ROB DRAPER: Guardiola and Ancelotti have replaced Cruyff and Sacchi as coaches of their generation… their teams Man City and Real Madrid appear to be headed for a seismic Champions League final

Silvio Berlusconi, AC Milan owner and former Italian prime minister, complained when his club signed Carlo Ancelotti in 1987.

“We have a conductor who can’t read music,” he told his coach Arrigo Sacchi. “I told him I would teach him to sing,” Sacchi replied. It turned out that Ancelotti was a maestro.

Likewise, Johan Cruyff always believed in Pep Guardiola, even when he was a scrawny teenager who barely made an impression.

“They told me they had a talented player in the youth team,” Cruyff said when he became Barcelona coach in 1988. “So I looked for him in the B team, but he wasn’t there.” And then I looked for him in the C team, and he wasn’t there either. I asked why and they said, ‘Oh, he’s so small!’ I said, ‘He’ll grow.’ And I put him in the first team squad.’

We didn’t know it then, but these four names, masters and apprentices, were reinventing football. Cruyff and Sacchi shape the modern era, a constant reference for anyone who trains.

Pep Guardiola (left) and Carlo Ancelotti (right) deserve to be considered the best managers of their generation

Guardiola learned from Johan Cruyff (left) after playing under him at Barcelona

And then, a generation later, you come to this year’s Champions League, which starts tonight, assess the competitors and come to the conclusion that it will probably be a competition between Manchester City and Real Madrid, between Ancelotti and Guardiola. Pep against Carlo.

Greatness is given to those who dominate Europe, not the domestic leagues. That’s why Guardiola’s Manchester City can only enter this debate now.

The Real Madrid team, nicknamed the “Quinta de Buitre” – the Vulture Troop – won five consecutive Spanish titles but never the European Cup, and was picked apart by Sacchi’s AC Milan, who lost 5-0 in the semi-finals of the 1989 European Cup. The first scorer of that crucial game, demonstrating Sacchi’s tactical superiority to the world? Ancelotti.

Maybe you can compare it to another, more recent semi-final. Manchester City’s 4-0 victory over Real Madrid, a triumph for Guardiola over Ancelotti, was similarly influential.

Teams win and lose all the time, but sometimes one game stands out. It is very rare that two such well-aligned sides with similar economic resources come together and for one to prevail so emphatically.

Not only did they lose: Real Madrid simply couldn’t cope with City. Guardiola’s team was on a different level to the club that had won four of the last seven Champions League trophies.

Cruyff’s principles prevailed again, just as they had when Guardiola won his Champions League trophies as manager of Barca in 2009 and 2011. Or when Cruyff took that skinny teenager and made him the linchpin of a team with Ronald Koeman, Michael Laudrup and others Hrsitov Stoichkov and won Barcelona’s first European Cup in 1992.

This date has resonance as it was the last European Cup in the old style. From then on we would have a revamped tournament called the Champions League. Something like the Premier League had just been founded in England.

Football’s laws would ban the back pass to the goalkeeper, which would change the game and privilege those who can play from the back. That is, Cruyff-like teams.

Ancelotti was part of the great AC Milan team in the late 1980s and early 1990s that achieved great success under Sacchi

Two years earlier, the offside rule had been changed so that one player was equally on the offside side, making it much more difficult to set an offside trap and play for a 0-0 or quick 1-0 counter-win.

The age of negativity was over. Now big money TV dominates. Attacking football received rocket fuel. And Cruyff was on the rise, the Total Football, an attacking view of the game that gave license to big personalities like Stoichkov and later Romario, very much in vogue with the times. Cruyff had revived his great 1970s Dutch side when the new dawn dawned.

Not that Sacchi was that different. He had great personalities in Marco van Basten and Ruud Gullit. His team played exceptional passing football.

But if you wanted a one-line summary – which is, of course, laughably inadequate – then AC Milan controlled the space in which Barcelona controlled the ball. Cruyff believed that the team’s system was designed to encourage individual brilliance, while Sacchi believed in his team above all.

“Many people believe that football is about players expressing themselves,” Sacchi said. “But that’s not the case.” “The player has to express himself within the manager’s guidelines.”

Cruyff’s team was also well trained and yet the individual always seemed to be king. His longstanding philosophical difference with Louis van Gaal stemmed from the fact that he believed his fellow Amsterdammer had made the game too complicated. “The difference is that he always organizes a lot of things for people,” Cruyff said. “And I always use the basic quality of people to achieve what I want to achieve.”

But just as quickly as Cruyff’s football took hold in the 1990s, it was systematically dismantled in perhaps the biggest and most important Champions League final since Real Madrid beat Eintracht Frankfurt 7-3 in 1960.

The 1994 final, which AC Milan won 4-0 against Cruyff’s dream team, was even more astonishing than City’s performance last May. “The press, especially the foreign media, had given us no hope,” said Paolo Maldini, the key player in Milan’s exceptional defense. And it’s true that everyone was a little bit enamored with Cruyff’s exceptional team, which had many of City’s characteristics.

They were picked apart, trailing 4-0 within an hour and barely giving AC Milan a dent. Ancelotti had since retired and was now Sacchi’s assistant with the Italian national team.

That victory went to Fabio Capello and although, as Jonathan Wilson points out, there was a progression from Sacchi to Capello, AC Milan was still Sacchi’s creation, just like Liverpool’s Bill Shankly’s creation, even if Bob Paisley won a lot more.

Ancelotti will certainly be thinking about this tactical duel as Real Madrid prepare for this year’s competition, which may be his last when he takes charge of Brazil next summer. Last year’s semi-final was sobering.

AC Milan showed that Cruyff’s Barcelona could be beaten when they beat them 4-0 in the 1994 Champions League final

Ancelotti will hope to draw inspiration from this as his Real Madrid side try to stop Guardiola’s Man City this season

Still, he has lived long enough to know that it is not a permanent mark, but rather a line in the sand. Ancelotti has won the trophy twice as a player and four times as a coach, while Guardiola has won once as a player and three times as a coach. This duel, their fight for their mentors, permeates the modern tournament like no other.

And Ancelotti can take heart. Not least because it was his Real Madrid team that exposed Guardiola’s limitations at FC Bayern. The 4-0 win at the Allianz Arena in the 2014 semi-final was a masterpiece of counter-attacking and possession football.

With Jude Bellingham playing behind Vinicius and Rodrygo, perhaps he has fresh kryptonite for Pep’s supermen? There is a joyful pragmatism in what Ancelotti manages to do without a centre-forward.

Perhaps Cruyff’s supremacy will be destroyed just as quickly as it was in the 1990s. For now, however, this seismic battle of wills will dominate the tournament. And surely we have to get Manchester City vs Real Madrid Part II at some point? Preferably in the finale.