From Café to Catapult: How Football Training Lost the Plot (or Found It)

Brian Clough took his European Cup winners for a coffee. Pep Lijnders ran triple sessions and tracked every heartbeat. Both won everything. So what changed?

Gary Mills was seventeen years old when he played in a European Cup final. He was eighteen when he played in another one. Nottingham Forest won both. And when Mills was later asked what training was like under Brian Clough, the man who made all of it happen, he laughed.

“We never spoke about the opposition or practised set pieces,” Mills told World Football Index. “We literally played eight vs eight at full match intensity. Nothing was ever complicated with Brian and Peter. For example, sometimes a training session would consist of Brian Clough taking us to a local cafe for a coffee and a chat as a group.”

Let that sit for a moment. A team that won back to back European Cups in 1979 and 1980 sometimes replaced training with a trip to the café. There weren’t the usual tactical briefings or set piece rehearsals. Clough did not analyse what the opposition were going to do. Forest played just eight against eight, at full pelt, and occasionally ending with a nice cup of tea along the River Trent.

Now open Pep Lijnders’ book, Intensity: Inside Liverpool FC, his account of Liverpool’s 2021/22 season. It was the campaign in which Klopp’s side played all 63 available games across four competitions and came within a point and a penalty shootout of an unprecedented quadruple. The world Lijnders describes could hardly be further from that Nottingham café if it tried.

Liverpool endured triple sessions during pre season in Germany, with two minute training bursts with timed rest intervals, building up to ten minute blocks at full match intensity. Klopp had access to opposition analysis for every fixture. A sign on the coaching office wall read “Our Identity Is Intensity” and on the other side, “Together Strong.” Liverpool logged every session with every heartbeat measured.

Both approaches produced European glory. Both were built on conviction. And the chasm between them tells you almost everything you need to know about how football management has evolved over the past forty years.

Nottingham Forest’s European Glory

To understand what Clough achieved, you have to understand what he was working with. Not just the players, though that’s a story in itself. Garry Birtles was a carpet fitter earning £2,000 from non league Long Eaton United before Clough and Peter Taylor turned him into the European Young Player of the Year. John Robertson, the man whose crosses and goals were decisive in both European Cup finals, had nearly left the club under Clough’s predecessor. Kenny Burns arrived as a striker with a reputation for fighting and was converted into a centre half who won the Football Writers’ Player of the Year.

But look at the backroom. Clough had Peter Taylor, his right hand man, the one who spotted the players and handled the scouting. And he had Jimmy Gordon, the club trainer, a hard boiled Scot who had first worked with Clough at Derby County. That was essentially it. Three men. A manager, an assistant, and a trainer. That was the entire coaching operation behind a side that won the First Division title, two European Cups, two League Cups, and the European Super Cup in the space of four years.

Clough’s philosophy was almost aggressively simple. “Players lose you games, not tactics,” he said. “There’s so much crap talked about tactics by people who barely know how to win at dominoes.” He wanted the ball played on the floor. He wanted discipline. He wanted players who understood what they were supposed to do and didn’t need to be told twice. He wanted strikers in the box, bot taking set pieces. As he put it with characteristic modesty: “If God had wanted us to play football in the clouds, he’d have put grass up there.”

The results were outrageous. Forest won promotion from the Second Division in 1977. They won the First Division title in 1978, conceding just 24 goals in 42 games. They won the European Cup in 1979, Trevor Francis heading the winner in Munich against Malmö in what was, remarkably, Francis’s first ever European game for the club. Forest retained the European Cup in 1980/ John Robertson scored against Hamburg at the Bernabéu. At one stage they went 42 league games unbeaten, a record that stood until Arsenal broke it in 2004.

All of this from a provincial club that, as the National Football Museum once noted, has won more European Cups than London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Rome combined.

And the man behind it all sometimes took his squad for a coffee instead of training.

The Liverpool Era under Jürgen Klopp

Now consider what Jürgen Klopp and Pep Lijnders built at Liverpool. When Klopp arrived at Anfield in October 2015, Lijnders was already there, having joined the club’s academy under Brendan Rodgers in 2014. After a brief spell managing NEC Nijmegen in the Netherlands, Lijnders returned to Liverpool in 2018 as Klopp’s number two. The relationship was so close that Klopp once described feeling they could “conquer the world together.”

That 2021/22 season, the one Lijnders documented in Intensity, remains one of the most extraordinary campaigns in English football history. Liverpool won the FA Cup and the League Cup, both on penalties against Chelsea. They lost the Premier League to Manchester City by a single point on the final day, and they lost the Champions League final to Real Madrid 1 - 0 in Paris.

Liverpool played sixty three games. Four competitions. A squad stretched to its limits and then stretched some further. Klopp’s team scored 147 goals scored across all competitions.

What made it possible, according to Lijnders, was preparation bordering on obsession. Every opponent was studied in detail. Every training session was designed with a specific tactical purpose. The coaching staff didn’t just prepare a game plan. They rehearsed it, refined it, analysed whether it was working, and adjusted in real time. Pre season in Germany meant being together twenty four hours a day for twelve days, training three times a day, building the physical and tactical foundations that would carry the squad through ten months of relentless competition.

And Lijnders wasn’t doing this alone. Klopp’s first team staff at Liverpool numbered twenty two. Twenty two. That included Lijnders as assistant manager, Peter Krawietz as the other assistant manager, Vitor Matos as elite development coach, Andreas Kornmayer as head of fitness and conditioning (recruited from Bayern Munich, where he’d worked under Pep Guardiola, Louis van Gaal, and Jupp Heynckes), two goalkeeping coaches, a head of nutrition who gave individual cooking lessons to players, live match analysts, opposition scouts who would attend future opponents’ games rather than Liverpool’s own, a throw in coach, and a full sports science department.

Brian Clough had three people. Klopp had twenty two. The game Clough would not have recognised was not the one played on the pitch. It was the one played in the offices, the data rooms, and the GPS tracking logs.

Why Information Revolutionised Football

Because that is where the real transformation has happened. Not in tactics or formations, which have always evolved. Not in fitness, which has always improved. The revolution is in information.

Every top club now equips its players with GPS tracking pods, tucked into tight fitting vests worn under the training kit. A single training session generates tens of thousands of data points per player. Total distance covered. High speed running distance. Sprint count. Peak speed. Acceleration and deceleration patterns. Player Load, a composite metric measuring total mechanical stress across all three spatial dimensions. Heart rate. Recovery time. Sleep quality.

The data from one training session at a modern Premier League club produces more measurable information than Brian Clough gathered in an entire season. Platforms like Catapult Sports and STATSports have become standard equipment. Video analysis systems like Hudl and Wyscout allow coaching staff to dissect every moment of every game. Performance analysis software like Opta and StatsBomb processes thousands of events per match: passes completed, pressing triggers, expected goals, progressive carries, defensive actions in the final third.

At Forest in the late 1970s, players were trained exclusively on the football field, on alternate days, without a specific physical objective. Tactics were prepared through playing. Physical conditioning was a byproduct of the football itself. The idea that you would monitor a player’s sleep patterns, customise their nutritional programme, or track the force their joints were absorbing during a sprint would have seemed like science fiction.

Clough’s response to all of this is not hard to imagine. The man who said “Come and see my coaching certificates. They’re called the European Cup and league championships” would probably not have been queuing up for a Catapult Sports demo.

There is a story about Clough giving a team talk to the Forest players before playing his former club and arch rivals, Derby County. Clough put the ball down on a towel in the changing room and told his players to keep the ball for 90 minutes. Forest won 2-0.

But here is the thing. The instinct to dismiss the modern approach as over complicated misses something important. The game has changed because the stakes have changed. Liverpool played 63 games in 2021/22. Forest played roughly 55 across all competitions during their 1978/79 European Cup winning season, and they were competing across fewer fronts.

The physical demands on players are vastly greater now. Pitches are faster. Players are bigger, quicker, more powerful. The margin between winning and losing at the highest level has narrowed to the point where the difference between a Premier League title and finishing second can be a single goal scored in stoppage time on the last day.

In that context, leaving preparation to instinct is not bold. It is reckless. When the difference between a title and a trophyless season is measured in hundredths of a second and fractions of an expected goal, clubs that don’t invest in data, analysis, and sports science are bringing a knife to a gunfight.

And yet. Clough won two European Cups with a carpet fitter up front and a training regime that sometimes involved sitting in a café. He did it with three coaching staff, no opposition analysis, and a philosophy that could be summarised in a sentence: get the ball, give it to someone in a red shirt, and don’t lose it.

So maybe the question isn’t whether the modern way is better. Maybe the question is whether football has replaced one kind of genius with another. Clough’s genius was emotional. He understood people, knew how to motivate them, knew when to push and when to leave them alone. He built trust so deep that his players would run through walls without needing to be told why.

Lijnders’ genius, and by extension Klopp’s, was systematic. They built an environment where nothing was left to chance, where every session served a purpose, where intensity wasn’t a mood but a measurable standard.

Both worked. Both produced extraordinary football. And both, in their own way, were obsessive. Clough just hid his obsession behind a cup of coffee and a one liner.

Final Word in Added Time

There is a lovely coda to the Lijnders story. After leaving Liverpool with Klopp at the end of the 2023/24 season, Lijnders took his first solo managerial job at Red Bull Salzburg. He lasted 29 games before being sacked in December 2024. The intensity, it turned out, was harder to sustain without Klopp beside him. By June 2025 he was back in the dugout, but not as a number one. He joined Manchester City as Pep Guardiola’s assistant, the architect of Liverpool’s intensity now helping to rebuild the empire of positional play at the Etihad.

The coaching carousel keeps turning. The data keeps accumulating. The GPS vests keep tracking. Somewhere in whatever afterlife accommodates men of supreme self confidence, Brian Clough is watching all of it, shaking his head, and ordering another coffee.

Because the one thing no algorithm has ever measured is whether a squad needs a triple session in the Black Forest or an instant coffee and a chat.