It is the renewal of a rivalry that has stretched across a decade. Jose Mourinho and Pep Guardiola first met in 2010. For the two years they were together in Spain, their relationship was toxic. It is more mellow now and while Guardiola outperformed Mourinho when both were in Manchester, he defended the new Tottenham Hotspur manager on Friday.
Yet there were occasional exceptions to the recent entente cordiale. In 2018, upon the release of Manchester City's Amazon documentary All Or Nothing, Mourinho sniped: "If you are a rich club you can buy top players, you cannot buy class." Fast forward 18 months and Amazon are filming Tottenham's season. Guardiola did not use it as a chance to brand his old rival a hypocrite, realising a mid-season appointment had no say in it. "Amazon was there with [Mauricio] Pochettino as well," he rationalised. "So he did not have another option but to accept it; the contract is already signed."
More to the point, Guardiola feels City have refuted Mourinho’s accusations. “I am the guy who speaks more through the club and always try to show incredible respect for our opponents, with a lot of class,” he said. “I’ve been here for four seasons. It is a club with very, very good things and we also make mistakes. But I think it is a team, a club and an organisation that is working incredibly well in many, many, many things.”
The eight-part series was a way of raising City’s profile and Guardiola explained: “Maybe the club Manchester City is not well-known around the world like [Manchester] United, or Liverpool, or Barcelona or Madrid, so the people here saw it as a way of showing who you are as a club.” Now it is Spurs who are looking to one of the world’s richest companies and one of its most famous managers to tempt new audiences.
In a sense, though, the 23rd meeting between Mourinho and Guardiola, who has 11 victories and just five defeats, is in part a 19th clash between Pochettino and the Catalan. Mourinho has only had 17 games at the helm of Tottenham; too few, Guardiola thinks, to make this his side. “Mauricio Pochettino was there five or six years while Mourinho has been there just months so all managers need time to make our teams play the way we want,” he explained. The process may take longer because Mourinho is scarcely a like-for-like replacement for Pochettino, a manager Guardiola admires. “They are quite different but there are similarities,” the City manager said. “Their teams are both quite aggressive.”
But Mourinho has long been more of a pragmatic manager, a winner who believes the ends justify the means. Guardiola is seen as the idealist but argued his idealism is in part pragmatic. “Winning a certain way is what helps you to win the titles,” he said. “We will, of course, not just be judged on the way we play but the titles we win. That is the truth.”
If only for a couple of sentences, it could have been Mourinho speaking.
