Pep Guardiola Photo: VCG

The biggest rivalry in European football might not be between two of the continent's biggest clubs, but instead two of its biggest personalities.

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola and Tottenham Hotspur manager Jose Mourinho will not meet again this season unless their teams can progress in either the UEFA Champions League or the English FA Cup.

The odds are against that. Spurs are a goal down to German side RB Leipzig after the first leg of their Champions League round of 16 tie in London. Manchester City are in a one-goal lead after traveling to meet Zinedine Zidane's Real Madrid at the Santiago Bernabeu.

As for the FA Cup, Guardiola's holders - who won last season's final at a canter against fellow English Premier League side Watford, with a 6-0 win at Wembley - need to overcome Championship side Sheffield Wednesday, while Spurs and Mourinho have a game against fellow Premier League side Norwich City.

Fellow apprentice



There is no guarantee of either progression or of the teams being drawn together. But if they were to then one of the greatest clashes in football philosophies will be resumed in the ideal situation: knock-out football.

As if this was scripted by the same people who pen Hollywood films, Guardiola and Mourinho were once friends. 

They worked to great effect under Englishman Bobby Robson at Barcelona, where Mourinho was officially translator and Guardiola was the team's aging captain, but both essentially operated in the role of assistant manager.

Perhaps that is where their rivalry comes from, a desire to win over the "Mister," as Spanish football still calls its coaches, borrowing from the early days where such figures were often English. Maybe their time together just forged their fighting spirit. 

The pair spent the best part of two decades at the top, but this season risks being the first in some years where they stand to end it feeling equally disappointed.

Guardiola's expensively assembled­ City side are back at Wembley in the Carabao Cup final this weekend. This is not what the Abu Dhabi royal family dreamed of when they purchased the club in 2008.

Last year a penalty win over Chelsea in the final of the same tournament was the icing on the cake of a first domestic treble, with the Premier League and the FA Cup making up the tiers of the cake and the fans' tears.

The Premier League has almost certainly gone. 

Liverpool, the team that drove Guardiola's side to the very last gasp last season, have romped ahead of the champions, with the champions elect expected to be another three points closer to the league title by the time Guardiola leads his own side out at Wembley.

It is no secret that the former Barcelona and Bayern Munich manager was brought in as football's Nick Fury, tasked with assembling a squad the envy of all else and coming out on top. 

That, for the owners, was represented nowhere more specifically than in the UEFA Champions League, where Guardiola has not won the title since 2011 with his all-conquering Barcelona.

In a particularly cruel twist, Bayern Munich, the club that the Catalan would manage next after a sabbatical, won the Champions League in the season before he arrived.

It all seems a long time from the period between 2011 and 2013 where Guardiola wins were sandwiched either side of the most recent Mourinho victory.

Worse for the pair of them is that their former clubs have all triumphed since.

Barcelona won again in 2015 when Guardiola was at Bayern while Mourinho had to see both Chelsea win in 2012 and then Real Madrid win the tournament four times out of five in 2014, 2016, 2017 and 2018.

If that was not enough, there have been even more mitigating factors. Mourinho's predecessor at Spurs, Mauricio Pochettino, reached the final last year, where his side lost to the Liverpool of Jurgen Klopp, Guardiola's current nemesis.

European ambitions are set to stifle Guardiola. 

The Catalan coach was hired with one thing in mind and all the shiny silverware he has added and the records broken along the way will not make up for City winning a second continental title to follow up with the 1969-70 European Cup Winners' Cup they beat Polish side Gornik Zabrze in Vienna's Praterstadion.

Now, after UEFA's FFP revelations and subsequent punishment, which has seen the Etihad side banned for the next two UEFA Champions League competitions, this is Guardiola in the last chance saloon.

It is win or bust, with speculation that either the lure of Europe's premier club competition or the contractual incentives that accompany it will see players leave in the summer no matter what happens.

Leave or stay

Guardiola has vowed his future to the former strugglers but few others don't. 

Worse still, there are rumors that if the ban is upheld after City and their owners exhaust all of their legal appeals, there is a risk that the club goes back down the domestic leagues, too, even as far as England's League Two.

As for Mourinho, he has not troubled a Champions League final since 2010, and after his stint at Manchester United he has lost some of the luster that defined him as Porto and Chelsea manager. 

The Portuguese will argue that he has won trophies along the way but the most recent Champions League and Premier League trophies are easily forgotten among the League Cup and Europa League wins and disappointment in the FA Cup final.

The truth is that time waits for no man. Mourinho, 57, and Guardiola, 49, will know this more than most after coaching careers defined by sleepless nights and attention to detail.

Arguably the greater truth is that the greatest coaching rivalry of a generation is over, done and dusted through circumstance and a tendency for their football to become circumspect.

As the old saying goes, "The king is dead, long live the king." More importantly, who and what's next?
Newspaper headline: United by fate