It's easy to forget, but English soccer was not in a great place 10 years ago. Competitively, at least.
The Premier League was flourishing financially, with the fruits of the league's early business savvy showing up in television deals that were beginning to dwarf any of Europe's other major leagues. But despite a growing financial advantage, England just wasn't producing teams that anyone could reasonably claim were the best in the world.
In both the 2007 and 2008 seasons, three of the four UEFA Champions League semifinalists were English. Liverpool won the whole thing in 2005 -- in a season when they didn't even finish top four in their own league. They made the final again in 2007, and then Manchester United and Chelsea played each other in the final in 2008. But after that, it just sort of stopped.
Over the next nine Champions League tournaments, the Premier League produced just three finalists: twice Manchester United were thoroughly dominated by Barcelona, and then Chelsea won it all in 2012, an occurrence that said almost nothing about the quality of English soccer and everything about the pure randomness often produced by 22 players attempting to kick a bouncy ball into a tiny goal.
Come 2016, the Premier League was the model for how to build a competitive, lucrative and constantly interesting league. But if you were looking for the sport's bleeding edge -- the best players, the most effective ideas, the highest level of execution -- you had to go somewhere else in Europe. And that's ultimately what the Premier League did, too. In 2016, the previous managers of Borussia Dortmund (Jurgen Klopp) and Bayern Munich (Pep Guardiola) competed in their first seasons in English soccer, and the rest is history.
Of the past six Champions League finals, half have been won by English sides, and four featured English runners-up. Since Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola came to England, the Premier League has become the premier league. Klopp's Liverpool and Guardiola's Manchester City dominate Europe, and the two managers' ideas shape the sport.
With Klopp leaving Liverpool at the end of the season, the Sunday match at Anfield could be the final chapter in modern soccer's defining rivalry between two of the greatest coaches ever. The four highest point totals in Premier League history (and six of the top eight) were produced by Klopp and Guardiola teams.
It'll be a long time until we see two teams as good as Liverpool and Man City at the same time again. So, ahead of Sunday's potential title-decider, let's take a look back at how both managers shaped the Premier League -- and each other.
The Premier League had emerged from what is colorfully known as the "s--- on a stick" era. During the previous period of dominance in the mid-to-late aughts, Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez and Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho prioritized more reactive approaches, where defensive organization was the main principle and everything else came second. The teams were great, but the games were frequently terrible to watch.
"Football is made up of subjective feeling, of suggestion and in that, Anfield is unbeatable," Argentina World Cup-winner Jorge Valdano said after Chelsea and Liverpool played in the 2005 Champions League semifinals. "Put a s--- hanging from a stick in the middle of this passionate, crazy stadium and there are people who will tell you it's a work of art. It's not: it's a s--- hanging from a stick."
At the moment of Klopp's arrival, the best teams had stopped playing such terrible, uninspiring soccer, but the big English clubs were still chasing the rest of Europe. Teams like Arsenal prioritized slick passing, but then it would fall apart in European competition when they came up against more talented teams who were both better at passing and more organized.
Broadly, Premier League clubs were inching toward a more defined continental style, but they were worse at the continental style than any of the teams on the continent. So, for the first half of the decade, England's best teams weren't tactically distinct -- they all sort of did a little bit of everything, without committing to one thing.
Of course, Klopp's whole thing is one thing: high pressing, vertical passing, constant running, making sure the fans feel something. If you've seen Liverpool play at any point since 2016, you know they do that. But let's put some numbers on it.
Per Stats Perform, only two Premier League teams since 2010 have won possession in the attacking third more than 250 times in a season: Liverpool in 2021-22 (287 times) and Liverpool in 2019-20 (252 times). Everyone is familiar with pressing now, the concept of collectively pressuring an opponent to try to win the ball as quickly as possible -- it's the most ubiquitous tactical strategy in the modern Premier League. In fact, teams can largely be defined simply by how much they try to press.
However, this just wasn't true when Klopp came to the league. Among the top 50 pressing seasons in the Premier League since 2010 -- as defined by number of possessions won in the attacking third -- just four of them come from seasons before 2016-17, and one of those comes from Klopp's partial first season with Liverpool in 2015-16.
In Klopp's first full season with Liverpool, the average Premier League team won possession in the attacking third 3.5 times per game. In his eighth and final full season, it's all the way up to 5.1.
Such is the ever presence of the approach that relegated Leeds United ranked fourth in the league in possessions won in the attacking third last season. The high press is now an option for anyone -- anywhere in the table.
Reporting By: Ajayi Temitope Yetunde.
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