There has always been a strong bond between Marcelo Bielsa and Pep Guardiola that goes beyond football.
There's an appreciation of genius from one disciple of the game to another but also a personal admiration.
It is the Spaniard, manager of the Premier League champions, that stills views the boss of Leeds United as his mentor, though.
In fact, Guardiola travelled over 5000 miles to talk football trends and tactics with Bielsa prior to becoming one of the greatest coaches in world football.
Playing for AS Roma in 2003, Guardiola had already switched his attention to management at the age of 32.
Guardiola was keen to absorb all the knowledge possible to stand him in good stead and the pair finally met three years later, during a rare quiet spell in both men's careers.
Bielsa was out of work, his last post with Argentina, taking them to a gold medal at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, before resigning as their manager.
Guardiola, in contrast, was playing out the final years of his career at Dorados de Sinaloa in Mexico.
It was a move sparked from Guardiola's interest to learn from what he regarded as one of the best coaches in the world, Juanma Lillo, whom he considered the best coach he had played under, rather than to actually play for Dorados de Sinaloa
That commitment to learning from the best is what saw him travel over to Argentina in a mere 5,000-mile journey to meet Bielsa’s at his ranch near Rosario.
Bielsa's love for the cinema saw Spanish film director and novelist, David Trueba, join Guardiola on this trip and he explains how the pair first met over an Argentinian barbecue, called an Asado.
Having picked the brain of Trueba for the first hour, he switch the conversion to football: "You haven’t come all this way to talk about films, have you? They started and they could not stop," recalls Trueba in The Quality of Madness: A Life of Marcelo Bielsa , a book detailing the career of the Leeds United boss.
After hours of discussion and debate on tactics and philosophies, Bielsa offered an insight as to why he refuses to partake in exclusive interviews, a belief that Guardiola himself maintains to this day.
"Why am I going to give an interview to a journalist at a powerful paper and deny one to a little reporter from the provinces? What’s the criterion?" explained Bielsa.
To this day nobody at Elland Road has had the pleasure of an hour alone with the Leeds boss, a stance he will maintain until he returns to his ranch for good.
