Boardroom, Backroom, & Bench: The Premier League’s Season of Change (Part 1)
Pep Lijnders and Kolo Toure: Students of the New Takers of the North Trying to Become Teachers
Pep Lijnders left Liverpool in 2024 alongside his boss and friend of many years, Jurgen Klopp. He had been part of a long, mostly successful and sometimes heartbreaking journey in Anfield.
Liverpool were second best many times to Man City despite amassing points that’d see them stroll to the title in many other Premier League seasons.
Klopp trusted Lijnders a great deal and treated him with immense respect. They’d tasted the bitterness of defeat, and the joy of winning together. Also. his work on the training ground was rated by players as important to what helped them stay in shape for many years.
After Klopp’s exit, Lijnders joined Red Bull Salzburg as manager but didn’t last a season as he got the boot following strings of unimpressive displays at the beginning of the season. Salzburg are by far Austria’s biggest club but their desire to reclaim their great glory wasn’t helped by Lijnders.
Lijnders didn’t have a job for six months, a period long enough for him to analyse why he failed at Salzburg. He admitted in an interview that he was too quick to impose his ideas on a relatively young squad.
He wasn’t new to senior management but his experience at the elite levels still needed a stop. Some work with arguably football’s greatest managerial mind, Pep Guardiola will do his CV a world of good and recharge his experience. He’s set to find joy from the same brain that caused him pain for so long. Lijnders’ most popular life has come in red and blue (not pills).
Guardiola is not Klopp but Lijnders has found himself at an intersection of two extremely different football ideologies where winning is ultimate and dominance is the dominant narrative in their respective systems. He is a lucky student.
When Guardiola contacted Klopp to ask what he thought about Lijnders, the German coach gave his blessings and spoke glowingly about his former number 2. He is a brilliant trainer, probably more less an astute manager.
Guardiola is at a point in his career where he’s making very unexpected and strange decisions like changing his backroom staff and appointing new captains by himself. To go for a man who worked so long at a rival club shows the Spaniard is not afraid of the unpopular. He’s too successful to be afraid of failing now.
Lijnders considered working with Guardiola too good to reject and it also meant he’d have worked with two of the best minds in football at either ends of a failed leap.
Just only coming off a failure at an elite football establishment, perhaps Pep (Lijnders) still needs some pep talk in Manchester. Let’s call him the Student of the North — a man whose story resonates across Manchester and Liverpool.
Kolo Toure: The Student On Teacher Training — Again
A long career at Arsenal, successful seasons at Manchester City, not-so-impressive yet respectable outings at Liverpool, and a season of double in Scotland with Celtic. Kolo Toure would never have imagined the playing career he had when he departed Abidjan in the early 2000s as a young man.
After becoming a part of Arsenal’s Invincibles team that went unbeaten in 2003/04, Toure also helped win Manchester City’s first Premier League title in 2012. His career was lit with presences at elite clubs.
His coaching career has also had some stops as assistant coach in big clubs at greatly competitive levels. Despite these good levels of studentship at great schools, the one time Toure attempted to stand on his own and teach a class, he wobbled and was shown the door at League One club side, Wigan Athletic. He was simply asked to go and complete his training.
Manchester City have appointed Toure as number two after some backroom exits in the club. He will be working as one of Guardiola’s assistants and that experience will definitely serve as a significant point in his career.
The former Ivorian international played under some brilliant managers including Arsene Wenger, Roberto Mancini, Jurgen Klopp and Brendan Rodgers. He also worked with Rodgers as part of his back room staff at Celtic and Leicester City.
Toure has shown the desire to become number one at some point in his career and has quickly banished the memories of his Lancashire experience. Like every man sacked before time, he said he wasn’t given enough time. Being at the entrance of the kitchen means the heat is minimal. Toure can learn to cook from watching.
And The Portuguese Named French?
Guardiola and Man City’s triple backroom haul is completed by former Liverpool staff, James French.
French worked in Anfield for more than ten years as an opposition analyst and must have spent hours studying why Manchester City’s slow buildup won them many Premier League titles. Such a hard task.
Now he’s a part of the opposition he used to analyse, his analytical skills will be put to great use in his role as set piece coach.
French comes from the Iberian Peninsula and has romance written all over him. How do you fancy headers becoming a romantic thing again at Manchester City ? The actual French at Arsenal must be quivering.