Pep Guardiola and Gary Lineker shared some time together at Barcelona, but the now legendary manager was left holding a grudge against the former England international
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Pep Guardiola reviews the Arsenal game
Gary Lineker had to hold his hands up and apologise to Pep Guardiola after the Manchester City boss reminded him about snubbing his shirt requests at Barcelona.
Guardiola was in Barca’s academy while Lineker spent three years at the Nou Camp from 1986. The Spaniard spent time working as a ball boy during first-team games while he was part of the club’s academy, coming into regular contact with Lineker.
After those matches, Guardiola would frequently ask Lineker to give him his shirt, with the Englishman always declining. Lineker would leave Spain without knowing he had snubbed the now legendary manager and he would only find out 28 years later.
That came when Lineker interviewed Guardiola a year after his appointment to the City job. The presenter has revealed that before that interview, the City boss quickly recalled their previous encounters.
“Funnily enough I did say no to someone, and I didn’t know I’d said no to someone. But it was Pep Guardiola. He wasn’t a player, I wasn’t playing against him, but when I went to interview him, the first time I ever interviewed him was when he’d just joined Manchester City,” he told The Rest Is Football podcast.
“And we sat down to chat and he said ‘Right before we start, I used to be the ball boy at the Nou Camp’. And he said ‘For every game at the end of the game, I always used to come up to you and ask for you shirt and you never gave it me’.
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Pep Guardiola demanded an apology from Gary Lineker for turning down a shirt swap request (
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“I’m that old that in those days you only got one shirt. They didn’t want you to give it away. So that was why. So I had to apologise to him.”
After meeting Guardiola back in 2017, Lineker was left impressed by the Spaniard. The Match of the Day host admitted that Guardiola’s light-hearted demand for an apology set the tone for his interview.
“Pep Guardiola sometimes comes across as a little bit curt when he speaks to the media but I found him extremely open and engaging when I met him last week. It maybe helped that we had some common ground in that we both played for Barcelona, and under the same coach - Johan Cruyff,” he told BBC Sport.
“But I had no inkling of the story that Pep brought up right at the start of our conversation, about when I was a player at Barca and he was a ball boy who asked me for my shirt. It set the tone for the rest of the interview.
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“It got across that he has a fun side as well as the intensity that we often see from him on the touchlines or in front of the cameras. I think part of the reason Pep can be abrupt is because he is usually interviewed either just before or immediately after a match.
“So it was good to speak to him in a more relaxed setting to hear his thoughts about English football and try to find out a little bit about what makes him tick. I enjoyed interviewing him a lot.”
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