When Mauricio Pochettino shows up on Pep Guardiola’s patch on Saturday there will be a new feeling between the two men. No longer on either side of Barcelona’s David and Goliath dynamic, with no great imbalance and no inferiority complex.

Pochettino will not arrive at the Etihad Stadium as a plucky upstart, as he did at Camp Nou with Espanyol. He will arrive as an equal, a threat, not just to City over 90 minutes but to their hopes of playing Champions League football next season.

Because this weekend, in this relationship, Pochettino has the upper hand. Spurs are three points ahead of City in the table and are playing far, far better than them. Pochettino has won his last three matches against City. Spurs won 2-1 at the Etihad Stadium one year ago and, in October, beat them 2-0 at White Hart Lane. It would be no surprise whatsoever to see Spurs overturn City again.

It certainly was a surprise the first time Pochettino’s team beat Guardiola’s. It was February 2009, he had just taken over Espanyol and their trip to the Nou Camp was hailed as “fighting King Kong with a teaspoon”. But Pochettino told his players that they had to believe that they could win and they did, 2-1.

“Did it feel impossible? No,” Pochettino remembered at his press conference this week. “We were on the bottom, and they were on the top. They had a team with Lionel Messi, Thierry Henry, Andres Iniesta and Xavi, unbelievable players. For Espanyol we had 11 youngsters from the academy. But one thing was important: belief. We believed that we could win the game and we did.”

That belief was not enough to bridge the gap between the two sides for the rest of Pochettino and Guardiola’s time in Barcelona. There is a very clear hierarchy in that city and the two clubs existed at opposite ends of it. “We are talking about Barcelona, one of the best teams in the world, up with Real Madrid,” Pochettino said. “The gap was massive, the gap was massive.”

The relationship between City and Spurs is different. Pochettino proudly said that his side was traditionally a bigger club than City. “Historically, Tottenham was bigger than Manchester City,” he said. “[In terms of] fans, Tottenham is bigger.”

But everything changed in 2008 with the Abu Dhabi takeover which, after a few years of close competition, catapulted City ahead of Spurs. Even if it has not been clear on the pitch this season, in a financial sense the two clubs are playing a different game.

“Manchester City is a different philosophy,” Pochettino said. “Not a different level, but in a completely different way than Tottenham. It’s a different club, different philosophy, different business, all is completely different. It is too difficult to measure if there is a gap or not. Because we are in a completely different world.”

Those are the different worlds that City and Tottenham exist in now. That is why City have the most sought-after coach in the world, and Tottenham took their manager from Southampton. Or why City’s team cost hundreds of millions of pounds to assemble, and Tottenham’s did not.

The pair were at different ends of La Liga (Getty)

Pochettino is proud of the fact that throughout his career he has taught young players and under-rated players how to play expansive aggressive dynamic football. That is harder, he might argue, than doing so with the cream of Barcelona or Bayern Munich.

Despite working with different materials, both managers share an idealised vision for how football should be played, a model of expansive football that they are trying to perfect. Some managers just want to win football matches but these two are in pursuit of something more. Guardiola touched perfection with Barcelona and nearly did so at Bayern Munich.

But over the last month Spurs have looked closer than ever to getting there, winning six straight in the league. Last Saturday they did not allow West Brom a touch of the ball and they should, with better finishing, have won the game 10-0. It is the best Spurs have played under Pochettino but he insisted he would continue to push his team on.

“I think one thing is important: we are never happy after our performance,” Pochettino said. “4-0 against West Bromwich, but always we find something to improve. We always find a solution, a different way to improve. You will never arrive at perfection. But you need to try to be perfect.”

(Getty (Getty)

Clearly Spurs are further along their path to perfection than City are along theirs. For all the money that has been spent at the Etihad Stadium, Guardiola does not have the right players for how he wants to play. Pochettino has every piece in place. It may not be enough to take Spurs to the title, because of Chelsea’s lead, but they should have an even better swing at it than they did last year.

If Spurs win the title, Pochettino said that it would be “the most amazing or most important thing in Tottenham’s history”. He meant that because it would be the last year Spurs play at White Hart Lane. But it is also true in the context of the financial advantage City, Manchester United and Chelsea enjoy over Tottenham.