Watching football lately, you can’t shake the feeling that plenty of managers are brilliant at building an identity, but oddly reluctant to change it when the situation demands. The plan stays the plan. The shape stays the shape. And everyone just waits for it to come good.

That’s not aimed at one club, either. You look around the league and beyond and you see coaches sticking to their ideas as if flexibility is a weakness. The names change, the principles don’t: the system is the system, even when it’s not producing the outcome they need.

Identity is great until it becomes a cage

To be fair, having a clear way of playing matters. It gives players certainty, it makes recruitment easier, and it stops you lurching from one short-term fix to the next. But football isn’t a lab. It’s a moving target.

The best sides have always had an identity and an escape route. That’s what people loved about Jürgen Klopp at his best: there was a clear base, but also an understanding of how to hurt the opponent in front of you. Same with Marcelo Bielsa in his own way, and the Atalanta coach when his team were at their most aggressive: not just ‘our football’, but ‘how do we get at them today?’

Sometimes it’s as basic as recognising where the space is and who can attack it. Sometimes it’s admitting the press isn’t landing and dropping five yards. Sometimes it’s swallowing your pride and changing the match-up out wide. None of that is selling out. It’s just coaching.

So where does the stubbornness come from?

Part of it feels like modern coaching is judged on process almost as much as results. If you can explain the model well, and the team looks ‘coached’, you buy time. There’s also the reality that changing too much can look like panic, and panic gets you sacked quicker than a bad run you can dress up as “variance”.

And then there’s ego. Not in the cartoon sense, but in the human one. If you’ve built your career on a set of principles, it’s hard to accept that, on a given afternoon, those principles are making you worse.

And what about the people upstairs?

The same frustration applies to sporting directors and the wider decision-makers. Football clubs aren’t normal companies, but they still need honest internal challenge. The healthiest set-ups are the ones where disagreement isn’t treated like disloyalty.

In an ideal world, the post-match isn’t just a debrief, it’s a proper stress test: line-up choices, in-game tweaks, set-piece work, the lot. One voice in the room should almost be paid to point out what went wrong, without it turning into a blame session. That isn’t negativity. It’s common sense.

If Liverpool, and everyone else, want to stay ahead, the lesson is simple: keep the identity, but don’t worship it. The game always changes. The smart ones change with it.

Written by Red-JC: 22 January 2026

Tags: efl transfers tactics