Even the dinner Pep Guardiola shared with Garry Kasparov in New York in the depths of a sabbatical from football 11 years ago had a competitive intensity about it.
Chess grandmaster Kasparov said he had given up the ghost against a 22-year-old Norwegian challenger, concluding that he would never beat him. Guardiola, feeling there might be an understanding here of his own sense of professional fatigue, questioned him about this again and again, probing for an explanation which Kasparov was reluctant to give.
It was a parallel conversation at the dinner table that night between the wives of these two primevally driven individuals, Daria Tarasova and Cristina Serra, which extracted the explanation.