Pep Guardiola: Secrets of super coach

If you ask football fans today who the best coach in the world is, most of them will answer Pep Guardiola.

The reason? He brought the three teams he has coached to near footballing excellence: FC Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City.

But how did Pep Guardiola achieve this top manager status?

It all started in May 2008 when Guardiola, FC Barcelona's second-team coach, took over the helm of the first-team from Frank Rijkaard.

He was 37, his salary was €1m a season and it was the first non-affiliated team he managed. Still, one of his first decisions was to sack Ronaldinho and Deco.

It took a season for time to prove him right because in the 2008/2009 season he won the legendary treble: Champions League, La Liga and Copa del Rey. Pep's team began to write success stories.

The son of Valentí and Dolors (pictured), a bricklayer and a housewife, Pep spent his childhood in Santpedor, a small town in the province of Barcelona. Pep's talent was evident early on.

Four years after his Barça debut, Pep Guardiola left his favourite club after the most glorious period in its history, with titles, goals and the belief that it was one of the best teams in football history.

Curiously, Guardiola has never lost to Real Madrid as a coach at the Santiago Bernabéu stadium.

Bayern Munich was his next project. For three seasons he managed Bayern, whom he adamantly led to dominance in the Bundesliga but failed to propel them into the Champions League. This eventually ended in his expulsion.

The press conference for the coach's introduction in Munich, when he took the floor and started speaking in perfect German and amazed the whole world, is a moment that's fondly remembered today.

This is Pep Guardiola: a methodical, constantly evolving, hardworking perfectionist. The plan may or may not work for him, but no one can fault him for not having a strong, informed idea about what he is doing.

And so it was that Pep Guardiola joined Manchester City in the summer of 2016. A club in which he has adapted almost better than at FC Barcelona, and with which he has won the Premier League four times since then.

Guardiola has won 32 titles in his career and is already the second most successful manager in history, although he is still a long way behind Alex Ferguson, who won 49 titles in his career.

As Pep Guardiola explained in an interview with ESPN Brasil, he wants to coach a national team after his contract with Manchester City expires in 2023. It remains to be seen if that will be the case or if he will extend his contract with the club by a few more years.

Concerning his private life, discretion and privacy have always been important to Pep Guardiola. That's incredibly true when it comes to his longtime partner Cristina Serra.

Pep Guardiola and Cristina Serra met at the age of 18 and got married in 2014 in Barcelona. They had a second wedding in Marrakech with 60 guests, Vanitatis reported at the time.

The couple have three children: Maria (2001), Màrius (2003) and Valentina (2008).

And then there's politics, which plays a big part in Pep Guardiola's life. He has never hidden his affinity for Catalan independence.

In July 2015, he was bottom of the list for the Catalan separatist Junts Pel Sí ('Together for Yes'), the CDC-ERC electoral coalition, in the 2015 general election in Catalonia.

The English Football Association even fined the Catalan manager £20,000 for wearing a yellow ribbon as a symbol of support for the Catalan politicians jailed in 2018.

Pep Guardiola has not only remained true to his principles in football. The same principles that have made him one of the best coaches in the world and in history. His story is far from over.