by It will, as ever, be a conflict of contrasts. The joy machine against the tortured genius. Extravert versus introvert. Low-slung baseball cap versus designer knitwear, ordered chaos versus chaotic order, 4-3-3 versus who the hell knows, blood red versus cool blue, the hair transplant versus the bald pate without A stain. In the last eight years, this is the duel that painted the skies of English football, it took him to new and familiar places.
And now, the end. For all the antagonism that Liverpool and Manchester City fans have developed over the years, Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola could not bring themselves to hate each other. The respect and admiration for each other was too deep. “The best manager of my life,” as Klopp said last week. “The best rival I’ve ever had in my life,” said Guardiola.
Related: It will not be impossible to follow Pep Guardiola, says Jürgen Klopp
It wasn’t meant to be this way, of course. When Guardiola arrived at City in 2016 the prevailing story was one of renewed warfare with José Mourinho, revealed at Manchester United that same summer. Liverpool finished a miserable eighth the previous season, and Klopp took over from Brendan Rodgers in October. Basically, English football’s newest toxic rivalry didn’t exist yet. For Guardiola, Klopp, Mourinho, Antonio Conte and others, great dynasties would have to take a back seat. First task: knock Leicester off the perch.
Perhaps we should have seen in hindsight what was to come, given how Guardiola’s Bayern Munich and Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund were so exciting over their three seasons together in Germany, given the obvious polarity of their two philosophy, ball dominance versus space dominance. . But there was plenty of rivalry, one that didn’t really come to fruition until the first half of 2018, when unbeaten champions City were beaten 4-3 at Anfield in January before being beaten 3-0 in. Champions League quarter final.
This was perhaps the point of maximum contrast: City’s great waifs and sprites, with their mesmeric and cultured short passing game, coming up against Liverpool’s ragged gale, with their pace and aggression and the Scottish left-back bought from Hull. Over the following years, Guardiola and Klopp would develop more around each other like winding vines, constantly anticipating and reacting, borrowing and stealing.
In Guardiola’s case it would be a point to deal with Liverpool’s counter, standing firm with the lightning front three, which would be an obsession that would later define his teams. As a result he succeeded in resurrecting an idea pioneered by Johan Cruyff, pushing his defenders into midfield when his team was in possession. Later this idea would develop further, culminating in the deployment of John Stones and Manuel Akanji in a hybrid defensive-midfield role last season. “His teams helped me become a better manager,” Guardiola said. “It’s why I’m still in this business. There are some managers who challenge you to step up.”
For Klopp, the stratospheric standards set by Guardiola’s City have convinced him that his Liverpool side need to retreat into their anarchic side to challenge for the title, to develop better and more reliable ways of recycling the ball against defences. deep Training exercises focused more on structured attack patterns, repeatable movements, drilled actions such as two men making dummy runs in the same direction so that a third could take advantage of the space they created. Liverpool’s average possession increased from 55% to 63% in Klopp’s first five seasons, culminating in his limited masterpiece: the 2019-2020 title-winning season, in which 15 wins were scored by one goal.
So there was a kind of symbiosis at work here, a shadow war that was clearly visible in their games against each other. Sometimes they canceled each other out; at other times they were strange tactical cul-de-sacs caused by mutual fear. Jack Grealish was deployed as a false No. 9 – a role he had never played before for City – in a 1-1 draw at Anfield in October 2021. The decision to play João Cancelo and Phil Foden at wing-back a year later backfired in a 1-0 win. . Last April, Klopp launched an all-out attack at the Etihad Stadium against City who were missing Erling Haaland, and his team were thrown in midfield in a 4-1 win.
England would, naturally, provide the perfect canvas for this: a golden fishbowl of theater and superb melodrama with screaming crowds and feverish devotion, but also a football culture crying out for a certain refinement. Apart from everyone’s success – the top four points total in Premier League history, appearances in five of the last six Champions League finals, the Big Six briefly making the Big Two – what stands out about this era is the way. they have sacred principles that were opposed to them when they came.
Everyone pushes high now. Everyone now recognizes that the best time to win the ball back is when you have just lost. Even amateur teams give the ball away from the goalkeeper now. The result was a certain homogenization of style, the development of football monoculture. But it’s hardly Klopp and Guardiola’s fault that they were so good that everyone felt the need to copy them.
With all the appropriate allowances for gambling bias, the last eight years really do feel like a kind of golden age. As the Lionel Messi/Cristiano Ronaldo duopoly was to La Liga in the 2010s, Guardiola and Klopp were to the Premier League: excellence begetting excellence, a great role model who rendered everything around him irrelevant.
For any coach worth their salt, the Premier League has become the place where you need to prove yourself. Great coaches – Carlo Ancelotti at Everton, Manuel Pellegrini at West Ham, Mourinho and Conte at Tottenham – took jobs under their spell in a desperate attempt to cling to this world, to be where life was. Will this still be the case in five years, after Guardiola has left, after Liverpool have rebuilt, after the court cases and realignments?
Guardiola remains, for now, but he, too, is closer to the end than the beginning. Maybe these two will meet again, in the FA Cup or some other league, or maybe even in international football one day. But in all intents and purposes, as soon as the final whistle blows on Sunday afternoon, all of this will be remembered. The curtain is coming down, and not just on a coach, or competitions, but what feels like an entire era of English football.
