After years as Klopp's assistant, Lijnders is ready to lead at Salzburg

The walls of Pep Lijnders’ garage in his new Salzburg home are still bare.

The unpacked boxes on the floor contain memories of his journey from coaching apprentice at PSV to becoming Jürgen Klopp’s “equal partner” at Liverpool, as Klopp calls it. There are framed photos, shirts and match balls from the several finals he helped the team reach.

But there is one other keepsake he cherishes above all as it sums up what he’s passionate about; developing youth, and seeing them flourish on football’s biggest stage. Next to one of the match balls from the 2019 Champions League final is a photo from the celebrations after Liverpool’s triumph. It is a photo of Lijnders with Trent Alexander-Arnold on his back. Alexander-Arnold framed it and gave it to him when Lijnders left Liverpool along with Klopp in May. The caption reads: “This is my favourite photo of us, too. Thank you for absolutely EVERYTHING. Without you, none of it was possible. Trent.”

Lijnders has got pages and pages of training sessions dating back 20 years. His journey began in 2002 as youth coach at PSV, in 2006 he moved to FC Porto, then in 2014 he worked through the Liverpool ranks to become a coach under Brendan Rodgers and Klopp, before he decided to try on his own during a chastening spell as NEC Nijmegen manager in 2018. He returned to Liverpool six months later with great success and, as Klopp told ESPN NL in August, Lijnders was the German’s footballing “inspiration for the last nine years.”

Lijnders is now embarking on another journey at FC Salzburg, hoping to channel influences like Johan Cruyff, the father of Dutch “Total Football,” Italian visionary and AC Milan legend Arrigo Sacchi, and ex-Feyenoord manager Wiel Coerver while instilling his own philosophy as a “counter-pressing monster,” as Klopp puts it. But this isn’t Liverpool 2.0, and he’s not living under Klopp’s wing.

The path from assistant under a well-known boss to manager in your own right is a well-trodden one. There are success stories: Mikel Arteta left Pep Guardiola’s stewardship in 2019 for the Arsenal job and has done incredibly well in a short space of time; José Mourinho was assistant to Bobby Robson at Barcelona before breaking out on his own to become one of the most successful managers of all time; new Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca worked under Guardiola; while the great Joe Fagan took what he learned from legendary duo Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley to steer Liverpool to silverware in the 1980s.

But then there are the cautionary tales too: In 1998, Brian Kidd’s tenure at Blackburn lasted 11 months after seven trophy-laden years at Manchester United with Sir Alex Ferguson; John Carver prospered under Robson and Alan Pardew at Newcastle but flopped when he took charge as caretaker in 2015.

So, it’s with that history of unpredictability that Lijnders is going it alone at Salzburg. He wants his team to be known for his blueprint of footballing “intensity.” But he won’t be given too long a grace period. His team have made a measured start — winning eight from 14 games, but losing 4-0 to Brest in the Champions League on Tuesday — and while it’s a group renowned for youth development, the fans expect success given last season was their first without silverware for a decade.

“We’re trying to create a team that can beat anybody in world football,” Lijnders told ESPN NL in August. “Are we there yet? No, absolutely not. But we’re on course.”

From Cruyff to Klopp

Lijnders’ playing career as a combative midfielder for local amateur club SVEB on the Dutch-German border was cut short at 17 years old due to an ACL injury. He went to the Central Institute for Sports Leader Training (CIOS) to study and began working at PSV Eindhoven, getting the only coaching apprenticeship on offer to students on the course. As he juggled his studies and his job at PSV, he also took charge of SVEB’s reserves, where he first tried to implement his philosophy: a mix of “Total Football” (a fluid football system encouraging positional interchangeability championed by Cruyff) and relentless counter-pressing.

“I had the feeling players came to life when I coached, which gives you confidence,” he says.

The apprenticeship with PSV was meant to be a five-year project, but he was awarded a full-time contract after three years, and spent the next two years flitting between the United States and the Netherlands with fellow coach Frans Hoek while developing talents like Cody Gakpo and Jordan Teze. He learnt from the legendary Guus Hiddink when he was PSV coach from 2002 to 2006 and tells ESPN: “Guus gave colour to Dutch football in the way Jürgen gave colour to German football.”

In 2007, aged 24, Lijnders had interest from MTK Budapest, but took up a contract at FC Porto where he hung on Vitor Frade’s every word. Frade — admired by Mourinho, André Villas-Boas, Robson and countless others — was a university professor who was also assistant manager at Porto and the father of tactical periodisation (essentially using training as a mirror for match intensity and rhythm, rather than an isolated exercise). Lijnders remembers their tactical innovations at the time and breaks into a wide smile, referencing an aerial photograph he has of one Co Adriaanse’s setup where he deployed solely wingers on the flanks and no full-backs. At the time it blew his mind.

In Portugal, Lijnders worked to spearhead Porto’s “Project 611,” an umbrella term for the club’s plan to re-think the academy’s relationship with the first team. “I trained all the teams — U19 in the morning, U15 in the afternoon, and U12 and U11 in the evening,” he says. “Sometimes I’d have 40 players, but I didn’t speak a word of Portuguese.”

Despite that barrier, Porto flourished. The club brought through talents like João Félix, André Gomes, André Silva, Fabio Vieira and Diogo Dalot. There was also midfielder Rúben Neves, a player who captained Lijnders’ youth teams at Porto, acted as translator, and someone who Lijnders wrote that he “loves to bits” in his 2022 book “Intensity.”

“That’s why I love football so much,” Lijnders says. “The relationship you forge with the players. If that bond isn’t there, there’s no way to success.”

He was sounded out by Rene Meulensteen in early 2013 as a possible addition to Ferguson’s backroom staff at Man United, but that collapsed when Ferguson retired at the end of that season. And by mid-2014, Lijnders was ready for a new challenge. While studying for his UEFA coaching badges under the guidance of the Welsh FA, Lijnders had applied for a youth coach vacancy at Liverpool job, so the club sent U23 manager Michael Beale and academy director Alex Inglethorpe to listen to one of his presentations. It did the job: “Michael said to me, ‘Pepijn, you’re not flying back to Porto, you’re coming with me to Liverpool.'”

Lijnders flew to Liverpool that evening, was put up in a hotel, and for three days they talked. It ended up with Liverpool offering Lijnders a contract to take charge of the U16 and U15s: a group that included Rhian Brewster, Ben Woodburn, Caoimhín Kelleher, Curtis Jones, and, notably, captain Alexander-Arnold.

That summer Lijnders was promoted to a job with the first team under Rodgers, but when the Northern Irishman was sacked on Oct. 4, 2005, Mike Gordon (president of the club’s owners Fenway Sports Group) asked Lijnders to keep Liverpool’s training ground Melwood ticking over while they pursued Klopp. Of course, when the German took over there were no guarantees he was going to keep Lijnders. Several of Rodgers’ staff had left already, but Gordon asked the new manager to keep on a couple of coaches from the previous regime. Klopp still had veto power, but was open to the idea.

The first was John Achtenberg. “Good, because I didn’t have a goalkeeping coach,” Klopp remembers telling Gordon. He asked his new boss: “What does the other guy do?” Gordon said Lijnders was a “technical coach;” an expert in bridging the gap between youth and first team.

“In Germany, nobody pays for a coach like that,” Klopp tells ESPN. “They’d say, ‘You want a second assistant for what? What are you doing?’ So, I liked the idea a lot.”

It was a luxury to Klopp, but he still didn’t know much about this young Dutch coach. So on his first night at the club, the new-look Liverpool management met for dinner in the Hope Street Hotel. Klopp had his trusted staff Zeljko Buvac and Peter Krawietz there with him, but he wanted to get to know the new faces. Achtenberg sat to one side of him; Lijnders to the other. “It was more or less love at first sight,” Klopp says of Lijnders. “I saw his passion for everything.”

Klopp also saw how much Lijnders respected him. “I don’t see myself as an exceptional coach,” he says. “I know some people for some reason think that, and you could see it in Pep’s eyes. You could see him think, ‘I better listen.’ That’s how it started. By the end, we were equal partners.”

Blossoming at Anfield

Lijnders’ first role under Klopp was as elite development coach. He loves flipcharts and each aspect of his tactical vision was written down on these vast pieces of paper. Klopp remembers those early meetings, and how whenever he’d talk, he’d hear Lijnders’ pen scribbling away, noting down everything he said.

At this stage, Klopp called Buvac the “brain” and Krawietz the “eye.” Talking in 2017 to LFC TV, Klopp said: “Pep has become unbelievably important in a short time because he writes everything down. He is also part of ‘the brain’ because he is our mind to remember the things what we did in previous sessions … I got the Dutch coach who was opposed to possession! Dutch football is possession-based: it’s Total Football, Cruyff. But he was a counter-pressing monster. I loved his excitement and the way he gets out of the saddle when he talks about football.”

One of his greatest contributions in that first period at Liverpool came in nudging Klopp to give some of the academy players a chance in the first team, with Alexander-Arnold one of the first promoted in 2016 at the age of 18.

“I could write a book about the moment he first told me about Trent Alexander-Arnold,” Klopp tells ESPN. “We opened the door; Trent ran right through it. His right foot is ridiculous. The Trent highlights video is ridiculous. You don’t need the goals, it’s the passes, you watch the passes and think ‘How is that possible?’ It’s a completely different sport.”

Lijnders also had a big impact in bridging the gap between first team and academy. “I learnt from him,” Klopp adds. “He opened my mind for different things in football. As we all get older, the distance between you and the age of the player group gets bigger. My two sons kept me in touch with that generation, but of course, the next generation of world-class coaches are already out there. There’s always change, development and improvement. Pep opened my eyes for those kinds of things.

Under Klopp, Lijnders assumed more responsibility: planning training and the schedule around matches. Off the pitch, the two regularly played padel and became incredibly close friends.

Liverpool finished fourth in 2016-17 but, midway through the following campaign, Lijnders was being sounded out about a head-coach position of his own back in the Netherlands. Keen to return to his homeland to be with his father as he battled cancer, the 34-year-old decided to take the top job at then-second division side NEC Nijmegen on Jan. 2, 2018. His goal was to secure promotion back to the Eredivisie, but it proved to be an ill-fated spell and they lost in the playoffs to FC Emmen. After over five months in the role, he left by mutual agreement on May 17.

“I have always taken full responsibility and never said a bad word about NEC,” Lijnders says. “It’s a beautiful club, but sometimes the timing is not right. Sometimes there is no click, or sometimes you join a club where you need patience. But I take responsibility. I don’t want to say too much about it, because everything I say could come across wrong. I learnt a lot to take into my next job.”

Back at Anfield, Buvac had moved on in April and Klopp was looking for a new assistant. Of course, he wanted Lijnders back.

One day, Lijnders was in the garden with his wife Danielle and mother when his phone rang. It was Klopp, and Danielle asked what the call was about. “He told me we’re going to conquer the world,” Lijnders told her.

Just 19 days after he left NEC, Lijnders’ appointment as Klopp’s assistant manager was announced on June 5.

“We all know there’s a famous saying: ‘You can learn more from defeats than from constant victory,'” Klopp says. “I’m not sure it [Lijnders’ time at NEC] was a real defeat, but it wasn’t well prepared, I think we can say that. We didn’t speak a lot about it, it was not necessary. I was just glad he came back.”

A golden return

Over the next few years, Klopp and Lijnders would achieve remarkable success together at Liverpool. The crowning moment was the 2019 Champions League final win over Tottenham Hotspur, but that was just one of a number of trophies including the 2019-20 Premier League title, 2022 FA Cup, 2019 Club World Cup, and 2022 and 2024 League Cups.

Lijnders was there for all the key moments, both in the public eye and in the shadows as they plotted their success. He was translator on the call when Klopp was trying to persuade Porto winger Luis Díaz to join the club in January 2022, and remembers sitting in Klopp’s kitchen trying to work out how to persuade centre-back Virgil van Dijk to sign from Southampton in January 2018.

But through all the joy and setbacks, the job took its toll. And before the 2023-24 season began, Klopp and Lijnders started to plan for the finishing point.

“It was happening in the [2023] summer, [with] a very difficult year behind us,” Lijnders says of a campaign where the club finished fifth and were knocked out of the Champions League in the round of 16. “We were happy we won the last eight, nine games of the season, we still went to Europe. We changed the system; Trent went more inside [to play as a midfielder].

“In the summer we already discussed if it was the right time to go, or if it was the right time to continue. We said ‘yes, we’ll do one more year and we’ll see in January.’ But by November-time, Jürgen said: ‘I’m done.’ And I said, ‘Yes if that’s the case, it’s time for me to go too.’ I’ve had several, nice offers in recent years, but I wanted to finish the project with him. My connection is very strong with him: he’s a brother, a father, a mentor. Outside of my family and closest friends, he knows me better than anyone.”

On May 19, 2024, Klopp took charge of Liverpool for the final time as they beat Wolves 2-0. After being out on the pitch, soaking in the unfiltered adulation, posing for countless photographs, he found himself back in the bowels of Anfield and there was a rare moment of quiet.

“We’d had Louise Dobson, the team manager, telling us where to go and when, and we were so touched [by the celebrations],” he says. “In the end, it was only Pep and me. We had tears in our eyes. We knew we were blessed as well because in our business, you come in through the front door and they push you out the back door. We were blessed and we could go out through the front door. We wrote a book together and that was the last chapter. And we enjoyed that as much [as we could] because you know it’s not forever. That’s life.”

After a night partying, and, according to Klopp, the Lijnders family dominating the dance floor, attention turned to the future. Lijnders had already been fielding interest from clubs keen to talk to him about forthcoming vacancies, and he knew it was time for his family to experience something new.

“You have 10 years in Liverpool, in Formby, a small village, you have everything there, right?” he says. “So my boys know nothing other than England, Liverpool and the club. They think every stadium is like Anfield.”

Lijnders only spoke to clubs who would visit him in person in Formby, and each time he’d look for certain guarantees. But it was Austrian Bundesliga side FC Salzburg that seduced him. The team had endured a tough 2023-24 campaign, which saw then-manager Gerhard Struber sacked in April, and won the regular season but finished second in the Championship Round to Sturm Graz to end their first trophyless season in a decade.

After a visit to Salzburg to visit the club in person, Lijnders’ wife Danielle turned to their youngest son, Romijn, and asked: “What do you think of Salzburg?” Romijn answered: “I miss it already.”

New beginnings

On Aug. 13, 2024, Salzburg beat FC Twente 5-4 on aggregate to qualify for the Champions League group stage. “We want to be the team that can beat anybody in the world,” Lijnders says. “Are we there yet? No, of course not … we’ve only started. But I want the fans to think, “okay, this is the new Salzburg.””

With his counter-pressing philosophy deeply ingrained, Lijnders also wants his Salzburg to suffocate the opposition. “You can play a dominant style of football, where you can have the ball in the opponent’s half a lot,” he adds. “We are young, we are talented, we are full of bravado. We don’t want the opponent to have any time. There is so much talent here, so much energy, so much youth. “We have a smaller squad, 16 or 17 players, and that gives us space for the academy.”

With a slogan of “Fußball von morgen” [Football from tomorrow] and a history of world-class players like Erling Haaland, Sadio Mané, Dominik Szoboszlai, Benjamin Sesko and Dayot Upamecano having come through the ranks, the club’s focus is very much on youth; the oldest players in the squad are goalkeepers Janis Blaswich (33) and Alexander Schlager (28), while the oldest outfield players are 25.

Since Lijnders joined, Salzburg have already raided his old club to sign midfielders Stefan Bajcetic and Bobby Clark on loan, while the new manager also brought coaches Vitor Matos and Andreas Kornmayer with him.

The crazy guys from Salzburg ❤️ pic.twitter.com/DrsXmSKwJ8

— FC Red Bull Salzburg (@RedBullSalzburg) August 27, 2024

The old Liverpool coaches still have their WhatsApp group open; it’s called the “Diamond Dogs,” inspired by Apple TV show Ted Lasso. When Salzburg play, the chat is as active as ever, with Klopp keeping a close eye on how Lijnders is faring.

“Everybody with a bit of a football eye can see his impact,” Klopp says. “I love this nice mix of real intensity, a clear idea and possession. I told him after a game recently, you can see this team has a good coach. That’s how I judge coaches my whole life — you watch the games, and then you wonder who coaches them. They play well. I think it’s a win-win situation for him at Salzburg. It’s so smart from him, and it’s so smart from Salzburg.”

Salzburg’s league season started with four wins, a draw and a defeat, but it has also seen damaging losses to Sparta Prague (3-0) and Brest (4-0) in the Champions League. He received some criticism for fielding teams against Sparta and Austria Wien without any Austrian players in the lineup, but Lijnders knows there will be times when form slumps and pressure increases. He will stick to his principles which have served him well so far.

“It’s dark and lonely when you don’t win, and when you get into such a period, it can be dark, lonely and uncomfortable,” he says. “But when you’re training on the field, helping players improve, I will never get tired of that. In those moments you have to hold on to what makes you, as a player, and a coach.

“Every coach will go through tough periods, but there’s nothing wrong with that. I know I play with high risk, but also high reward. That’s who I am. There are two matches in football. There’s the match on the scoreboard, and the second match is your identity. You can lose one, but you’ll never lose the second match.

“I hope you’ll see Salzburg pressing and chasing the opponent across the entire pitch, and from all directions. But above all, they’re doing it together, forever.”

Additional reporting: Sanne van Dongen and Milan van Dongen