jonathan northcroft
Why JĂŒrgen Kloppâs philosophy now dominates the Premier League
Success of Kloppian disciples such as Andoni Iraola show that gegenpressing philosophy is alive and well and driving next era of tactical innovation
Klopp and Guardiola may have left the Premier League but their impact on the top flight lives on
Jonathan Northcroft, Chief Football Correspondent
Saturday August 22 2026, 6.00pm BST, The Sunday Times
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At Liverpool there were two JĂŒrgen Klopps. He acknowledged it himself. He knew there was âJĂŒrgenâ, the bear-hugging pied piper everyone loved, and then there was âKloppâ â who could be an abrasive, almost bullying martinet.
To us who love football, the complexity and scale of great coachesâ characters is endlessly compelling. You see it on the streaming platforms, where Pep Guardiola and JosĂ© Mourinho still compete, each the focus of new multi-part documentaries.
Yet, in England, there seems a sudden dearth of major figures in the dugout now. Players were discussing it at a Championship club; looking at the array of bosses starting the Premier League season and concluding this is first season they can remember without a ârock star managerâ in the competition.
Iraolaâs pressing style borrowed heavily from Klopp
Andrew Powell/getty images
However, that doesnât stop tribute acts. The rise of coaches devoted to Guardiolaâs ideas is well-documented and Mourinho lives on through Frank Lampard (who said this week that âJosĂ©âs always thereâ) while Sir Alex Fergusonâs imprint remains on Michael Carrick and David Moyes.
The big development is the rise of the Kloppites, of managers whose role model was the true alternative to Guardiola, and this summerâs changes cement Kloppâs influence on his profession. Nine clubs in Englandâs top flight begin the season with new managers (the most since 1946-47) and, among them, seven either worked under Klopp, talk about their debt to Klopp, or identifiably play âKloppianâ football.
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They arrive to supplement existing afficianados Fabian HĂŒrzeler, Andoni Iraola and Daniel Farke and suddenly half of all Premier League clubs are coached by Klopp-lovers or Klopp-devotees.
The most obvious lurch in Kloppâs direction is actually a reversion, for it involves Liverpool. Winning a title did not protect Arne Slot from the fact neither his personality nor football captured supporters like his predecessorâs and Iraola was appointed to bring back at least one of those things.
Heâs a Spaniard, who even played for one of Manchester Cityâs offshoot teams (New York City FC), but when I sat down with him in 2023 he made clear which side of the Guardiola/Klopp divide he was on. âI have always loved gegenpressing and the German coaches,â Iraola said. âThe Bundesliga is where the idea players have to be complete started from, because coaches were very demanding out of possession.â
He added he preferred âchaos over organisationâ â the most âKloppianâ of statements.
Iraolaâs Bournemouth played the underdog heavy metal of Kloppâs Mainz or early Dortmund and a clip has been doing the rounds of Klopp, after facing Bournemouth in Iraolaâs first season, purring about his opponent: âThatâs real coaching, I have to say.â
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A conspicuous difference between Klopp and Slotâs Liverpool teams involved intensity. Liverpool topped the Premier League for distance covered in Kloppâs first full season (2016-17) but by Slotâs second season (2025-26) were being outrun in 34 of 38 league games. Hiring Iraola, whose Bournemouth were second for high-intensity runs and third for distance covered last year, is Liverpoolâs bid to get back to the sweat-stained thunder of Kloppâs prime years.
Iraola has been tasked with bringing intensity back at Liverpool
Luke Williams/Every Second Media/Shutterstock
Iraola has been warning it may be some time before Liverpoolâs players âhave the energy for 90 minutesâ of the intensity he wants from them but there has already been a return to Klopp ways in training.
Slot used a performance coach, Ruben Peeters, who was an expert in periodisation, a method which carefully manages load to prevent injuries. Yet preparation for sessions was so painstaking Liverpoolâs players could arrive at the training ground at 10am but not be out on the grass until 12.30pm, having first undergone meetings, gym work and time in a dedicated pre-training gathering space called the âGreen Roomâ, which might involve light exercises some viewed as fripperies, like throwing a basketball about.
Especially during busy times in the fixture schedule, training could be significantly below match intensity. This contrasted to Klopp, whose philosophy was to train at 95-100 per cent every day and then perform at 80 per cent â or rather play against opponents who could only reach 80 per cent of the levels his team had pushed themselves to on the training pitch.
âLiverpool were always coming down to meet the opposition and that drop off in matches compared to training meant we just bullied teams,â a former member of Liverpoolâs staff said. Rather than drop off, Slotâs team â gasping â had to try to move up.
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The ferocity of Iraolaâs sessions was a talking point of Liverpoolâs summer tour. He introduced a punishment game called âconsequencesâ where players divided into groups and only the winners of a training exercise were spared having to sprint from one 18-yard box to another and back.
Players were not worked too hard in training under Slot
Robbie Jay Barratt/getty images
He was observed implementing a novel fitness test where instead of an orthodox trial of aerobic endurance like a distance run or bleep test, players did sharp interval running followed by a longer run. It seemed the objective was to examine playersâ capacities to recover from repeated changes of pace â something essential to performing in the Kloppian style.
âThe intensity. Itâs the intensity,â Milos Kerkez (who also played for him at Bournemouth) said when asked what makes Iraola special. âHeâs not scared to play one-on-one all over the pitch, to press high and to be on the front foot always. If you see footage of how we all are after training, all lying down, then you can see what he is preparing us for.â
Bournemouth replaced Iraola with Marco Rose, who played nearly 200 games for Klopp at Mainz (âhe shaped all of us,â Rose says) and worked under Klopp last year, as coach of RB Leipzig, the flagship club of the Red Bull football project, while Klopp was Red Bullâs head of global soccer.
Kloppâs decision to join Red Bull after leaving Liverpool in 2024 was criticised as âselling outâ but in purely philosophical terms was natural, given all Red Bull teams follow playing principles laid down by the projectâs architect, Ralf Rangnick.
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Rangnick and Kloppâs ideas and coaching careers are intertwined: in Germany, Rangnick was the godfather of gegenpressing but Klopp was the one who truly revolutionised the Bundesliga with it, through his charisma and Dortmund successes.
Rangnick was the godfather of gegenpressing but Klopp refined and was hugely successful with it
Christof Koepsel/Bongarts/Getty Images
Red Bull and Klopp are often inseparable influences on Germanic coaches, in a way Oliver Glasnerâs history neatly explains. Glasnerâs first coaching posts were at Red Bull Salzburg and he recalled the period, post-playing, when he was working out his philosophy.
âSometimes you get an influence, you donât know why, but for me it was the end of my career looking for my second career ⊠Dortmund was impressive because it looked like they had [not] the best individual players but the best team. So it is always why? Why does this work so great? And JĂŒrgen Klopp was one of the first ones. He was always talking about counterpress and in Austria we were talking about counterpress,â Glasner said.
âI was in my coaching programme, and they asked me to write a dissertation â âHow I see football, how I want to playâ â and I remember I wrote, âI would like to play with counterpress like Borussia Dortmund but I have no idea how to train it.â But fortunately for me I became assistant manager of Roger Schmidt and Ralf Rangnick and [learnt] how to train it.â
Gary OâNeilâs first coaching role was under Klopp, managing Liverpool Under-23. HĂŒrzeler (like a lot of young coaches) says he is influenced by both Klopp and Guardiola but his intense, fast, high-pressing style is Kloppian and it was Klopp he called for advice before joining Brighton & Hove Albion.
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Farke is one of Kloppâs best friends in coaching and speaks to him regularly for help. Hullâs Sergej Jakirovic cites Klopp as his managerial touchstone (âI have been following him since Mainzâ) while high pressing and fast transitions are core ideas of Ălvaro Arbeloa (Fulham) and Pierre Sage (Crystal Palace).
When Arbeloa took over Real Madrid, the Madrista newspaper Diario AS trumpeted his appointment by declaring: âHe is inspired by JĂŒrgen Kloppâs Liverpool.â And when Sage took over at Lyon, he demanded more pressing and speed, challenging his players in language taken directly from Klopp (who extolled âheavy metal footballâ). âThey must stop playing the cello and start playing the electric guitar,â Sage said.
Why is Kloppism more popular than ever? As a Premier League manager put it, Guardiolaâs influence over tactics is unrivalled and profound, but it is Klopp who has shaped how a lot of modern coaches talk publicly about their ideas, with âpressing,â âintensityâ, âtransitionsâ and âout-of-possessionâ such buzzwords in the football media-sphere.
To coaches, being the very human Klopp seems almost attainable while Guardiolaâs genius may feel ethereal and out of reach. When the pair were inducted together into the League Managers Association Hall of Fame in 2019, Chris Wilder said listening to Guardiola was a privilege but it was Klopp who had the audience in the palm of his hand.
Premier League fans indicated that they would rather their team be managed by Klopp rather than Guardiola
Jason Cairnduff/reuters
And if more and more coaches want to be Klopp-ish, it seems the public wants it too. In several surveys, Premier League fans cited Klopp as the rival manager they would most like at their club. One for SkyBet asked fans which manager they would want to play for if they were players and Klopp was the resounding choice. Only Manchester City supporters said they would rather play for Guardiola.
All this means owners and sporting directors know it is an easy sell to their fanbase if they appoint someone âlike Kloppâ and there is another dynamic: Kloppâs football is associated with making underdog teams overperform whereas the received wisdom is you need the very best players to play Guardiolaâs way. Hiring a Kloppian feels the safer choice for those with lesser budgets.
And maybe the biggest driver is the direction football â especially in England â has taken recently. The 2025-26 Premier League had fewer passes per match than any season since 2012-13 and an increase in speed with the average passing sequence lasting a full second less than 2024-25.
Guardiola himself spent the last period of his City reign moving slightly away from Guardiolan ideas. 2025-26 marked a five-year low in Cityâs average possession and City hit five-year highs for through balls and fast breaks. To lean into the intense, physically demanding, fast-attacking coaches is to lean into what seems the zeitgeist of the English game.
âToday modern football is the way that [Iraolaâs] Bournemouth play, that Newcastle play, [HĂŒrzelerâs] Brighton play. [Klopp-defined] Liverpool have always been like that,â Guardiola mused in early 2025. âToday modern football is not positional, you have to ride the rhythm.â
Which brings us to Matthias Jaissle, up against Iraola for his debut as a Premier League coach. Jaissle, Newcastleâs surprise replacement for Howe, is, yes, Red Bull schooled and another young, German manager who benefited from Rangnickâs patronage and studying Klopp.
âI often looked at the transitions [Klopp] put in place at Liverpool,â Jaissle said, and he has been signing young players, like Amar Dedic, Aladji Bamba and Bazoumana TourĂ©, who bring speed and intensity, but he has one of the most difficult jobs of any incoming manager with Newcastle having sold Anthony Gordon, Bruno GuimarĂŁes and Sandro Tonali.
Klopp is back in management himself, as Germany boss, and will be back at English grounds watching players such as Nick Woltemade and Florian Wirtz. Will he think about his influence on the football he is seeing? Self-importance is not his style. âLegacy? I couldnât care less,â he once said â but his is writ large, and not just at Liverpool but across more and more of the Premier League.
BtwâŠ
What is the connection between Liverpoolâs Andoni Iraola and Villarrealâs Iñigo PĂ©rez?
Liverpool will host Villarreal in the league phase of the Champions League this season, a clash which will see the two Basque coaches face each other in competitive action for the first time.
First they were teammates at Athletic Club. Then PĂ©rez was Iraolaâs assistant at Rayo Vallecano. Then he was his successor.
Now, the master will face the apprentice, as both managers embark on their first Champions League campaigns.
What a game we have in store at Anfield!
https://www.instagram.com/p/Dck8FX5Deqa/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsi=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
Very honest interview and talks about our current squad and was has to be done.
I do enjoy listening him to talk in regards to his footballing philosophy, seems honest and open, but doesnât give too much away tactically.
Actually like Stevie as an interviewer.
I absolutely loved his words about what he expects from the players each game.
It will be easy to keep the fans onside with that kind of attitude.
38 points keeps us up to be fair
On the way out someone just reminded him its Richards last day tomorrow 
https://x.com/indykaila/status/2094467260446363996
Thank you, Andoni! If it wasnât for your ROAR, weâd be screwed.
I donât think Iâve ever known anyone, in the history of the internet, to use the telephone emoji like Indy does.
Well if he hadnât, how on earth were we to know what a telephone looks like?
No wonder why the LFC reddit community banned indy. Heâs a master baiter.
This guy is really great for tactical analysis. Definitely worth a follow
Iraola has inherited a defensive mess at Liverpool- here is how he plans to fix it
Yeah, I posted a video of his analysis last week, comes across well with clear ideas.
Nice one. Where did you post it?