Txiki Begiristain and Ferran Soriano arrived at the Etihad with a philosophy born at the Camp Nou for sustainable brilliance

There is a glint in Joan Laporta’s eye as he recalls the conversation that he had with Pep Guardiola in the spring of 2008. The decision had already been made that Franck Rijkaard wouldn’t continue beyond the end of the season and Barcelona’s then president called in the B-team coach to tell him that the board thought that he, a 38-year-old with no first-team experience, was the ideal man to take over. “And do you know what he said to me?” Laporta grins. “He said: ‘You haven’t got the balls’.”

As it turned out, he did have the balls. But the decision wasn’t just about courage, it was also rooted in conviction and calculation. Laporta considered Johan Cruyff but had been persuaded otherwise and a thorough search began. The sporting director had played with Guardiola in Cruyff’s “Dream Team”, closely monitored Barcelona B and came increasingly to see Guardiola as the best candidate. Not just for who he was but also for what he represented: former ballboy and captain, defender of a particular style and promoter of youth. “We chose a philosophy,” Laporta is fond of saying.

Manchester City did too. Barça’s sporting director was of course Txiki Begiristain, now at the Etihad, and Laporta’s vice-president in charge of economic affairs was Ferran Soriano, now City’s CEO. The first call came in December 2011. Soriano met Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan and Khaldoon al-Mubarak in Abu Dhabi but with his company, Spanair, in a process of liquidation, he declined. When he eventually agreed in summer 2012, one of his first calls was to Begiristain. Now comes a blast from the recent past. “I’d have preferred a different opponent,” Begiristain said after the Champions League draw, “but I’m happy to see old friends again.”

The assumption that City simply copied Barcelona’s model, air-lifting it in, is facile and flawed. So is the theory that signing Soriano and Begiristain was merely a prelude to signing Guardiola, although no doubt they’d have liked to. Much of what City are building pre-dated their arrival and, although the official line sounds very like Barcelona when it talks of a “common football philosophy that links the youngest academy boy to the most senior first-team player,” that includes the heart of the gigantic Etihad Campus development, the City Football Academy.

Yet Sheikh Mansour did see in Barcelona’s model something that dovetailed with his vision and goes beyond the football: from international expansion, to the opening of new markets, from youth development to revenue creation there are parallels. It may be over-simplistic, but here there’s a temptation to say that City, like Barcelona, want to be likeable; to avoid being seen just as arrivistes.

There is also a need to make their economic position sustainable: financial fair play demands it. “Sustainability has always been central to Sheikh Mansour’s investment in City,” the statement ran when they unveiled academy plans. “The long-term future is dependent on the ability to recruit and develop young players.” When Sorriano was at Barcelona he calculated that every home-grown player who reached the first team had cost the club