"Sunderland and Swansea in the Championship. In England, he looks beyond Guardiola and the Premier League. Villarreal and Real Sociedad are examples. The project at Stade Reims is intriguing. Braga, he says, are doing incredible things. When asked where he looks for inspiration, he names teams from across Europe. If you have the other team pressing high in your own half and you have space behind, why not use it? The evolution is to control these two situations, to build without risk. "People have criticised Pep for using Erling Haaland with direct balls but for me it is smart. Now, after 15 years, everyone can press high and try to recover the ball close to your goal. "When Barcelona started to build up from the goalkeeper in 2008, nobody else did it so nobody had the capacity to press this build-up in a good way. That is one of the best things about Guardiola," explains Moreno. You need to change because if you do something regularly then opponents analyse you and find a way to stop you. He has seen an evolution in Guardiola's approach at Manchester City. But he admires Guardiola's rarely discussed flexibility as well as his much vaunted principles. A native of Catalunya, it is perhaps no surprise that Pep Guardiola remains a reference. It helps to explain why his ideas about the game have become fluid with time. These players let you know that you are there because they need someone to sit on the bench and pick the team. "This is the big difference with these players. Sometimes that means you need to shut up and let them play. You are there to put them together to make the most of the team that you have. But at the top level, you are not there to teach them everything. "Sometimes your job is to give lots of information. I was on the pitch, this felt like the best solution so I did it.' But you did it? 'Yes,' they say, 'but I do not know why. Ask Xavi or Andres Iniesta why they have done something and they do not know. "What the best players in the world do is impossible to explain. But when you have a player like Messi, you need to take a step back and let him play because my mind is not capable of coming up with what his mind will create. "What I learned from him is that football is not a science," he adds. Even now, my son says to me, 'You trained Messi?' For him, it is incredible." But what did Moreno learn from the experience? I will tell my grandchildren that I was with Messi. "Working with him was one of the best things that has happened to me in my life. He wanted to be champion again and again. If you consider that he was awesome during matches, he was awesome during training sessions. "It was incredible to see him in everyday training situations. He is always the smartest player on the pitch. He does not need to analyse what the opponent is going to do because it is the opponent that has to be worried about what he has to do. "He was with the team during the sessions. You train them to be an option or a solution for him because he is going to be the one who is analysing the weaknesses of the opponent and trying to make the most of every situation in which he has with the ball. "You train the rest of the players around him. "We worked together," says Moreno, laughing. Not that he would describe it as training Messi. To go from there to training Lionel Messi must have been extraordinary. I am talking about 1995 when I first started to record my team in Catalunya with the help of my girlfriend - now wife - and my family. Nobody was using it at that time and it was the future. "And also I combined that with using new technology. I read a lot of football books and I also read books about other subjects because football is about human relationships, about communication. "I was always thinking about how I could improve without being a professional player. I began studying for the Pro Licence soon after that and got it at 25 years old. At 16, I tried to get the UEFA B Licence but the rules said that I had to wait until I was 18. "I realised early that I did not have the ability to play professionally so I started training little kids. With the conversation focused on football, he is engaging company. The situation feels particularly unfortunate given that Moreno worked so hard to reach the top of his profession. He is understandably guarded on the matter and the topic remains off limits. The controversial breakdown of their relationship upon his return brought intense and unwanted scrutiny, setting Moreno on a different path. When Luis Enrique left that role for personal reasons, Moreno took over for 10 unbeaten matches, winning eight. Moreno was Luis Enrique's assistant when Barcelona won the Champions League in 2015 and followed him to the Spain national job in 2018.
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