Erik ten Hag and Pep Guardiola have taken very different roads to Manchester derby

Two bald men with gimlet stares. Two coaches united by a Cruyffian vision of football and trying to impose it in a foreign land. But as Sunday’s Manchester derby approaches, it doesn’t feel as though Pep Guardiola and Erik ten Hag have that much in common.

Ten Hag’s star is rising. After his successes at Ajax, only now are his ideas reaching a truly global public and being tested at the highest level. Guardiola is the old master, with 10 championships in the big five leagues to his name. His philosophy is not merely well-known but has shaped the modern game at elite level. It doesn’t appear imminent but, given his intensity and the consistency of his achievement, there are already whispers about his possible retirement.

Yet Ten Hag is nearly a year older than Guardiola, a detail that seems almost implausible given their status and the way football regards them. It highlights just how young Guardiola was when he began to revolutionise the game and also the scale of the task facing Ten Hag. It’s not unrealistic to say that if he is truly successful at Manchester United, this could be his last major job in football.

Their situations in Manchester could hardly be more different. On arrival in 2016, Guardiola came into a club that had effectively been built to his specifications, his path smoothed by two directors from his former club, Barcelona. In six years at the Etihad he has been able to craft a squad to play his very precise brand of football, supported to the extent that when, in his first few weeks, he realised that Joe Hart wasn’t good enough on the ball to operate as he needed him to, he was supported in sidelining the England No 1 to bring in Claudio Bravo.

By contrast, Ten Hag walked into the chaos left by half a