High pressing questions: How will Julian Nagelsmann look to exploit Liverpool?

The UEFA Champions League gets back underway this week, with the first tie seeing RB Leipzig take on Liverpool, with the game acting as RB Leipzig’s home game despite being played in Budapest. The two sides are on opposite trajectories at the moment, with RB Leipzig the only consistent contender to Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga this season, while Liverpool are coming off the back of three consecutive defeats in the Premier League.

Nagelsmann’s Leipzig clearly pose a big threat to Liverpool’s hopes of having a run in the competition, and Nagelsmann has a track record of devising excellent game plans that can secure results, and so this only adds further to their threat in cup competitions. Thankfully, the two teams I have watched the most of this season are probably RB Leipzig and Liverpool, and so in this tactical analysis, I will preview the tactics of both teams, assessing how Nagelsmann may set up in and out of possession to exploit Liverpool, and also show how Liverpool can exploit Leipzig.

Breaking the Liverpool press

Part of the tactical conundrum RB Leipzig pose is their excellent flexibility and fluidity between shapes, and so when analysing them before a game it can be difficult to nail down an exact shape they are likely to play against you. When Leipzig are in possession then, you certainly rely on nailing down their general principles and structuring your press so that it can deal with adaptations that are thrown at it- which thankfully Liverpool’s press is pretty good at.

Leipzig manager Julian Nagelsmann has come up against Liverpool before during his Hoffenheim days, where both games were tight in terms of performance but Liverpool comfortably went through in the end, in part thanks to a excellent free-kick from a young English full-back called Trent Alexander Arnold. This tie though did show Nagelsmann’s ability to coach a team to play through Liverpool’s press, and we can see a few examples below of how this was achieved.

Hoffenheim used a 3-1-4-2 structure in their home leg against Liverpool and aimed to nullify Liverpool’s cutting of the passing lanes into the full-back.  We can see the general shape to the game here, with Liverpool’s pressing scheme unchanged since this game back in 2017.  Roberto Firmino’s role is made slightly more difficult against a back three in that he now has to press a centre back while keeping a pivot in his cover shadow. The inside forwards press from out to in, so the opposition are showed the inside lane, and it was this inside lane which Hoffenheim looked to use to access their wing-backs.

They achieved this by using that back three and by occupying Liverpool’s central midfielders, as we can see below. The back three allowed for quicker circulation of the ball from side to side, and also reduced Liverpool’s general intensity towards the ball, and this meant with quick circulation that the single pivot (Kerem Demirbay) could be accessed away from Firmino’s cover shadow. Here he takes up a slightly wider position deliberately in order to occupy the Liverpool right central midfielder (Emre Can). With Salah oriented towards pressing the widest centre back, he stays higher to give himself a good starting position and angle to press from, and so the lane between these two players is open. Full-back Alexander-Arnold is pinned in place by a striker, and so he cannot move, and Hoffenheim create a free player.