The story of their legendary meeting has surfaced again, as it does whenever their paths cross in football.
The story of Marcelo Bielsa — mentor, maestro, manager — and Pep Guardiola, a recently retired player, beating a path to his ranch retreat in Rosario, Argentina, and receiving tablets of wisdom as they roasted haunches of meat together on an open fire, in 2006.
The almost comical intensity of their supposed 11-hour talk that day — with Bielsa's computer being used to check facts and settle arguments, and Guardiola's film director friend David Trueba being positioned between two chairs to act out a tactical move at one stage — has given rise to the assumption that tactics dominated the talk.