The Manchester City boss says his rivalry with the Portuguese does not compare to other famous sporting clashes such as Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier

 

Pep Guardiola has moved to play down his rivalry with Jose Mourinho, insisting it is nothing like history’s great sporting battles because it is the players on the pitch who make the difference.

 

Guardiola’s Manchester City will face Mourinho’s United in a highly anticipated Manchester derby at Old Trafford on Saturday afternoon, the latest installment of a managerial rivalry that usually steals the headlines.

 

The two men worked alongside each other at Barcelona during the 1990s but their coaching careers took different paths and, since Guardiola was chosen ahead of Mourinho for the Barcleona job in 2008, their respective teams have been involved in a number of memorable clashes.

 

Their time together in Spain, with Guardiola at Barca and Mourinho at Real Madrid, produced drama both on and off the pitch in every meeting between the two clubs, not least during an intense run of four Clasicos in just 18 days.

 

The two men have only met once since they left Spain - when Guardiola’s Bayern beat Mourinho’s Chelsea on penalties in the 2013 UEFA Super Cup - but their paths have now converged in Manchester and their rivalry provides an intriguing subplot ahead of the first derby of the season.

 

It was put to Guardiola that his run-ins with Mourinho could go down in history alongside the long-running Formula One feud between Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, or Muhammad Ali’s infamous bouts with Joe Frazier, but the Catalan did not see any similarities.

 

“Come on!” he implored. “Both of us, we are really good like these kind of people? Come on!

 

“I think, with a lot of respect for you in your jobs, you make big, big mistakes. Jose and I don’t play, so I’m sorry, when you play Ivan Lendl and John McEnroe, when you play Michael Jordan and… well, Michael Jordan beats all the others, but Jordan or Kobe Bryant, or Federer and Rafa Nadal or Djokovic… that is the point, we don’t play.

 

“This game belongs to the players, it doesn’t belong to Jose, it doesn’t belong to me or Arsene or the big managers. I think you give so much importance to what we say. In the end what we are, we speak through our players, through our games, not what we’re talking about here, so the rivalry, believe me it’s on the pitch, the players, they are the big stars. Tomorrow the people go to Old Trafford to see Jose or me there on the side, they are going to see all the big fantastic players on the field.”

 

The City boss was also keen to point out that although he relishes the opportunity to improve himself by working out how to better his opponents, titles and trophies are not decided by how he fares against other big-name coaches.

 

“I said many times as a football player like I was, the big players make me a better player, and as a coach, as a manager, the better managers make you a better manager,” he added.

 

“Here and in Germany, with Thomas Tuchel, Jurgen Klopp, and in Spain as well, that’s true. I want to beat them and they want to beat me, I want to do my best and I need the best players or the best manager to make me better and they help me make the step forward, there is no doubt about that.

 



 

“But at the end you don’t win the titles for that rivalry because it’s just two or three games in the season. I was lucky to be the coach of fantastic players and we won a lot of titles because we won a lot of games, not just one game against Jose or another coach, [we won] many of them. You have to win every three games to win the title, the title is not only tomorrow against Jose.”

 

Guardiola, however, has seen first-hand the impact coaches can have on the history of clubs or even football itself.

 

Having learned his trade playing for Johan Cruyff at Barcelona, he then reinstated the club as the dominant European force by reinstating the Dutchman’s principles at Camp Nou when he took over the reins in 2008.

 

But the Catalan is as yet unsure about his own chances of establishing a legacy at the Etihad Stadium and becoming a manager capable of transcending his sport, although he knows what the club’s owners are hoping to achieve.

 

“I know why they contacted me to come here, they know the way we are going to play, because they know me, but the impact I don’t know.

 

“When I finish my period here, after we can analyse how my period was here, especially in Manchester City.

 

"For City fans it is the most important thing in their lives, it doesn’t matter how many titles but when you compare the history, especially in the Sir Alex Ferguson era, the impact for Manchester United in the global world of course it’s bigger than Manchester City, but from Abu Dhabi people came here to try to make steps forward, to achieve, but the impact I don’t know, so I cannot say."