Klopp and Guardiola close the curtain on a rivalry that will define an era | first division

YoAs always, there will be a clash of contrasts. The joy machine against the tortured genius. Extroverted versus introverted. Low-rise baseball cap versus designer knitwear, ordered chaos versus chaotic order, 4-3-3 versus who the hell knows, blood red versus cold blue, hair transplant versus spotless bald head. For the last eight years, this is the duel that has painted the skies of English footballIt took him to new and unknown places.

And now, the end. Despite all the antagonism Liverpool and city ​​of manchester Fans have grown on each other over the years, Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola never really managed to hate each other. The mutual admiration and grudging respect simply ran too deep. “The most outstanding coach of my life,” as Klopp said last week. “The best rival I have had in my life,” according to Guardiola.

Of course, it wasn't meant to be. When Guardiola arrived at City in 2016, the predominant narrative was one of renewed hostilities with José Mourinho, introduced to Manchester United that same summer. a sick person Liverpool They had finished eighth the previous season, and Klopp replaced Brendan Rodgers in October. English football's most recent toxic rivalry essentially didn't exist yet. For Guardiola, Klopp, Mourinho, Antonio Conte and others, building an impressive dynasty would have to take a backseat. First task: knock Leicester out of their privileged position.

Perhaps in retrospect we should have seen what was coming, given the way in which Guardiola's Bayern Munich and Klopp's Borussia Dortmund had feuded so excitingly during their three seasons together in Germany, given the polarity evident in their two philosophies, dominance of the ball versus dominance of space. . But this was a slowly developing rivalry, one that didn't really take shape until the first half of 2018, when City's unsullied champions-in-waiting were beaten 4-3 at Anfield in January earlier. being defeated 3-0 in the first leg of the Champions League quarterfinals.

This was perhaps the point of greatest divergence: City's brilliant waifs and pixies, with their mesmeric and cultured short passing game, facing the heartbreaking gale of Liverpool, with their speed and aggression, and a Scottish left-back bought from Hull. In the years that followed, Guardiola and Klopp increasingly developed around each other like winding vines, constantly anticipating and reacting, borrowing and stealing.

For Guardiola, countering Liverpool's counterattack, stopping that lightning front three, would become an obsession that defined his subsequent teams. It led him to resurrect an idea pioneered by Johan Cruyff: pushing his full-backs into the center of the field when his team had possession. This idea would later evolve further, culminating in the deployment of John Stones and Manuel Akanji in a sort of hybrid defensive-midfielder role last season. “His teams helped me become a better coach,” Guardiola said. “It's the reason I'm still in this business. There are some managers who challenge you to take a step forward.”

For Klopp, the stratospheric standards set by Guardiola's City persuaded him that his Liverpool team would need to rein in his anarchic team in order to challenge for the title, to develop better, more reliable ways of recycling the ball against deep defences. Training exercises became increasingly oriented toward structured attack patterns, repeatable movements, trained actions like two men making simulated runs in the same direction so that a third could exploit the space they created. Liverpool's average possession increased from 55% to 63% in Klopp's first five seasons, culminating in his restrained masterpiece: the 2019-20 title-winning seasonin which 15 of their victories came by a single goal.

So there was a kind of symbiosis here, a shadow war that was most evident in their games with each other. Sometimes they canceled each other out; At other times, their fear of each other led them down strange tactical dead ends. The deployment of Jack Grealish as a false number 9, a role he had never played before at City, in the 1-1 draw at Anfield in October 2021. The decision to play João Cancelo and Phil Foden at full-back a year later, a decision that backfired on them with a 1-0 defeat. Last April, Klopp attacked with all his might at the Etihad Stadium against a City side that was missing Erling Haaland, and his team was devoured in midfield. in a 4-1 defeat.

England, of course, would provide the perfect canvas for this dialectic: a fishbowl of theatre, gargantuan melodrama, screaming crowds and feverish devotion, but also a football culture crying out for a certain refinement. Aside from the success each has enjoyed (the four highest point totals in first division In history, an appearance in five of the last six Champions League finals, the Big Six briefly became the Big Two; What is most notable about this era is the way they have enshrined principles that were at best questioned when they arrived.

Now everyone is pressing high. Now everyone recognizes that the best time to recover the ball is when you have just lost it. Even amateur teams now pass the ball to the goalkeeper. The result has been a certain homogenization of styles, the development of a football monoculture. But it's not Klopp and Guardiola's fault that they were so good that everyone felt the need to copy them.

With all appropriate allowances for recency bias, the last eight years really do seem like something of a golden age. What the Lionel Messi/Cristiano Ronaldo duopoly was to La Liga in the 2010s, Guardiola and Klopp have been to the Premier League: excellence begets excellence, a shining example that turns everything around it into a kind of irrelevance.

For any manager worth his salt, the Premier League became the place where he needed to prove his worth. Great managers – Carlo Ancelotti at Everton, Manuel Pellegrini at West Ham, Mourinho and Conte at Tottenham – took jobs below their grade in a desperate attempt to hold on to this world, to be where life was. Will this still be the case in five years, after Guardiola leaves, after Liverpool has rebuilt, after the court cases and realignments?

Guardiola stays, for now, but he too is closer to the end than the beginning. Perhaps these two will meet again, whether in the FA Cup or some other league, or perhaps even one day in international football. But for all intents and purposes, once the final whistle blows on Sunday afternoon, all of this will be forgotten. The curtain is falling, and not just on one manager or one rivalry, but on what seems like an entire era of English football.