Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool are truly unique

For years, Jose Mourinho and Pep Guardiola were thought of as two ends of a linear tactical spectrum. Then Jurgen Klopp came a long.

Pop, punk, jazz.

Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque.

Counter-attack, possession, pressing.

Football, like anything else, has its different styles. And while any style can exist at any time, one always tends to dominate. Jose Mourinho’s compact and efficient system took Europe by storm in the early 2000s, only to be superseded by Pep Guardiola’s possession-oriented approach. Though no one could replicate Guardiola’s success, his Barcelona team defined an era. Every team suddenly wanted to play the “Barcelona way.”

As a result of their success, and their contrasting visions of the game, Guardiola and Mourinho came to represent the opposite ends of what was a linear spectrum. Teams could lean toward one end or the other, but they all seemed to fall somewhere between the two.

After a year away from the game following his departure from Barcelona, Guardiola was eventually lured back into management by Bayern Munich and the Bundesliga, where he would, at last, meet his system’s silver bullet: Jurgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund. Klopp’s side, unlike those who had tried and failed to topple Barca, didn’t want to find a place on the Guardiola-Mourinho tactical spectrum; they wanted to break it.

By modernizing and refining an existing tactic, Klopp made a name for himself scalping teams with better players and bigger budgets. His fast-paced style of aggressive pressing and counter-pressing led him to a Bundesliga title and Champions League final. Despite a disappointing end to his days at Dortmund, Klopp had succeeded in pioneering a new style at the Westfalenstadion, one he has developed even further at Liverpool.

In an article published by FourFourTwo in 2016, Uli Hesse suggested “we may soon see a team that will intentionally give the ball away in order to then launch the counter-press.” While Klopp’s 2017-18 Liverpool side, another Champions League finalist, didn’t quite go to those lengths, they came as close as any team ever has — not necessarily by ceding possession, but by ceding space.

Contrary to claims Klopp has steadily ramped up his “heavy-metal football” since arriving at Anfield, Liverpool have become much more measured in their pressing actions over the past few years. After a couple seasons perfecting his team’s ability to enact a high press, Klopp has reeled them back in

By pressing in a mid-block — that is, by waiting for the opposition to try to pass the ball into midfield before pressing — Liverpool have achieved similar offensive results without as much defensive risk. The Reds now present their opponents with opportunities to exploit by intentionally leaving space between their midfield and defensive lines. However, when defenders take the bait, bypassing the attacking and midfield players in front of them to pick out a playmaker in space, Liverpool rapidly compress their formation, win the ball and break forward. An exceptionally good touch or a particularly talented player will occasionally slip the counter-press and wreak havoc, but as Klopp’s tenure has gone on, Liverpool have gotten better and better at avoiding these moments, as evidenced by their impressive defensive numbers this season (and, to a slightly lesser extent, in the second half of last season).

This willingness to incite transition is a true departure from the approach of most high-level teams over the past several years. Understably so, top teams want to control games as much as they can, leaving as little as possible to chance and relying as little as possible on moments of brilliance from individual players.

Although Klopp’s Liverpool certainly take measures to control matches, their ability to thrive in the chaos created by their proactive reactivity is genuinely one of a kind. Indeed, if there was any overriding lesson from the Reds’ run to the Champions League final last season, it was that no tactical system could stop Liverpool from implementing theirs. They were going to force an open contest, and they going to thrive in it.

Of course, to define Liverpool’s style in terms of their play against opponents of similar quality is to define them in terms of something they’re doing only a minority of the time. Though there are similarities between Liverpool’s performances against elite teams and mediocre or bad ones, the tactics and subsequent performances often differ drastically. Pressing is an inherently defensive action; you can only do it without the ball. And so Klopp’s reputation as a pressing manager, despite the fact his teams consistently dominate possession against the lesser sides, is something of an oxymoron. This isn’t to say his teams don’t press at all against the likes of Cardiff and Burnley; they simply have less opportunity to do so.

The constant thread in all of Liverpool’s performances is an emphasis on transition. Where, for example, they tend to create open contests against better teams by encouraging them to make mistakes, they’re equally comfortable creating chaos in games in which they dominate the ball.

Instead of passing the ball endlessly in midfield like some possession-dominant sides do, Liverpool create transition against compact sides by sending long balls into the channels, where Roberto Firmino, Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane, all of whom thrive in one-on-one situations, chase them down and isolate defenders. This allows Liverpool to push back the opponent’s defensive line and render their once-compact spacing ineffective. If the opposition aren’t troubled by the initial threat of the front three, Liverpool’s midfielders will be there to capitalize on the dismantled defensive shape with late runs into the box.

For so long, the frame in which people could view teams was binary. They were either proactive or reactive, and constantly compared to the men who had come to represent those two extremes. Though Klopp’s style hasn’t yet achieved the same level of success as those of Guardiola and Mourinho, the fact he has added an entirely new dimension to the game is, in and of itself, a major achievement.