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Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola saw analyst Carles Planchart depart in the summer with a friendly message to look for a new project
"It's a personal decision he'll have to make. I think a project should last five or six years, no more. But not for him, for everyone. Afterward, you have to regenerate. As a friend, I would tell him to look for a new project because he still has a long way to go.
"This is why he's been at City for so many years: they've treated us like family, they've let us work as if we were at home. He didn't feel that way at Barca or Bayern.
"He's a football fanatic. His life is on the green, on the grass. He's a genius, a creator. His greatest strength is how he invents football. The difficult thing in this life is creating; the rest of us are copycats. He's number one at this."
The words of Carles Planchart to SPORT this week, speaking on Pep Guardiola's future a few months after he took the decision to stop working with him for the first time in his career. Planchart had been with Guardiola from the very start, following him from Barcelona to Bayern to City before calling it a day after nine years in Manchester - presumably to rest up for his next project.
There's a lot to unpack. Planchart saying that a project should last five or six years probably grabs you first, as it seemingly puts Guardiola - and what he is trying to do at City - on borrowed time.
This is his tenth season, so how can things still be good? All great managers decline, and after a year without winning a trophy and a £350m spend this year there are more eyes than usual on Guardiola.
However, as Planchart says at the end, Guardiola is number one at creating. The best are the ones that can outlive expectations for as long as possible - Planchart himself must be pretty good considering he lasted more than his idealised lifetime of a cycle - and Guardiola is already in the conversation of the greatest managers to have been in football.
The departure of Planchart reduces an already-small group of people who have been with Guardiola throughout, and that could be seen as a worry for the coach. How well he copes with the switch from his long-time mentor Txiki Begiristain as sporting director to Hugo Viana will have a big say in the success City have in the next few years.
Yet the fact that Guardiola is still around to test out how well he can deal with new relationships and theories is telling. Planchart goes onto admit that there was a drop in coaching among the staff last season as the team struggled, yet while there has been a major overhaul of the backroom coaches Guardiola has remained for a reason.
Playing with four centre-backs in defence, or a big No.9, or without the ball would all have been seen as things that Guardiola would never consider as a coach at various points in his career, but he is still coming up with fresh approaches to games and to campaigns.
That is why the people that matter at City would more agree with the end of Planchart's analysis: their manager is number one. And after a poor start to this season with a new-look team and staff, Guardiola has begun to show that people may have to talk about his time at the Etihad as at least a ten-year project.
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