I keep saying, and I've said it to the players, what happens in a dressing room stays in a dressing room, whether that's with me and a player, whether it's two players together, whether it's the coaching staff and the players. I just think it's almost a sacred environment and that trust in that area is unbreakable.
If you want a measure of how private a place the dressing room was when I was growing up at Manchester United, consider this: even Sir Alex Ferguson would knock before coming into the dressing room at the Cliff, the old training ground. The dressing room is for the players - and the players only.
The group of players that you see in the Barca dressing room is unique. There are a lot of homegrown players and others who really care for Barcelona a lot as well.
The dressing-room environment is very difficult to replicate, camaraderie is very important.
My players know the 'fear' word or something like that does not go inside our dressing room. Never.
I played in Spain, and we also had a very good dressing room, and I won a lot of things. So I think that in my experience of being in dressing rooms, it's so important to have a really good group.
In the dressing room, you can never lose that group concept.
It's an incredible feeling when you look across the dressing room and see Andres, Leo, Luis and Sergio Busquets, and everyone else. They are players I used to watch on TV or play with on PlayStation, and now I am sharing the same dressing room. It's incredible for me.
They (Liverpool players) are passing the cup down the line like a new born baby. Although when they are back in the dressing room they will probably fill it with champagne, something you should never do to a baby.
I speak all my languages basically every day with the people in the dressing room, and it's a pleasure to be able to do so. On the pitch, if it's a group of players I'm trying to communicate with, then I use English because you need to make sure everyone understands what you are saying.
There are plenty of sports teams that say they're very open and super accepting in the locker room. But are they really? Is it really a safe environment? Have they preset that environment to make these players feel comfortable for coming out? I don't think so because there's none out.
If you're a senior player, and you really want to make an impact in the dressing room, it's difficult if you have players there who are not as committed as you are and they have a certain status.
It occurred to me that building a company was the best way to align a group of people towards building something great. And its really... it's a good organizational structure where you can really reward people. If they're building something that's good, you can you work with partners and reward them if the product that you're developing work well. It's a good way to get the best people involved to build something very good.
In the intermission, between group one and group two, you go to your dressing-room and change every stitch you have on you: underwear, shirt, tie, socks, pants and tails. Your other clothes are soaking wet.
When I came to Barcelona, I really liked in the dressing room that I found balanced, normal people: [Victor] Valdes, [Carles] Puyol, [Andrés] Iniesta. They don't think they are the center of the world for being football players.
The dining room is a building; the bathroom is a building. If we scatter this single-program architecture inside of a domestic environment, we can link an interior urbanism in a way similar to a village or a township of tiny houses.