the Spanish
national team.
To his lasting regret, Lillo never made it
as a professional player — “I would, he
says, “give it all back for 15 minutes on
the pitch” — but he became a familiar
face
on the bench all over Spain. For a while at
least. When he took over at Almería last
season, it was a return to the First Division
for the first time in a decade. Meanwhile,
he had been in Mexico, where he
coached Pep Guardiola.
Actually, ‘coached’ is a rather inadequate
word. Guardiola has never hidden his
admiration for Lillo, describing him as
the coach that, along with Johan Cruyff,
had the greatest influence upon him. And
when Lillo talks about Barcelona, he can’t
help talking about ‘we’. He has guided
Guardiola and, during his first months as
Barcelona B coach, and then first-team
manager, he unofficially helped prepare
Guardiola’s sessions. It could have been
official once: when Lluis Bassat ran for the
presidential elections in 2003, his sporting
director was going to be Guardiola. The
coach? Juanma Lillo. Bassat, though, lost.
Six years would pass before Guardiola
took over. Officially, Lillo had no role at
all — even though his fingerprints were
all over the project. But fate can be cruel
and earlier this season, Lillo was sacked as
Almeria coach after an 8-0 defeat.
To Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona.
You once said that you understood
why presidents sacked coaches, what
you couldn’t understand is why they
hired them in the first place. Have you
worked it out yet? What’s a coach for?
What is your role?
First, there is the question of your formal
role. On a very basic level you choose

3. The Brain in Spain
who plays and who doesn’t. Otherwise,
who would do it? But beyond that, I
wouldn’t try to establish a role, given
our limited importance. This is a game,
played by players. Those [coaches]
who have expressed their significance
seem to want to claim some personal
protagonism or status through others.
Our role is less than many coaches
realise or want to believe. That said,
within those limitations there are things
you can outline. First, though, you have
to talk about the difference between
a professional sphere and a formative
sphere. You have to ask what is a
coach? Some are more didactic, some
have a desire for protagonism, some
are orthodox, some aren’t. Some are
stimulated by competition, others by the
game itself.
And in your case?
Bear in mind that I started very young.
At 16 I was already a coach. I wasn’t a
player and that has obliged me to be
closer to my players, to seek complicity.
That alters your outlook. I wanted to be
a player, that’s the thing. My vocación
[vocation] with a ‘V’ was being a player;
my bocación [from boca, mouth] with
a ‘B’ is being a coach: I’m a coach to
feed myself. All coaches are amalgams
of things but I consider myself didactic.
I want to facilitate players gaining a
consciousness about what they are
and what they are doing. It’s not just
about the game; it’s about people.
It is about everything. Nothing can
be de-contextualised. How you live,
what you are, what importance you
give to relationships, to behaviour, to
interaction… all of that effects how a
team plays. In our society, there are
loads of teachers but few educators, few
facilitators. As [the Spanish philosopher
and writer] Francisco Umbral said,
every day people are better qualified,
but less educated. People have MBAs,
or an MBB, an MBC — but they can’t
cross the road, still less have the
empathy to see things from the point
of view of others. Academia is trying
to turn us into machines. As far as my
work is concerned, empathy is vital. A
person performs better in any working
environment in a good atmosphere than
in a bad one. You have to make players
conscious of things that maybe he can’t
see. Not least because these days playing
in a team is harder and harder…
Why?
Because society is not set up like that;
society drives you towards individualism.
Football is a collective sport; you have
to treat it as such. Everyone has their
own way of being, you encourage
relationships, association. To do that, you
have to make sure there’s the smallest
possible difference between what you
do and what you say. You have to be
porous: can you listen? Can you direct?
There are three types of authority: formal
authority, technical authority and personal
authority. I don’t want formal authority,
via someone else’s power, the position of
‘coach’ or ‘boss’. Authority is not
something you impose; it is something
that is conceded to you by those with
whom you interact. I want to try to
encourage self-discovery among players,
dialogue and understanding. It is complex
and shifting. You orientate people rather
than order them. You balance, you adapt,
you listen. Human beings are open; there
is no answer that definitively closes any
debate. It’s not just that what works with
one player doesn’t work with another; it is

4. Sid Lowe
that what worked with one player doesn’t
work with the same player at a different
time and under different circumstances.
In practical terms, what does your
work entail? The first day you turn up at
a club, what do you do?
The first thing I do is have a personal
meeting with every player. I turn up with
loads of information and data about them.
I want to confirm that information, verify
it and challenge them with it. What does
he think when he hears that? You can’t
be more open or honest than to tell a
player what you have been told about him.
I could keep that information to myself
and establish a prejudice, but I don’t.
There’s no greater act of sincerity than to
tell a player what prejudices, what pre-
established thoughts, I have about them.
We all have prejudices — both good ones
and bad ones. I show them mine, looking
them in the eye. The next day, I tell the
whole group. I show them what they think
of themselves and the team, I hold up a
mirror. Often you learn the most from
their self-perception… I speak to people
who know players, who have shared a
dressing- room with them, who have
coached them. If I can talk to their parents,
so much the better. Then you have to
know how to use that information.
In footballing terms, how do you set
up your teams? The obvious, if simplistic,
thing is that a coach gets to a club and
thinks: who is my right-back, who is my
left-back, who is my central midfielder
and so on… ?
In my case, it’s not like that. When you
get a to a team 80 percent or more is
already constructed; you have to see
if you’re going to clash a lot with what
is already there… you have to go and
learn from the players, not the other
way round. Everything has to work
together, amongst them. My mentality is
interaction and relation. If you say, “let’s
evaluate the right-back”, I say, “but who’s
alongside him? Who is in front of him?
Who is nearest to him?”
You’ve said before that there is
no such thing as attack and
defence?
Of course. How can attack and defence
exist if we don’t have the ball? How can
one exist without the other? But people
need to communicate, so there is a
reduction of concepts, a simplification. I
understand that. The thing is, you have to
be able to reduce without impoverishing.
And that goes for everything. You can’t
take things out of their context because
they are no longer the same thing, even
if you then plan to piece things back
together again. You can’t take an arm
off Rafa Nadal and train it separately. If
you did, when you put it back in it may
create an imbalance, a rejection from the
organism. How can you gain strength for
football outside of football? If you run
over there, what you are training for is
running over there, not playing football.