Football changed in April 2013. Jürgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund beat José Mourinho’s Real Madrid and Jupp Heynckes’s Bayern Munich beat Tito Vilanova’s Barcelona in the semi-finals of the Champions League and the hegemony of a Spanish model of football, based on possession or its opposite, was shattered by a series of rampaging German counterattacks.
The lessons of that fortnight remain highly relevant to Sunday’s meeting at Old Trafford between Manchester United and Liverpool, Mourinho and Klopp. Or at least that is the convenient theory. Nothing is ever as neat and simple as that, and by the following season Carlo Ancelotti’s Real were devastating Pep Guardiola’s Bayern by breaking with rapid efficiency.
But those four games in April 2013 did change the perception. It had seemed football could be played in only one of two ways. Either you sought to achieve possession statistics of 75%, dominating the game through keeping the ball as Guardiola’s Barça had done, or you sought to defy that approach by radical non-possession, retaining the shape and waiting for a mistake, as Mourinho had done with Internazionale against Barça in 2010 and, in a less exaggerated way, with Real in certain key games.
Theorising about football had come to focus on that one metric: possession. It did not necessarily express how well you had played, but it did express how you played. But football is not a simple dichotomy and the rise of Klopp and the German school, and others who share similar ideas, such as Chelsea’s Antonio Conte, have shaken the simplicity of that analysis.
That is not to say Guardiola’s style – call it tiki-taka if you like – is finished, outmoded, but that top clubs have found another way of playing.
And there are clear crossovers between the two philosophies – as is seen clearly in somebody such as Tottenham’s Mauricio Pochettino, understandably given his tutelage under Marcelo Bielsa. The Guardiola style may be a little more focused on possession, although that is evolving almost by the week, and the Klopp-Conte style more on rapid transitions, but both require acute positional sense and both tactical approaches are based on a belief in the value of attacking.
In that sense, Mourinho still remains aloof among the managers of the Premier League’s top six clubs in that he does not believe only in playing on the front foot, something that creates a certain tension at clubs such as Real and United whose self-identity is of cavalier flair. That is another of the strands that makes their meeting at Old Trafford so intriguing.
When United went to Anfield in October, they were stuttering badly and had won one of their previous four league games. Mourinho shut the game down, adding to an impression that Klopp’s side can be frustrated by dogged teams who sit deep – as they were in losing to Southampton in the EFL Cup semi‑final first leg on Wednesday.
But United go into Sunday’s game on the back of nine straight wins in all competitions. Perhaps they have not been quite as fluent as they would have liked, perhaps they have enjoyed some of the luck that had shunned them earlier in the season and perhaps it has not been the most testing run of fixtures but nine wins are nine wins.
Mourinho is smiling again, making jokes in interviews. He has solidified the defence and his substitutions are working. He’s back in control. But what does Mourinho do here? It’s one thing to grind out a point away from home amid a bad run, quite another to set out to do so at Old Trafford on a good run.
What may be tactically correct may not be emotionally or politically correct – was his assertion this week that a United v Liverpool game wasn’t like going to the theatre a warning to expect a battle? And because the only top-six side United have beaten on their good run was Tottenham, who at the time were in a miserable patch of their own, there is a sense that this game is the real test of whether United are capable of challenging the very best.
But there’s a broader narrative beyond even that. Louis van Gaal won four games out of four against Liverpool but there was a wider belief that the Dutchman’s stewardship of the club was a time of flux and that the pendulum of supremacy may be shifting back towards Merseyside.
The past four years have brought four different champions: the last time that happened was 1990-93 and was followed by United’s domination; the previous such sequence was seven from 1967-73 and was followed by Liverpool’s domination. With United seemingly obsessed with celebrity signings and playing staid football, it was possible to discern Liverpool resurgent with their bright young coach and his focus on developing talent. The game at Anfield in October did not really change that perception.
Mourinho has beaten Klopp once in six meetings and there were plenty of questions asked in the autumn about whether he too was a little passé, both tactically and in his relations with players. Results have quelled that tide of criticism but this feels like another test, another chapter in the history of entangled but competing theories that began in April 2013.
