Liverpool v City is no longer the Premier League’s big show: how have the mighty fallen? | Jonathan Wilson

Great rivalries are always more about feel than about numbers. There have been only four Premier League seasons in which Manchester City and Liverpool have finished in the top two positions in the table (and one of those occasions was 2013-14 when the managers were Manuel Pellegrini and Brendan Rodgers, which is not a duel anybody is writing books or making documentaries about).

Yet for most of the decade that Pep Guardiola has been at City, it has felt that English football was defined by his struggle with Jürgen Klopp and Liverpool, and by a form of the game that developed as each learned from the other.

Klopp has gone now and nobody would be surprised were Guardiola (and/or Arne Slot) to follow in the summer. The seasons when both clubs would soar past 90 points are past. They are in transition, recrafting their squads for a new age that is yet fully to take shape, and the rivalry is diminished as a result. Liverpool are out of the title race, and defeat at Anfield could in effect take out City as well.

The issue with the Guardiola/Klopp revolution was perhaps that it was too successful. Once everybody accepted its principles, and holding them, almost no matter how efficiently you could execute them, was no longer enough. There isn’t a team in the Premier League now that isn’t at least relatively adept at pressing, often not in the remorseless fashion that became familiar in the days of peak Klopp but in short bursts in specific situations.

The idea of using possession to create overloads is broadly accepted by everybody. Once a revolution has become the status quo, though, it is no longer a revolution. What comes next is the question nobody yet seems able to answer. And what’s striking is that, while many Premier League clubs have followed the example of Mikel Arteta, looking to control and set pieces, neither City nor Liverpool have.

It’s just over a year since Guardiola gave the interview to TNT in which he said modern football was being played by Bournemouth, Brighton and Newcastle. That understandably drew the headlines, given it seemed in isolation to suggest that Guardiola was saying the game had become increasingly about ball-carrying rather than passing. Perhaps more telling, though, was what he said next.

“Today,” he went on, “modern football is not positional, you have to ride the rhythm, it is unbelievable, and we could not, simply we could not because we did not have the players … The teams that are playing once a week, it is another story and that doesn’t count, it counts when you are playing every three or four days.” (The pre-emptive drive-by on this season’s Manchester United was presumably accidental).

This was not, in other words, some sort of recantation of faith by Guardiola, nor some sort of admission that his way of doing things was outmoded. Rather it was a practical point, a recognition that the modern calendar is too crowded to play the way he used to, the way he wants to. Guardiola has always existed in a state of perpetual evolution; his greatest strength has been his capacity to tweak, develop and hone his style of play – but his most recent adaptations have been forced on him.

There is perhaps no greater example of that than the signing of Erling Haaland, the most traditional of No 9s, whose reluctance to engage with midfield possession felt like a deliberate attempt by Guardiola to introduce a creative friction, to break up the occasionally predictable patterns his football can create. Given that it brought the treble, it can be said to have worked, but the trend of buying against type has continued, although it’s unclear whether that is the work of Guardiola or Hugo Viana, who replaced Txiki Begiristain as sporting director last summer.

Gianluigi Donnarumma is a commanding presence and an extremely good shot-stopper, but his relative lack of ability with his feet makes him an uncharacteristic Guardiola keeper. Rayan Cherki is technically gifted but he plays with a freedom that is antithetical to the Guardiola desire for control. Rayan Aït-Nouri’s forward surges may be exciting but it’s hard to imagine a less typical Guardiola full-back.

The makeup of the squad implied a move to playing a more traditional style, and that has materialised to an extent. City have, unusually, won four games this season with less than 50% possession; in the draw at Arsenal they had just 33% of the ball. More recently, though, Guardiola’s side have returned to something more familiar: since the chaotic 5-4 win over Fulham in early December, City haven’t had less than 58% of the ball in any league game.

If that was intended to bring control, though, it has failed. City’s attempts to employ an offside trap, redoubled since the arrival of Pep Lijnders as assistant last summer, have amplified the susceptibility to balls played in behind the defensive line. It’s not just high risk, it’s also a style that demands additional physical effort, an issue that seems contrary to Guardiola’s protests about fatigue and perhaps explains why this City team so often fade in the second half of games.

The overall impression is of confusion, but Liverpool’s attempts to rejig their style have been just as muddled. It’s still not clear what vision underlay last summer’s spree. There seems to have been a general sense that it was better to focus on more technical players – and it probably is easier to bulk them up than to develop fast feet in physical monsters. But, unless Liverpool are set on following Leeds and Nigeria by operating regularly with a front pairing, it remains difficult to understand the logic behind signing two centre-forwards when there were such obvious deficiencies in midfield and at the back.

And so what was recently the showpiece game of English football – think, perhaps especially, of their four meetings in 2017-18: a 5-0 win for City and a 4-3 win for Liverpool, followed by Liverpool’s 3-0 and 2-1 wins in the Champions League – has taken on a different cast.

Two clubs who led the world, not only in terms of results but in how they played, now scratch around in the post-consensus gloom, wondering what the future may be and how they might lead it.