He already bears the name of a famous coach. In the case of Pep Lijnders, however, the first name does not stand for Josep, but for Pepijn – Lijnders is Dutch. And unlike colleague Pep Guardiola, he rarely pushes himself to the fore.
Pep Lijnders has been assistant coach at Liverpool FC since 2014 (with a short break), first under Brendan Rodgers and for the past eight years under Jürgen Klopp. Together they have celebrated great successes, including winning the Premier League and the Champions League.
Lijnders always does the work in the background: he takes over training sessions or works out the tactics for the next game. In this respect it is rather atypical for the Dutchman that he has now published a diary. Inside Liverpool FC tells the story of the 2021/22 season in which Liverpool reached the Champions League final.
Diaries are seldom a great blessing in football; on the contrary, they sometimes lead to serious scandals – Toni Schumacher and Lothar Matthäus, for example, know that. And Pep Lijnders also got headwind for his publication. Mainly because things didn’t go so smoothly at Liverpool in the following season: The Reds got off to a bad start in the Premier League and were taken apart by Real Madrid in the Champions League round of 16.
There was immediate criticism of Lijnders: TV expert Dietmar Hamann, formerly a Liverpool player himself, saw the book as “an indication that something is wrong internally”. Media speculated whether the diary even helped opponents decode the Liverpool game. Lijnders vehemently defended himself against this: He regrets “nothing” and that the book does not contain “a lot of insider information that could harm us”.
“Inside Liverpool FC” has now also been published in German – and if you leaf through it, you will actually find little that even fans have not known for a long time. There is talk of “defending in triangles”, “pressing dynamics” and “neuro-scientific training methods”. Commercially available tactical talk that reveals nothing that simple video analysis cannot reveal. It probably didn’t take this book to disenchant Liverpool FC.
The atmosphere on Anfield Road was very different at the time that Pep Lijnders describes. Liverpool won the FA Cup, beat Manchester City (with the other Pep) twice and made it to the Champions League final (0-1 vs Real Madrid). All of that feels like a long time ago, in the fast-moving football business hardly anyone is interested in the topics from back then – and so it’s a shame that the book is only now being published in German. At one point, the rumors about a move from Sadio Mané to FC Bayern are mentioned. In the meantime, Mané is already on the move again with the Munich team.
It gets interesting, however, when Lijnders allows an insight into the everyday life of one of the largest football clubs in the world. The little jokes in the dressing room, the constant pressure to succeed, the cooperation in the coaching team. You learn, for example, that Jürgen Klopp had 20 trees planted in a nature reserve as a Christmas present for every employee. And how much mutual respect there is between Klopp and Lijnders.
The 40-year-old Dutchman writes about Klopp, among other things: “You have to be very strong in football to be able to withstand everything that comes at you from the outside. And nobody can do that better than Jürgen.” And the boss in the foreword about his assistant: “Pep is unique. I’ve never met anyone like him. He’s a workaholic and obsessed with football training.” With a letter of recommendation like that, it’s really only a matter of time before you see Pep Lijnders in the foreground on the big football stage.
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