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Since crossing the gates of Liverpool, Jurgen Klopp has made no secret of his approach.
“If you look at the fair play tables in Germany when I was a coach there, my team was always in the top three,” he said shortly after his appointment in October 2015.
“I don’t want to have fouls, especially silly fouls in the wrong areas. You should always try to keep the ball, that’s what I want.”
Fast forward more than four years and Klopp has kept his word, and not just in bringing the silverware to the club and returning it to its privileged position.
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In each of his three full seasons in charge, Liverpool have finished the season’s top at the Premier League fair play table with the fewest disciplinary points collected through reserves and red cards.
The Reds again led the way before the coronavirus outbreak halted the first flight on March 13, their record of 26 reserves and only one red card in 29 Premier League games puts them ahead of second place in Leicester City.
That is no accident.
Research conducted earlier this year revealed that Liverpool had committed fewer fouls per game than any other team in Europe’s major leagues.
And his layoff history under Klopp sits favorably alongside those of his predecessors over the past 30 years, when card rules were tightened and players had to account for actions as broad as taking their shirts off when celebrating the most brief retreat towards officials
In 256 games under Klopp in all competitions, only seven red cards have been awarded to Liverpool players, an average of one every 37 games.
The culprits have been James Milner twice (both against Crystal Palace), Brad Smith, Sadio Mane, Joe Gomez, Jordan Henderson and most recently Alisson Becker at Brighton and Hove Albion’s home in November.
The only Liverpool coach who can boast of a better average in the past three decades is Roy Evans, who has only seen six reds in 226 games, some arguing evidence of the lack of courage that sometimes afflicted his teams.
Statistically speaking, the brief reign of Evans and Gerard Houllier was the most likely to see an expulsion, with three in 18 games, although two of them came in the UEFA Cup clash in Valencia.
Most managers move around a similar brand, Liverpool has a red card on average once every 16 games with Roy Hodgson, 17 with Graeme Souness, 19 with Rafael Benítez and 21 with Brendan Rodgers in charge.
And perhaps it is surprising to discover that Kenny Dalglish has just overcome Houlier’s only tenure in which red cards were most frequent, the Anfield legend saw six of 74 games during his second spell on the bench, an average of one in 12, while Houllier was 23 in 307 games averaging one in 13 games.
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