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The greatest rivalry in football for the past decade is coming to an end. Managers Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola clashed in 30 games across Germany and England, but neither came out decisively on top (their final meeting was a 1-1 draw earlier this month). In May, Klopp will leave Liverpool for good. It’s a shame that two of the best managers of all time may never face each other again, because their rivalry has raised the calibre of the sport so spectacularly.
Klopp and Guardiola tinkered relentlessly with their squads, tweaking formations, positions and playing styles in order to best one another. In doing so, they redefined the cutting edge of football season after season, and their dominance in all tournaments forced other managers to adapt their own styles so as not to fall behind. There will be much talk about their tactical brilliance in the coming months, but the man who really deserves the praise is the one who inspired them both, the godfather of modern football: Johan Cruyff.
‘Playing football is simple, but playing simple football is the hardest thing there is,’ Cruyff liked to say
When Cruyff was an 17-year-old novice at Ajax in Amsterdam in 1965, Rinus Michels had just become the club’s manager. Michels had himself developed a revolutionary attacking approach to the sport which relied on two tenets: players interchanging positions on the attack to confound the opposition’s defence, and making runs into space between opposition players in lieu of playing man-for-man. He called this approach ‘total football’. Cruyff was the perfect disciple for Michels. He was never the most athletic player – he smoked 20 a day – but he, like Michels, understood that football is a cerebral exercise as much as a physical one.
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