Manchester City will fly to Spain straight after their trip to Newcastle on Sunday

Manchester City jet straight off to Spain on a four-day jaunt after Sunday’s game at Newcastle United.

In an unusual move, the Premier League champions are facing Barcelona in a friendly for charity at the Nou Camp on Wednesday evening.

But Pep Guardiola wanted to turn the trip into a training camp, with City using facilities in Girona to aid their preparations for next week’s home game against Crystal Palace.

The friendly is organised to raise funds for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis research after ex-Barca goalkeeper and coach Juan Carlos Unzue – who worked under Guardiola – was diagnosed with the disease.

It will also take Bernardo Silva to the club who have publicly courted him all summer, with Guardiola anticipating that City’s transfer business is over.

‘We will be together for a few days, our chairman (Khaldoon Al Mubarak) will be there with us for three days,’ Guardiola said.

‘There is time to train and recover in a good environment and we go because Barcelona opened their doors to make a game for an important person in our lives.

‘It will be perfect and we will come back here on Thursday, recover, see the draw for the Champions League and prepare for the Palace game.

‘The best way to take rhythm is playing games. Training is nice but the best way is playing games and the guys who didn’t play much minutes in the first two games are going to play. After in September, with games every three days, everyone is going to play.’

Guardiola claimed that spending time away from the City Football Academy will act as a positive distraction for his players ahead of a long season.

‘We will talk, laugh, train, have a good game against Barcelona – it never looks like a friendly game when you play Barcelona,’ he added. ‘We are in here for 11 months – the facilities are exceptional but at the same time sometimes a change is good.’

City – who have Kalvin Phillips and Cole Palmer back available at St James’ Park – have surprised their manager by winning both opening games of the season.

‘The last two games were really good and at some points unexpected,’ he said. ‘The players prove to me again how wrong I was (because) in the first games, always we have doubts about how we will react after pre-season.

‘We didn’t train much, just 10 or 11 days for pre-season. I don’t know how we are going to do. The last three years we didn’t win against West Ham away and they proved I was wrong, that I can trust in them.’