Pep Guardiola has been here before. Not as a manager, as we all know by now, but as a player he once stood in the greatest cathedrals of sports and it collapsed around him. When those walls fell, not even his idol, the architect of everything he believes in, could prevent it.
We have to travel back a few years to find that point and I wonder if any memories have surfaced in his mind during this remarkable crisis at Manchester City.
You see, what happened to Barcelona in the 94-95 La Liga season bears some eerie similarities to what we are seeing now. That was of course Johan Cruijff's Barcelona. Or, to use their nickname from that time: the dream team.
And what a dream they were – there was Koeman, Romario, Stoichkov and Hagi, with Guardiola perhaps the most valuable cog of them all. When he opened his eyes, he saw the world as Cruyff saw it. When he opened his mouth, Cruyff's teachings came out.
Devastatingly brilliant and sometimes fallible before their own brilliance, that Barcelona side, and especially the earlier versions with Michael Laudrup, could be seen as an artist's truest impression of football. Cruyff's football. The football of 1,000 disciples, none bigger or more loyal than Guardiola.
But empires end. After winning their fourth straight league title in 1994, and three seasons after winning the European Cup for the first time, Barcelona took a spectacular dive. Laudrup had been sold in the summer, Romario was too preoccupied with the notches on his bedpost to last beyond January, and the ages were creeping up – five of the squad were in their thirties at the time, and Cruyff's short temper with the board was growing unhealthy . places.
And so everything that was right went wrong. From the position of reigning champions they dropped to fourth place, dating back to a period between March 10 and May 5, 1995, when they played ten matches, drew five, won one and lost four, their exit from the Champions League quarter not included. final against Paris Saint-Germain.
Guardiola, Cruyff's Rodri, only played 45 minutes in that stretch. An ankle injury took care of the rest and when he was missing, it all went wrong. Rodri again. But he was there, watching from the sidelines as something beautiful came crashing down.
In his 35 years of adult life in football, that was the most violent dip he has known. On the contrary, it was until this one that was worse. More gripping and harder to understand.
When we think about what happens to Guardiola's Cruyffian monument at City, there will always be a reflex to believe this is a mistake. That they could wake up at any moment. Maybe even against Manchester United on Sunday; probably in time for a return to good service next season, if they don't get bombed back to the Stone Age by lawyers.
But then I think of Cruijff again, because the parallels with that 94-95 slide jump off the page. Those four consecutive national titles. An aging dream team that included the reigning Ballon d'Or holder – then Hristo Stoichkov, now Rodri – and somehow hit a wall relatively quickly after a crowning European performance. With PSG on City's horizon in the Champions League and its survival in the competition in jeopardy, no one knows how closely the present will mimic the past.
For Cruijff, according to Guardiola the best mind in football history, there was no revival after the crash. No recovery. That season was the beginning of his end as an active manager; he was dismissed a few weeks before the end of the next campaign. At the age of 49 and having already endured ill health, he was pretty much done with it, apart from three years with the Catalan national team from 2009.
He was driven out by the power struggle with Barcelona's board, but perhaps he was also tormented by the frustrations that come with being a temperamental genius. A genius who couldn't process that there were limits to his magic and methods.
Listen to Guardiola lately and you will hear a weary soul pondering his end in club football when his contract at City expires. It's hearing the exhaustion of a broken, burned-out 53-year-old man who has so rarely had to deal with sustained failure; a genius struggling to come to terms with why his magic doesn't work anymore either, because he's always been so damn good.
He talks about injuries, but they don't give the full picture. He knows. He knows that this is not the only means to this end, just as Romario's focus on a different kind of scoring did not work on its own to kill that great Barca team. Throughout City's rut, Guardiola has still been in the position of putting teams on the pitch with better players than most they face, so it's not a blanket excuse, just like no comparison between Guardiola and Cruyff has ever been can be accurate.
They are men connected by a style that one pioneered and the other perfected. Idealists who are almost isolated because of their place in the history of the game and their influence on the way it is played.
But Guardiola will never be forced out of City like Cruyff was at Barcelona. He has no enemies in a house built just for him. And he doesn't have that many limbs in his personality, so we'll never hear about him smashing a chair in the vice chairman's office like Cruyff did. He will not be fired and shout, 'God will punish you for this act.'
He is not Cruyff. And yet he is the closest we have known him, hitting the same wall they once plowed into together. What was so right has become wrong again, which brings us to a rather prescient quote from Guardiola about Cruyff.
It is easily lost among others he gave to his mentor. But it's in the pages of a beautiful book that Simon Kuper wrote about Barcelona a while ago and feels relevant now because it was about Cruyff's gift and also about his downfall.
This is what he said: 'When a genius gets it right, which is almost always, the result is perfect. But when a genius does something wrong, it goes so terribly wrong that you want to kill him. Only geniuses take those risks.'
Guardiola knows genius better than most. And he knew Cruyff better than anyone outside his own family. He idolized him, understood him, learned from him, improved his vision and mastered it.
As an admirer of sporty beauty, I hope their similarities don't extend much further than they already have. That this spiral of doom is broken, and more for the sake of retaining one of the greatest managers ever, than for the sake of a state club.
It would be a much more fitting tribute to Cruyff if Guardiola could pirouette on the ball and turn the other way with speed.
The frustration of the stimulus reaches a boiling point
Tottenham can be a maddening club and Ange Postecoglou has had a maddening week. Just 24 hours after saying he would never criticize a player in public, he launched Timo Werner under a bus.
He wasn't wrong: Werner's performance against Rangers was terrible and hardly isolated. But it was risky and it wasn't necessarily the right target.
This was made much clearer and at much greater risk by Cristian Romero when he questioned the man upstairs.
If Daniel Levy were to carry out his duties with a greater sense of adventure, Postecoglou would never be forced to rely on loan deals best known here for failing at Chelsea.
Dubois earned SPOTY recognition
There has been a certain amount of the usual hand-wringing over the omission of Mark Cavendish from the Sports Personality of the Year shortlist.
Certainly a great athlete, and 35 Tour de France stage wins over his career are all the proof he needs. But I have no problem with him being left out; it would have felt like a recognition of his lifetime achievements rather than his work over the past twelve months.
By the right standard, Daniel Dubois would have a lot more reason to be hurt. He beat Anthony Joshua much further than even Oleksandr Usyk and won a world title. He deserved to be there.
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