In October 2012 in New York when Pep Guardiola was on sabbatical, he chatted with Garry Kasparov about how to attack the adversary in chess and other sports, and Kasparov had told him: “You wouldn’t attack in the same way from a mountain top as you would from wide open countryside.”

Guardiola had also dined in New York at the end of 2012 with Ferran Adrià, the gastronomic genius who was about to close his restaurant El Bulli. The chef told him: “Pep, you’re more than a coach, you’re a great innovator.”

The coach had responded: “Look Ferran, all I do is look at the footage of our opponents and then try to work out how to demolish them (in actual fact he used a rather more prosaic and somewhat obscene term). All I do is study my arsenal of weapons and pick the ones I need for each occasion.”

Xavier Sala i Martín, who is an economics professor at Columbia University, puts it like this: “For me, Pep is a great innovator. He wins matches by analyzing his opponents’ weak point and then attacking it. But, more than that, he introduces constant innovations so that even if his opponents catch on and correct their own errors, Guardiola has already altered his strategy. He is always one step ahead and manages to stick to his own game philosophy of superiority in the middle of the field whilst at the same time adapting Bayern’s game to the characteristics of their current opponent.”