Pep Guardiola’s teams strike fear into most opponents, but Jürgen Klopp is one manager who has found a solution more often than not.
By Lars Sivertsen, Football Expert for Betsson
The list of managers who have a good record against Pep Guardiola is not particularly long. Having only managed Barcelona, Bayern Münich and Manchester City obviously helps, but then there are plenty of managers who have been in charge of similarly illustrious clubs without getting anywhere near Guardiola’s numbers. But there is one manager whose head-to-head record against Guardiola is particularly noteworthy: Jurgen Klopp.
In 28 encounters between the two, Guardiola has won 11 games, drawn five and Klopp has won 12. With apologies to Nathan Jones and his rather freakish 100% record against Guardiola (One win in one, and unlikely to meet again any time soon), for Klopp to have a positive record against Guardiola and his teams over as many as 28 games is pretty remarkable.
Klopp’s record against Guardiola is also interesting because he has tended to take a very different approach than a lot of other managers do in these games. A lot of Guardiola’s most damaging defeats, not that there have been too many of them, have tended to come against teams that sit back and excel on the counter. As Jonathan Wilson once noted in The Guardian, Pep Guardiola and his teams share certain similarities with Darth Vader and the Death Star from Star Wars: “Both are ambitious technocrats who dream of the creation of an all-conquering machine. Both expend vast amounts of money and expertise in bringing their visions to actuality. Both have created awesome weaponry that can obliterate opponents, whether Alderaan or Watford. Yet both cannot help but leave in their destructive creations a fatal flaw”.
The fatal flaw, it often seems, is that Guardiola’s teams have at times been vulnerable to counter-attacks. Perhaps inevitably so, as they dominate possession and push numerous players up the field. When possession is lost, a moment of great vulnerability is inevitable.
This exact moment would appear to be Guardiola’s ventilation shaft, as it were. And he is well aware of it. Much of the tactical evolution Guardiola has gone through at Bayern and City has been about attempting to stop these counterattacks. Whether it’s the immediate press to regain the ball after possession, the tactical fouls deployed when the press fails or the fact that Guardiola wants a patient build-up to make sure players are in the right position when the ball is lost, it’s all about controlling these moments of transition. But still, the vulnerability will always be there in some form or other.
Looking at the other managers who have a strong record against Guardiola, we find Antonio Conte (four wins, no draws and just three defeats) and a certain previous #20 (four wins, one draw and four defeats), two managers who both had some success against Guardiola by sitting deep and hitting on the counter.
Jürgen Klopp, however, has tended to do the opposite. “You need to be brave and you need to play football”, Klopp said back in 2018. “You have no alternatives to beat City. You could win the lottery, hope they tackle each other and then you can stand deep in your own box and hope nothing happens, but that is not really likely”. Indeed, most of Manchester City’s games end up playing out like this – with City dominating possession and the opponent desperately camped out in their own third. And for all the talk of ventilation shafts and counterattacks, City do tend to win the vast majority of them. Beating the City press and getting those counterattacks away is easier said than done.
Trying to go out and actually press City, like Klopp believes you have to do, is not particularly easy either. Time and time again we see teams attempt to be brave against City, only for City to smash them into a pulp. But Klopp’s teams do seem to find a way more often than most. In fact, one of the times the two met in Germany, Guardiola was so worried about Dortmund’s press that he decided to play the tall and brawny defensive midfielder Javi Martinez as a kind of number 10 and play the ball long. It was a profoundly un-Pep-like approach, but Bayern won 3-0. The fact that the high priest of possession football even felt the need for such a rogue move was a compliment to Klopp in and of itself.
Perhaps we will see something similar this weekend, though this Pep team won’t have to play a defensive player in a strange position to do it. Since they added a certain tall striker in attack, going long is now a far more viable tactic for City. Aerial battles between the man dubbed “a tremendous Nordic meat shield” on the one side and Virgil van Dijk on the other should be well worth the price of admission. It will also be fascinating to see what happens down Liverpool’s much-discussed right flank. Mohamed Salah has been terrific so far this season and everyone knows what Trent Alexander-Arnold can do going forward, but against the very best it’s hard not to think that this side could be a defensive liability. Jérémy Doku versus Alexander-Arnold is a one-on-one matchup few Liverpool fans will be relishing, but then the Belgian dribbler’s own defensive contributions have been known to be a bit suspect.
Additionally, Manchester City have been notably less Pep-like so far this season. Their average possession number is 62.5% per match, down from 68.2% in the 2021/2022 season. Manchester City’s PPDA (Passes allowed per defensive action in the opposition half) number is way up from previous Guardiola seasons. PPDA is a crude but reasonably effective way of measuring how much a team is pressing their opponents in their opponent’s half of the field, as an efficient press will limit the number of passes the opponent are able to put together in their build-up phase. Under Guardiola City have typically had one of the lowest PPDA numbers in the league, but so far this season no less than 10 PL teams have a lower number than them. City still have a lot of possession and will press opponents, but nowhere near as much as we’re used to seeing under Pep. With Guardiola’s newfound enthusiasm for central defenders, perhaps he feels his team are both more comfortable and more capable of spending a bit more time defending without the ball.
Either way, Saturday’s encounter should be an intriguing one. Jürgen Klopp’s high-pressing approach has previously unsettled Guardiola’s fine tuned possession machine, but that machine seems to be functioning slightly differently than usual this season. And for all their attacking exuberance, Liverpool have shown some defensive weaknesses themselves this season. The early kick-off may put a slight damper on things, but these are still two teams that favour a front-foot approach. And Klopp’s Liverpool are one of the very few teams who have the bravery and ability to consistently take the game to City.
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Last Update: 22.11.2023