COLLINGWOOD is the handpicked opponent for Mick Malthouse's record-breaking 715th game as an AFL coach on Friday night.

Although much was made of his departure within 12 months from the club he coached to the 2010 premiership, Malthouse says there might not be quite the enmity with Magpie president Eddie McGuire, the architect of the arrangement for Malthouse to hand the reins to Nathan Buckley, as has been suggested.

"A lot has been said and written about me and Eddie, but he's a visionary when it comes to Collingwood," the Carlton coach explains in an interview in this week's AFL Record ahead of his milestone game, when asked about the people who have helped him most along his coaching journey.

He says Collingwood, when he arrived there, was, "broke, on the bottom and with a home ground that was suburban and with woeful training facilities".

"It took a few years to get to the Westpac Centre, but he (McGuire) had a vision and that's what gave me the opportunity to come back to Melbourne when (wife) Nanette's mum was ill."

In an expansive interview, Malthouse talks about how the coaching bug first bit when he led a group of his Richmond teammates to a premiership in a social basketball competition and walks through each of his coaching stops: Footscray from 1984, West Coast (1990), Collingwood (2000) and Carlton (2012).

He talks with fondness about his greatest non-premiership victory, in round four of 1987. After losing the first three games of the season by a combined 40 goals, his Bulldogs knocked off reigning premier Hawthorn at the Western Oval.

He reveres the West Coast teams he led to two flags and the finals in each of the 10 years he was there, while he celebrates two of his teams at Collingwood, the unfashionable 2002 group that lost the Grand Final to the Brisbane Lions by nine points, and the 2007 side that fell five points shy of the rampant Geelong in the preliminary final.

"They had no right to be there given the playing groups," he said wistfully. "But they had exceptional will. They almost won the unwinnable."

He also speaks frankly about the challenge he faces with the Blues.

"When I played for Richmond and coached Collingwood, Carlton was just about the same level in terms of everything," he says.

"But when you come to Carlton you see that membership is moderate, finances are moderate, and they've won one premiership in 20 years. So as much as it felt that when I played and coached against them they were a massively big club, right now they're not. But they can be. Carlton is a sleeping giant."

Malthouse also discusses what motivates him to keep coaching game after game and year after year.

And although he doesn't buy into their musical tastes, he claims the professional footballers of 2015 share the same dreams and motivations as their part-time predecessors did the year he started coaching.

Read the full interview and other Mick Malthouse tributes in the round five edition of the AFL Record, available at all grounds.