The contest between Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola is one of personal leadership v sporting philosophy
Jonathan Derbyshire
Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola is an austere figure, while in contrast Liverpool's Jürgen Klopp is all grizzled garrulousness © AFP
After a week of success for English football clubs in European competition, attention turns to the denouement of the domestic season on Sunday. Liverpool are in a straight fight for the Premier League title with Manchester City. Both teams are on long unbeaten runs and both are being driven to the finish line by coaches of rare distinction: the Catalan Pep Guardiola in Manchester and the German Jürgen Klopp on Merseyside.
Previous title races have thrown up compelling narratives on the touchline, of course. Who can forget the 1995-96 season, when Kevin Keegan, then manager of Newcastle United, was pushed to the brink of nervous collapse by the relentlessness of Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United? And, for many years, the emotional weather of the English game was set by Sir Alex’s animus towards Arsène Wenger at Arsenal, and then José Mourinho at Chelsea.
But the Klopp-Guardiola supremacy feels different. For one thing, they have largely eschewed the tedious “mind games” in which Sir Alex and his rivals used to engage. Messrs Klopp and Guardiola have been lavish in their praise for each other’s teams — hard not to be, I suppose, when both sides have amassed almost unprecedented points tallies.
No, the real interest in this contest between two men widely acknowledged to be the pre-eminent coaches in world football right now lies elsewhere: in what it tells us about the dynamic interplay between personal leadership and character, on the one hand, and sporting “philosophy”, on the other.
After Liverpool’s remarkable 4-0 win against Barcelona in the Champions League on Tuesday, the defender Dejan Lovren revealed what Mr Klopp had said to his players before the game: “He just said: ‘Believe — put it in your mind that you can do it . . . Just show some f**king balls.’” This is echt Klopp. And the press corps loves it.
In The Times, Matt Dickinson wrote of Mr Klopp and his counterpart at Tottenham Hotspur, Mauricio Pochettino, who oversaw another barely credible comeback in the Champions League, that they possess not just “shrewd football brains” but also the “human qualities that underpin brilliant leadership”. For all City’s success under his command, English journalists rarely speak of Mr Guardiola in similar terms.
This is partly a function of demeanour. Mr Klopp is all grizzled garrulousness, while Mr Guardiola, who could pass for an architect in one of continental Europe’s more adventurous practices, is an austere figure. It also stems from a suspicion of his methods and his unbending commitment to the principles of what he calls “positional play”.
The Swedish striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who played a single season with Mr Guardiola at Barcelona a decade ago, complained that the training ground there was “like a school”, with the best footballers in the world standing “with their heads bowed”. He eventually stopped referring to the coach by name, calling him “the philosopher” instead.
Mr Klopp is often said to be an apostle of a style of football that is the antithesis of Mr Guardiola’s — a muscular Sturm und Drang that strikes very different notes to the intricate patterns woven by City’s platoon of diminutive midfielders. But the win over Leicester that took City to the brink of a second successive league title was achieved when the veteran defender Vincent Kompany ignored the dictates of Guardialismo and took a shot from outside the penalty area.
Liverpool and Tottenham’s victories in Europe this week were likewise feats of will rather than tactics. And it may be that it falls to Spurs and Mr Pochettino, a voluble Argentine with the dress sense of a mid-ranking member of a New Jersey crime family, to mount a serious challenge to the Klopp-Guardiola duopoly. For the moment, however, those two look unassailable.
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