Meet the other Pep

Pep Guardiola is the talk of English football, but there’s another Catalan coach by the same name working a little lower down the pyramid. Nick Wright talks to Leeds United’s assistant manager Pep Clotet about how he came to work with Garry Monk via Manuel Pellegrini, Michael Laudrup and Guardiola himself…

After parting company with Swansea in December last year, Garry Monk and his assistant Pep Clotet spent months exhaustively analysing exactly what had gone wrong. The duo had guided Swansea to their highest ever finish in the previous season, but they departed with the club placed 17th in the Premier League after a run of one win from 12 games.

How had things gone so wrong, so quickly? And how could the pair ensure they didn’t make the same mistakes again? Monk and Clotet wanted answers, and no stone was left unturned. For days on end, they assessed video footage and buried their heads in statistics to get to the bottom of it.

“We spent days watching a lot of games,” Clotet tells Sky Sports. “I did it on my own, Garry did it on his own and then we met a lot of times at my house in Swansea. We analysed the good season we had at Swansea where we finished 8th, we analysed our first season, when we took the club out of relegation danger, and we also analysed the season that we left.

“We analysed tactically. We analysed game-by-game. We analysed every final-third entry for and against us, the domination rate for every five minutes, the possession. We even analysed the opposition. We kept video records and physical data from every training session. We wanted to know if our training impacted our performances. What could we have changed to make it better?”

Such obsessive attention to detail will come as no surprise to those who have worked with Monk and Clotet. Their meticulous, data-driven approach at Swansea saw sleeping pods installed at the training ground and drones filming sessions overhead, and speaking to Clotet provides a glimpse of the extraordinary work ethic of a management team now attempting to take the lessons from Swansea into reviving the fortunes of Leeds United in the Championship.

“That period after Swansea helped us see what went well and what didn’t,” says Clotet. “We drew a lot of conclusions on what is the best way to work with a team and to implement our football. I was happy when Garry got the chance at Leeds and he wanted me to come with him because I feel very comfortable working …

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