Tottenham must adopt Liverpool(ish) blueprint to beat Manchester City

Tottenham have a bad recent record against Manchester City, but Liverpool have laid out the tactical blueprint for beating Pep Guardiola’s side.

Two consecutive transfer windows without a signing, knocked out of both domestic cups, a faint glimpse of involvement in the Premier League title chase over after about three days — Tottenham’s season hasn’t exactly screamed progress. A first win in their much-delayed new stadium last week has only done so much to gloss over the sense of drift that has infected the club this season.

What highlights there have been have almost all come in the Champions League. In particular, a late, knockout-round-qualifying draw at the Camp Nou and the resulting round of 16 games against Borussia Dortmund have given Spurs fans real confidence they can make a deep run in this competition.

There’s only one problem: Their next opponent is Manchester City, a side they haven’t beaten since 2016 and against whom they’ve lost their last three matches by a combined score of 8-2. It doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to suggest this was the worst possible quarterfinal draw for the north London club. The question now is how they can win anyway.

Three years into Pep Guardiola’s City reign, and more importantly over a decade into his senior management career, there’s no debate about how he’ll approach either leg against Spurs — or any other match, for that matter. There are always tweaks, often very bold ones, but the fundamentals remain the same: dominate the ball, dominate the space, dominate the game.

Mauricio Pochettino’s own default setup is similar to Guardiola’s, the main difference between the sides a matter of funding. After Pochettino bested Guardiola in their first Premier League matchup, a 2-0 win at White Hart Lane in October 2016, it’s been a largely predictable story: Pochettino’s apparent lack of options but to fight fire with fire typically sees Tottenham burned.

Pushing up and pressing all the way to the goalkeeper, as Tottenham love to do, simply provides Ederson an opportunity to demonstrate his impressive long-passing game, instantly playing City’s forwards in behind. If Spurs are to make it to the Champions League semis, they’ll almost certainly have to adopt a different approach.

Good news! There’s a blueprint to beating Guardiola’s Goliath, and it belongs to Liverpool. The Reds’ exemplary record over Guardiola’s City is pretty much unique, the highlight coming in this very round of the Champions League last year, when they beat the Citizens 5-1 over two legs. To understand how Tottenham might beat City, then, it will be helpful first to look at how games between Liverpool and City tend to play out.

With the exception of a 5-0 City win early last season — a match in which Sadio Mane was sent off in the first half — most of the games between Liverpool and City have looked similar from a tactical perspective. The Reds surrender possession by sending the ball long, apply minimal pressure to City’s defenders and sit deep enough to simultaneously create a large, open midfield area and rule out the long ball over the top. From that starting position, they set traps to win the ball as City attempt to progress through midfield.

This approach to defending — or what you might in this case call “attacking without the ball” — isn’t entirely unique, but it’s a significant exception to the norm. Typically, the cornerstone of defensive solidity is compactness. Whether a team are parking the bus or pressing high, the distance between their deepest players and their highest is small, thus limiting the space in which the opposition are allowed the ball.

This isn’t the case with Liverpool, at least not when they play ball-dominant teams like City. When they don’t have the ball, the distance between Liverpool’s forwards and defenders is almost half the length of the pitch. This invites their opponents to pass into a disjointed midfield area, where they rapidly compact their formation to close down the ball.

Jurgen Klopp has of course been very successful with this approach, but it’s so unusual, so seemingly contradictory to the accepted best practices of good defending, it’s not the sort of thing that can be easily adopted for a single game. Therein lies the problem for Tottenham.

Still, while Being: Liverpool isn’t a realistic (or wise) approach for Pochettino to take, he can adopt some facets of Klopp’s City blueprint, most importantly the medium block. Sitting deep against City only allows them space and time to pass you to death. Pressing high, as Tottenham have typically done, will see you picked off from a distance. The medium block is the compromise, a middlingly high defensive line that ensures the ball spends as much time as possible in the phase of possession in which City are at their least threatening.

Syphoning the ball into City’s full-backs or their deepest midfielder (normally Fernandinho) before pressing them around the halfway line not only increases your chances of winning the ball, but of doing so in the area of the pitch where City are most vulnerable to counter-attacks. With so many players ahead of the ball in these moments, and so much space behind their defenders, they can be hurt.

Fortunately for Spurs, they have some experience with this sort of setup. On rare occasions, usually in the Champions League, Pochettino has moved away from his own, Guardiola-esque Plan A.

In the second leg of the round of 16, for example, with a 3-0 lead to defend, Tottenham were content to allow Dortmund the ball and, like Liverpool, meet the opposition on the halfway line (though Spurs’ pressure here was more about denying BVB passage through midfield than it was about turning the ball over high up the pitch). This setup wasn’t entirely successful (the xG for the match was 1.5-0.9 in Dortmund’s favor), but Spurs will have benefited from testing it out against a good team in a high-pressure environment.

The tactics were also reminiscent of those adopted in last season’s group stage wins against Dortmund and, even more notably, Real Madrid.

The other key to Liverpool’s success against City is their lethality on the counter-attack. The transition between defense and attack is typically the most under-coached phase of the game. Most managers are content to allow their players to improvise when they have space to play in — as they do in most counter-attacking situations — but Spurs can’t quite match the frenzy of Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane and Roberto Firmino on the break. They can compensate for this, however, with a slightly more methodical approach in counter-attacking situations.

In particular, Tottenham can capitalize on City’s tactical asymmetry. Usually, the Citizens line up with Leroy Sane glued tight to the left touchline, leaving the left-back — be it Fabian Delph, Oleksandr Zinchenko or Aymeric Laporte — free to move inside when City have the ball. On the opposite flank, Raheem Sterling and Kyle Walker share the responsibility of providing width, with Walker often playing as a third center-back and Sterling popping up in the box at the opportune moment.

City’s use of an inverted left-back could potentially be exposed as a weak link when they lose the ball. With Delph (or Zinchenko or Laporte) mostly operating in midfield when City are in possession, there’s a pocket of space where a traditional left-back would line up. If Tottenham start their own speedster, Heung-min Son, on the right, and get the ball to him quickly when they win it, they should have a reliable route into City’s final third.

Guardiola’s use of only a single, pacey player positioned in each of the widest zones at any one time is indicative of his dogmatic prioritization of attacking through the center of the pitch. City use the threat of their wide players as a means of accessing the middle — stretching their opponents from touchline to touchline and dragging their opposite numbers out of position with darting runs before quickly working the ball backward and inside.

The key for Tottenham, then, is to avoid doubling up on Sane or Sterling, and instead surrendering the zones wide of midfield by having their wingers tuck inside, thereby denying City access to the area at the top of the box from which they do so much of their damage. This won’t be straightforward, especially given the athletic limitations of Tottenham’s current cast of full-backs, but any team that hopes to beat City must choose the lesser of several evils.

All of this is of course much easier to talk about than it is to do. Nevertheless, City aren’t invincible, and the game plan described here would allow Tottenham to exploit their biggest weaknesses, giving them at least a plausible chance of advancing to the semifinals.