Liverpool face Manchester United on Sunday in what will be a clash of two managers who started out with similar philosophies but are now very different

Jürgen Klopp had warned us what we should expect. As he charged down the touchline on Wednesday evening punching the air and shouting amid the snowflakes after Joe Allen’s late equaliser against Arsenal, he was perhaps not merely saluting a hard-earned point but relishing a game that fulfilled his ideal of what football – and specifically English football – should be.

“I don’t like winning with 80% [possession],” he said in 2013. “Sorry, that is not enough for me. That’s not my sport. Fighting football, not serenity football, that is what I like. What we call in German ‘English’: rainy day, heavy pitch, 5-5, everybody is dirty in the face.” OK, it was 3-3 and not 5-5 but everything else in Wednesday’s game against Arsenal fitted: the drama, the energy, the sense of chaos that could be, if not shaped, then at least harnessed by those of sufficient will.

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To Louis van Gaal, whose Manchester United go to Anfield on Sunday after a 3-3 draw of their own, away to Newcastle, such a game is anathema. His football is all about control, something symbolised by his touchline demeanour. Where Klopp jumps, shouts and swears, Van Gaal tends to sit stonily, only the occasional twitch of the mouth hinting at his emotion. In that regard, it’s significant that on Tuesday there were at least two occasions when his composure deserted him and he banged himself hard against his chair in frustration.

The sense of Klopp and Van Gaal as opposites is about more than their personality types, however. It is a question of philosophy and the dialectic that is shaping modern football. Van Gaal’s upbringing was classically Dutch but he was egocentric enough not to buy wholesale into the legends of Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff. Although his thinking has its origins in Total Football, his is a more pragmatic interpretation of it. Van Gaal wants to minimise risk by holding the ball and abhors the needless loss of possession.

It is that caution, the lack of spontaneity, that led to Cruyff’s condemnation of Van Gaal, to the former Ajax winger Sjaak Swart’s dismissal of his football as negative and, ultimately, to the widespread criticism of his “boring” approach this season. Yet Pep Guardiola, at least in his Barcelona days, said no coach had exerted such an influence on him as Van Gaal. His Barça, too, prioritised possession, although the pace of their flurries of passing is a world away from the mannered stodginess of United this season.

In Guardiola’s first three seasons at Barcelona that style dominated the world. Nobody played it quite like Barça but the majority of elite sides at least aspired to that sort of approach – in part because many of the coaches at the elite sides had also played at Barça in the late 90s. Football, however, is in a process of permanent evolution.

As Barcelona’s hunger began to diminish, a consensus emerged as to how to play against it: the thesis generated an antithesis – once Barça got the ball, sit deep, deny them space in the final third, make them play sideways, accept they may have 70% of the ball and then spring forward in rapid counterattacks. If they could be pressed high up the pitch before they had been given the chance to settle into their passing rhythms, so much the better.

That was how Klopp had been playing anyway, first at Mainz and then at Borussia Dortmund, taking the English-style pressing of the 60s to 80s and making it more energetic, and more sophisticated. It is the evolutionary step England should have taken but, losing confidence in its own style in the early 90s, didn’t. The pressing, looking to win the ball back high up the pitch, of course, is one element of the Barçajax style practised by Van Gaal and Guardiola (in his Barça days at least); the difference is what happens once the ball is won.

Where some had professed themselves bored by what Arsène Wenger described as the “sterile domination” of Barça, even if they admired its technical elegance, the rapid counterattacking of Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund as they ripped though Barcelona and Real Madrid in 2013 Champions League semi-finals was undeniably thrilling.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Louis van Gaal’s Manchester United team have been called boring this season. Photograph: Martin Rickett/PA

That initially left Bayern in an awkward position, having already decided to appoint Guardiola, high priest of the style demolished by their outgoing coach Jupp Heynckes. Guardiola, though, is young enough and spry enough of mind not to be dogmatic. He has adapted his style at Bayern, becoming more flexible, more varied in approach, implementing the synthesis of his Barça style and the more robust counterpressing style he found in Munich.

The foundations of the modern Bayern were laid by Van Gaal: the radical possession of Barça under Guardiola and the counterpressing of the modern German school of which Klopp has been a leader are, in a sense, both developments of the philosophy favoured by Van Gaal. The river diverged and at Guardiola’s Bayern the streams are converging once again.

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Which makes Sunday’s game at Anfield feel almost like an exercise in time travel. At AZ and with the Dutch national side, Van Gaal proved himself capable of adaptation but he seems at United to have gone back to the core principles he espoused at Barça and at Bayern; perhaps that’s simply how he feels elite sides must play, that a more counterattacking approach is merely, as the Russian theorist Lev Filatov put it in discussing the proto-catenaccio of Alexander Kuzmich’s Krylya Sovetov side in the 40s, “the right of the weak”.

It seems almost heretical to suggest that a coach as ferociously intelligent as Van Gaal can have been left behind by the game’s evolution but United’s plodding possession football does feel a little old-fashioned. It may even be that modern players – brought up in an age in which football, shaped by the celebrity culture it is now a part of, has lurched back towards individualism – cannot ever feel comfortable in the self-effacing egalitarianism of Van Gaal’s system.

Against that is Klopp, overtly youthful and practising a form of football that probably could not have existed without Van Gaal’s influence. It is not often in the Premier League era that Liverpool have been the more modern side in a meeting with United, which may be of succour to the more optimistic Liverpool fans.

For the rest of us, Sunday offers the prospect of a battle between two very different men practising very different variants of the same core philosophy.