Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp are two very different managers, but the way in which they apply their energy usually leads to the same results.
As founding stories go, Manchester City’s dramatic 2012 Premier League title win is unusual in that it doesn’t really represent what the club became. It’s been a full decade since Sergio Aguero scored his last-gasp winner to take the title to the club for the first time since 1968, but City seemed to use up all their reserves of jeopardy on that first one. Since then, they’ve lifted the trophy a further four times, but they’ve never come close to such drama since.
That’s the way Pep Guardiola likes it. Manchester City are a machine, a system which shouldn’t have to depend upon such vagaries as how much time the referee is adding on for stoppages or dying-second winners. The shrill hysteria of a crowd willing a team forward for that One Last Chance doesn’t really suit Manchester City. They squeeze the life out of their opponents with a boa constrictor-like suffocation of pressing and tidy geometric shapes, coached like the engine of a sports car is fine-tuned. They’re always playing a long game.
But going into the last round of fixtures of the season, City are cutting it finer than they would like. Riyad Mahrez’s late penalty at West Ham might have left this weekend’s fixtures looking largely academic, but his effort was saved and now the final day starts with just a single point between the top two and a frisson of excitement in the air. And at the centre of all of this nervous energy are two coaches who in quite different ways encapsulate the mild eccentricity that almost seems to be a prerequisite to managerial greatness.
Both Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp are obsessives with a particular eye for tiny detail, but this obsessiveness manifests itself in very different ways. Guardiola has created a team as a machine, a corporation that produces ‘best in class’ football, with trophies as market…
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