Pep Guardiola has an extraordinary story to tell. As manager of FC Barcelona the Catalan won fourteen trophies in four seasons and became the youngest manager ever to win the Champions League.
Pep Guardiola’s Barça elicited an extraordinary emotional response from football fans. It felt good to cheer for Barça. Here was a team who represented a paragon of the modern game: home-grown, brilliant and defined by an inspiring social mission. Indeed, Pep Guardiola’s Barça worked to cause a tipping point in the professional game - as Martín Mazur wrote in El Gráfico: “Pep Guardiola sits at the same table as Steve Jobs. He makes a decision and the world follows. They try to copy it, but are unable to do so”.
Pep Guardiola, however, struggled to deal with the hero status which he felt was thrust upon him by a nation starved of contemporary role models. Indeed, Pep Guardiola would ultimately quit FC Barcelona citing exhaustion in 2012. The man from Santpedor became an idea, but Pep, ultimately, set an example that life is about the pursuit of the best in ourselves, that the true adult does not need heroes and that there is more to life than happiness.
Here we examine how sport can help an individual to deal with a punitive conscience. Here we learn how to understand our heroes, the nature of myth making and the search for meaning in life. Here we discover that real heroism has nothing to do with celebrity; that it is about following a dream and trying to become the best you can be.
Pep Guardiola’s Barça elicited an extraordinary emotional response from football fans. It felt good to cheer for Barça. Here was a team who represented a paragon of the modern game: home-grown, brilliant and defined by an inspiring social mission. Indeed, Pep Guardiola’s Barça worked to cause a tipping point in the professional game - as Martín Mazur wrote in El Gráfico: “Pep Guardiola sits at the same table as Steve Jobs. He makes a decision and the world follows. They try to copy it, but are unable to do so”.
Pep Guardiola, however, struggled to deal with the hero status which he felt was thrust upon him by a nation starved of contemporary role models. Indeed, Pep Guardiola would ultimately quit FC Barcelona citing exhaustion in 2012. The man from Santpedor became an idea, but Pep, ultimately, set an example that life is about the pursuit of the best in ourselves, that the true adult does not need heroes and that there is more to life than happiness.
Here we examine how sport can help an individual to deal with a punitive conscience. Here we learn how to understand our heroes, the nature of myth making and the search for meaning in life. Here we discover that real heroism has nothing to do with celebrity; that it is about following a dream and trying to become the best you can be.
