Cruyff: Barca wanted to sell Guardiola to a team in the second league
Cruyff wrote in his memoirs he transformed Guardiola into a real Barcelona player. He saved him from being excluded from La Liga.
"Barcelona wanted to get rid of him. They considered him scrawny, bad defensively and ineffective in the air. What nobody saw was that he had the basic qualities to go far: he had game intelligence, speed in his execution, technique. If I hadn't been at Barcelona, for sure he would have been sold to a Segunda Division club," he remembers.
When Barcelona offered Guardiola to coach their first team, the Dutchman told his successor his "golden rule": "I told him that above everything else, you have to be the boss, the one that makes the decisions and is responsible for the consequences. In that sense, Pep [Guardiola] followed the same path and guidelines that I did".