The Premier League demonstrating itself to be the greatest league in the world? The demise of the powerhouses of the European game? An era of all-out-attacking football in which 3-0 deficits are breeze? All of the above have been cited as reasons for Liverpool and Tottenham contesting the second all-English European Cup final.
The over-whelming reason is infinitely more life-affirming, though. These two teams are Europe’s best because they are led by two supremely optimistic and humane individuals who have reminded us that managers really can make good players great.
Neither Jurgen Klopp nor Mauricio Pochettino have lacked money to build. But the players who have delivered them to Madrid cost a fraction of those assembled by the continent’s high rollers. What links the two is their fundamental optimism about the players they have inherited. And a predisposition to build relationships which them which have created a soaring self-belief.
A revealing story from Son Heung-min’s difficult first season at Tottenham says much about why he has been in place to shape Spurs’ route to the Bernabeu. The South Korean had been struggling - even lacking a clinical finish in an 11-a-side game against the club’s academy players– and not getting the game time he wanted. A club in Germany was interested. He was thinking about leaving.
The easy option for Pochettino would have been to accept. Son has a very big entourage around him, including a secretary. His father is his agent. ‘Managing all that isn’t easy,’ Pochettino reflected in ‘Inside Pochettino’s Spurs’ his chronicle of the 2016/17 season.
Yet he sensed there were still grounds for hope and a conversation with Son ensued that demanded the utmost dexterity, given that one of the Argentine’s mantras – shared by Klopp – is never to guarantee a starting place to a player. Slightly against his better judgement, because the player had again looked unconvincing in training, Pochettino fielded Son at Stoke, four games into the season, in an attempt to ‘wipe the slate clean’. He scored, provided an assist, defended in spades and did not look back.
At so many clubs, that German offer would have been accepted. As Premier League clubs have grown fabulously wealthy on the Premier League’s £5.1bn TV deal, players have become an instantly dispensable commodity in the ugly churn of the transfer market.
But a touchstone for both Pochettino and Klopp is their belief that new levels of technical ability and quality can emerge from those individuals who put in the effort. Collectivism is more significant than the next transfer target. ‘It becomes a serious matter… if the footballer’s aim isn’t a shared one, but purely individual,’ Pochettino has said. ‘And when he forgets the required order in this sport: that the individual shines more when at the service of the team.’
Klopp's coaching assistant and chief scout Peter Krawietz has described the German’s identical creed. ‘One guy doing it by himself is nothing. That player will try once, he'll try again, but then he'll turn around and say, 'Where's everybody else?'
Adam Lallana, who has played for both these managers, tells Klopp’s biographer Rafa Honigstein: ‘Their demand is similar - put in the graft. [Klopp] understands you will make mistakes and not play so well in a game but if you leave blood and sweat on the pitch for him. That is what he likes most.’
Compare this philosophy with Jose Mourinho, lamenting the physical superiority of players like Andy Robertson, Mo Salah, Sadio Mane, Naby Keita and Fabinho when his United side faced them earlier this season, which he claimed he was powerless to affect. ‘There are qualities that a player has or he doesn't have,’ Mourinho claimed at the time. ‘You cannot improve, you cannot make them have [these qualities].’ Someone described this as classic football ‘fixed-mindset’, compared with what psychologists would describe as the ‘growth mindset’ of Klopp and Pochettino.
Nothing in football is new of course. Sir Alex Ferguson loved young players and the possibilities they brought. In his office at Carrington hung a print of Charles C Ebbets ‘Lunch Atop a Skyscraper’, the iconic Depression era photograph of 11 men sitting on a girder with their legs dangling precariously over New York.
‘The photograph explains what a football team is and has to do,’ Ferguson once explained. ‘What is the greatest thing a team can do? They can sacrifice their life for each other and sometimes when one falls two can save him. That is what you call sacrifice.’
But there’s precious little of such philosophy to be found among the giants. United laboured under the inflexibility of Louis van Gaal before opting for Mourinho’s brooding negativity, blowing millions in the process. Juventus have bet the bank of Cristiano Ronaldo delivering them to their holy grail of Europe’s ultimate prize. Pep Guardiola certainly does brings the emotional intelligence of Klopp and Pochettino, though his club have spent far much more than the finalists.
There is another way and this was the week when two supreme semi-finals revealed it. Liverpool and Tottenham are testament to the fruits of man management in its purest form.
