For 90 minutes on Sunday, the Charleston Battery’s Ben Pirmann and Phoenix Rising FC’s Juan Guerra will become the best of frenemies.

Because when it comes to lifting silverware, there might be nothing better than getting one over your friend.

“I want him to fail miserably on Sunday, just like he does for me,” said Pirmann with a smile on Thursday. “Then when it’s all over we’ll be pals again, but it’s exciting. You want to win so badly. Playing against a good buddy, I want to win even more.”

“I am very, very happy to share my first Final with him,” added Guerra. “And I can also promise you that I want to beat him on Sunday, and then I’ll give him a hug and then we’ll have a beer after the game.”

Pirmann’s Battery and Guerra’s Rising FC squads will meet in the 2023 USL Championship Final at Patriots Point this weekend (7 p.m. ET | ESPN2 | ESPN Deportes | SiriusXM FC), but their pathways to this point as coaches could hardly have been more different.

On one hand you have the Battery’s manager, who is on his third Head Coaching stop after leading Detroit City FC during the club’s pre-professional days while an assistant coach at Michigan State University. From there, he became an assistant coach at Memphis 901 FC for its inaugural season in the USL Championship before ascending to the top job late in the 2020 season, earning the league’s Coach of the Year a season ago before his move to Charleston late last year.

On the other, Rising FC’s manager had an extensive playing career that saw him compete for Venezuela at the senior international level and make almost 200 professional appearances before becoming an assistant coach at Indy Eleven – the last club he played for – in 2019. After a second assistant coaching stop at Phoenix, last year he took the helm at Oakland Roots SC for his first Head Coaching position before returning as Rising FC Head Coach late last season.

In a twist before Sunday’s game, both Pirmann and Guerra were in an online seminar for their coaching course on Thursday afternoon ahead of the biggest game of their careers so far. That time spent together hasn’t just seen them share coaching ideas but become closer as friends.

“Being together over a year over the pro license, we’ve shared hundreds, maybe thousands of hours together,” said Guerra “Not just in the classrooms but during breakfast, during lunch, during dinners, during our online webinars, on the phone doing projects together because we were assigned a lot of projects where we were in the same groups.”

What does that mean for Sunday? That both Pirmann and Guerra not only have the film on how the other wants his team to play, but they have the how and the why behind the respective styles they seek to employ to build a successful team.

“I know how Ben thinks, and Ben knows how I think,” said Guerra. “There’s going to be a game where there’s not going to be a lot of surprises. We’re going to see two teams on the field that reflect the identity of both of our organizations, but also our identities as head coaches.”

As differing as their paths to this moment might have been, the storylines for the Battery and Rising FC this season have notable similarities. Each was a club in need of changes when they arrived, with Phoenix and Charleston both having missed the postseason a year ago. After major roster moves for both, the coaches have built squads that play an attacking style that should provide an entertaining finale to this season.

There are similarities in how each has approached this week, too. For Guerra, the message writ-large on the whiteboard since Monday morning in the Rising FC locker room has been “The Game Starts Today.” For Pirmann the message on focus and process follows a similar philosophy.

“Our focus is on our processes,” said Pirmann. “You know, Monday when we had our team meeting, I said, ‘Look, just promise me one thing, that we go through the process of this week, Sunday is going to be here when it gets here.’ I've never met somebody who can speed up time. So, for us, we focused on every single day.”

After the success both Guerra and Pirmann have brought to Phoenix and Charleston in their first full seasons at the helm, only one can claim the spoils on Sunday.

Both, however, are expecting the other’s side to deliver a top-quality performance in the pursuit of victory.

“We just want to get better and better,” said Pirmann. “We share ideas. He’s a really class act and a good person. And that just makes you draw nearer to people like that.”