Champions League drives and unites Guardiola, Ancelotti - ESPN

Between them, Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti and Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola have lifted the European Cup as player or coach a remarkable nine times. When this greatest competition in the history of club football reaches its 70th birthday in three seasons' time, the profiles of the Italian and the Catalan — each born in tiny communities whose combined population wouldn't fill a third of the Santiago Bernabeu — will be written into Champions League history books as the greatest the competition has ever seen.

Ancelotti, even though he might one day be overtaken by Zinedine Zidane or Guardiola himself, has won more European Cup finals (four) than any other coach. Ever. Guardiola will be on that pantheon in three years' time because it's his Barcelona side of 2011 that is widely hailed as having produced the most magnificently complete performance in any Champions League final — although some who witnessed Madrid's 7-3 defeat of Eintracht Frankfurt in 1960 might argue otherwise.

Despite all this, the men who meet in Tuesday's semifinal first leg (and then again in the return leg in eight days' time) also have a deeply quixotic, angst-ridden and painful relationship with the competition. For them, this trophy is the definition of a love-hate relationship; can't live with it, can't live without it.

For example: Guardiola was in charge of Bayern Munich when, in the 2014 semifinals, they suffered their heaviest-ever home defeat in the history of the competition. Coincidentally, it was to Carlo Ancelotti's Madrid.

As a player, he'd have been able to add another title to the nine he and the Italian have, were it not for the agony of the equal-biggest thrashing any team have taken in a European Cup final. Johan Cruyff's