Man City clash with Liverpool as Guardiola and Klopp celebrate a decade of rivalry

Later this year, Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp will have an anniversary to celebrate: 10 years of sharing touchlines. A storied marriage it has been, of title-chases too close to call, of European epics, of domestic silverware tussled over with such fine margins it has twice needed penalty shoot-outs to separate their sides.

Saturday’s face-off, Guardiola’s Manchester City against Klopp’s Liverpool, is the 28th confrontation between managers who will have in total spent 42 tense hours of their lives in neighbouring technical areas, exchanging intense side-eye glances, sometimes sharp words and occasionally knowing smiles suggesting they sensed, as clearly as the millions watching, that, at certain peak points in the past decade they were in charge of the most thrilling two teams anywhere in club football.

It would be hard to make that claim ahead of this weekend, when in a Premier League that has not been won by any manager apart from Guardiola or Klopp since 2017, neither sit at the top of the table. Nor will either of them climb to the summit whatever the outcome of their lunchtime kick-off, with City eight points shy of leaders Arsenal. There’s a rarity in that, too.

Scroll back over the Klopp-Guardiola archive, to its origins in clashes between Guardiola’s Bayern Munich and Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund, and at this late stage in any of their nine seasons as adversaries there is only one precedent for their playing each other without one of their teams being at the top of the standings.

And there are few previous instances, when, with around two-thirds of the season played, the gap between Guardiola and Klopp’s teams has yawned as wide as the 27 points that separate second-placed City and sixth-placed Liverpool.

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