Gegenpressing: the press Klopp wanted more of on his Germany debut

Jürgen Klopp came away from his first game in charge of Germany missing precisely the gegenpressing. "I have seen it, but I would like to see a lot more of it", he said, according to the analysis ARD's Sportschau published on 25 September 2026, in a piece that notes the term entered the English language thanks to him. That is the cue to take the high press apart with numbers and sources: what gegenpressing is, where it came from, how it is measured and what publicly available data say about whether it works. I will give away the conclusion, because it is uncomfortable. The definition is solid. The high-press metric described by Wyscout and Stats Perform has a blind spot that Stats Perform itself has admitted in writing. And proof that pressing more means winning more did not turn up in any of the sources this analysis was able to open.

Gegenpressing: what it is and what separates it from the high press

The starting definition comes from Coaches' Voice. In a piece dated 1 March 2022, journalist Ali Tweedale describes counter-pressing as a way of unsettling the opponent the moment possession is lost, at the point of defensive transition: several players go aggressively after the ball and the nearby opponents, aiming to regain it as fast as possible, before the other side can settle. The German tactics site Spielverlagerung says the same with an engineer's precision: gegenpressing is pressing immediately after losing the ball, with one's own defence normally already organised because players positioned themselves in anticipation while in possession. In my reading, that last clause is the most important one, and the one that vanishes first when the subject turns into terrace talk: the press after losing the ball does not start at the moment of loss, it starts earlier, in how the team positions itself while it has the ball.

Gegenpressing, then, is not a synonym for the high press. Coaches' Voice treats pressing, the act of applying pressure to the ball, as one of the five defensive principles of play, present since football was invented; gegenpressing is the particular case defined by timing, right after the ball is lost. The high press, in the data, is measured by location. Wyscout presents PPDA, short for passes per defensive action, as a metric of high-press intensity, and the calculation divides the opponent's passes in the 60% of the pitch closest to their own goal by the defensive actions of the pressing team in that zone. In my reading, the two ideas overlap when the ball is lost near the opponent's goal and part ways far from it: in 2022, Coaches' Voice described Marcelo Bielsa asking for aggressive counter-pressing all over the pitch, which includes zones PPDA does not even look at.

Who created gegenpressing: an idea with many fathers

The word is German, and the idea has many fathers. Coaches' Voice records that the English term counter-pressing is a translation of "gegenpress" and names German coaches who developed and used the strategy at various clubs: Wolfgang Frank, Ralf Rangnick, Jürgen Klopp, Thomas Tuchel and Julian Nagelsmann. Pressing has a lineage of its own. According to the same platform, it gained prominence from the 1960s, when Viktor Maslov, Ernst Happel, Rinus Michels, Valeriy Lobanovskyi and Arrigo Sacchi had their teams adopt an aggressive press. Klopp does not appear as its creator in any of the sources for this analysis. What Sportschau wrote is that the term entered the English language thanks to him. Popularising is not inventing, and it is only in that sense that one can speak of Klopp's gegenpressing.

Ralf Rangnick told his own version of that lineage in a first-person piece published by Coaches' Voice on 22 October 2020. On a cold February day in 1983, as player-manager of sixth-division FC Viktoria Backnang, he faced Valeriy Lobanovskyi's Dynamo Kyiv, the first opponent he had seen press the ball systematically, and he calls that moment his epiphany. In the same piece he recalls Helmut Groß, a structural engineer who had taught himself tactics and with whom he wrote coaching manuals, and the videos of Arrigo Sacchi's AC Milan that friends sent from Italy. In 1998, as coach of SSV Ulm in the German second division, he went on television to argue for a flat back four, and in the country that had given the world the sweeper, that sounded almost like heresy. Felix Magath, Rangnick recalls, used to say that "tactics is something for bad players".

What this tells us: according to the sources in the table, pressing gained prominence from the 1960s, while PPDA, a metric created to measure high-press intensity, was only introduced in 2014, according to Wyscout. One possible reading is that the press built its reputation over decades in the eyes of coaches before PPDA gave it a number.

"The best playmaker in the world": the line attributed to Klopp with no traceable origin

There is a line that football websites attribute to Klopp: gegenpressing would be "the best playmaker in the world". The problem is the origin. Spielverlagerung uses the expression in German, "besten Spielmacher der Welt", without a footnote, link or interview. VOOR Sport says in its headline that counter-pressing is Klopp's "best playmaker" and, when it actually quotes the coach, carries a different line: "losing the ball isn't the problem", completed by the idea that what matters is how quickly it is won back. That one, too, comes without a date or an original outlet. In the sources for this analysis, no original interview turned up for either. So I use the expression for what it is: a line attributed to Klopp and repeated by football websites, not a dated quote. The one that has a date, an outlet and a context is far less poetic, and it appears further down, in his first game in charge of Germany.

How the high press is measured in football: PPDA and ball recoveries

Colin Trainor introduced PPDA in 2014, according to Wyscout's glossary, and the calculation fits on a napkin: the passes the opponent starts in the 60% of the pitch on their side, divided by the sum of the defensive actions of the pressing team in the same zone, that is, fouls, interceptions, won defensive duels and sliding tackles. The lower the number, the more intense the press. Stats Perform (Opta) describes the same calculation as opponent passes allowed per defensive action in the opponent's defensive 3/5 of the pitch. For scale, Wyscout reports that the average PPDA per season across Europe's top five leagues in 2018/19 was 11.01; Eibar had the lowest, 6.72, and Nürnberg the highest, 18.21, that is, the least intense press in the sample. The tables below show the calculation in one match, the lowest-PPDA list for one season and other pressing metrics.

What this tells us: in the Wyscout example, Manchester United made 207 passes in the 60% of the pitch on their side and Liverpool answered with 40 defensive actions there, one for every 5.2 passes. One possible reading is that PPDA counts how often the pressing team interrupts the opponent, not whether those interruptions turned into chances or goals, which stay outside the calculation.

The Stats Perform list for the 2015/16 season shows what PPDA sees when it looks at whole leagues. Across the five big leagues and the Eredivisie, the ten teams with the lowest PPDA ranged from 7.5 to 8.82, with three from LaLiga, two from Ligue 1, two from the Bundesliga, two from Serie A and one from the Premier League; none from the Eredivisie made the cut. The Wyscout benchmark for 2018/19, cited above, belongs to another season and another provider, and the two cannot be compared number for number. Second place is the one that deserves attention, and Stats Perform itself raises the doubt about it.

What this tells us: in the Stats Perform list, Paris Saint-Germain are 2nd, with 7.55, and the company itself writes that one possible reason is territorial dominance, which moves defensive actions closer to the opponent's goal even without a pressing style. One possible reading is that a low PPDA, on its own, does not separate the team that presses from the team that simply lives in the opponent's half.

What this tells us: of the six metrics in the table, only Wyscout's counterpressing recovery carries the moment of losing the ball in its name, and it is the only one on the list without a definition checked on 26 September 2026. This suggests, without proving it, that gegenpressing is easier to see on video than to find as a public number.

Does gegenpressing work? What the evidence shows, and what it does not

Why gegenpressing should work is a question that, in the sources for this analysis, is answered with football logic, not with a spreadsheet. The Coaches' Voice definition already contains the argument: win the ball back before the opponent can settle on it. Rangnick, in his 2020 account, goes further. For him, so much happens in the 8 to 10 seconds after the ball is won or lost that "those moments decide games", and a large part of training was devoted to what he called swarming behaviour, the synchronised movement of players. The same Coaches' Voice piece by Ali Tweedale records variations: Pep Guardiola merged aggressive counter-pressing with a possession game, and Ralph Hasenhüttl's counter-pressing in midfield proved, in the journalist's assessment, a productive way of creating chances on the counter-attack. These are arguments and assessments, and none of them comes with a measurement of effect.

When you look for the number, the ground gets softer. Stats Perform writes, in the piece explaining how it measures pressure, that the high press shows one of the widest gaps in football between analysts' interest in a topic and their ability to put a number on it. Joris Bekkers starts from a similar diagnosis in a preprint, a paper released without peer review, which he submitted to arXiv on 30 December 2024 and updated on 30 June 2025: in his view, the pressing metrics available tend to fall short on precision or to leave out much of what the data offer on players' position, movement and speed. His proposal is to measure the time to intercept and turn it into a probability. It is an attempt to measure better, and the limit lies in the scope: the paper does not test whether more pressure, measured this way, produces more chances, goals or wins.

The Soccer Addicted archive did not, as of September 2026, measure pressing, counter-pressing or ball recoveries. The closest thing it held was possession data, and that speaks to another Rangnick line from his 2020 account: with too much possession, he said, your game "resembles handball" and gets nowhere. In the measurement of 25 September 2026, covering 29,821 completed matches from 17 national leagues where match statistics existed for both teams, there were 7,723 matches in which one team had 62.5% or more of the ball, and that team won 49.9% of those that had a winner. With draws left out, 50% is what a coin toss gives. In this sample, having an overwhelming share of the ball did not separate winners from losers, which, in my reading, fits Rangnick's scepticism and says nothing about pressing.

And the physical cost? The only peer-reviewed source on it that this analysis managed to open does not cleanly support the idea that running more takes its toll in injuries. The study by Tania Nilsson and co-authors was published on 9 September 2025 in BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine and followed 25 players from three professional clubs in the Swedish first division over four seasons. External training load, measured as accelerations, decelerations, high-speed running and sprinting, was set against 25 hamstring injuries, the muscles at the back of the thigh. The authors found large individual variation and no consistent group-level trend, and conclude that short-term load alone may be of limited use in predicting that risk. Two caveats weigh: the study is exploratory and does not isolate pressing as a variable. In my reading, it neither acquits nor condemns gegenpressing.

What this tells us: none of the five sources in the table tests whether pressing more leads to more goals or wins, and the only peer-reviewed one, with 25 players from Swedish clubs, found no group-level trend between training load and injury. One possible reading is that, in the sources for this analysis, the effectiveness of gegenpressing rests on football logic and the testimony of coaches, which is not the same as proving that it does not work.

Klopp and gegenpressing with Germany: what his debut showed

In Klopp's first game in charge of Germany, against the Netherlands, gegenpressing showed up in fragments. The German site ran, in an analysis by Justin Kraft updated on 25 September 2026, wrote that Germany played with high intensity and that the attacking press worked very well in the opening phase, with "interesting ball wins", in Joshua Kimmich's words. The second point of praise was how quickly the team got back behind the ball when winning it high up did not come off. Sportschau recorded the other half: Klopp said he had seen gegenpressing but would like to see a lot more of it, that the mechanisms against the ball needed to feel much more natural and that the team had played "too little football". According to the data Sportschau cites, Germany did not put a single shot on the Dutch goal in the second half, and their share of possession fell below 40%.

My reading, to close: gegenpressing earned its fame as an idea, and the public number that would confirm it did not turn up in the sources for this analysis. The logic is sound. Attacking the ball before the opponent can organise, with your own defence already in position, makes sense on any tactics board. But PPDA is partly confounded by territory, the only metric in the table with the moment of loss in its name was left without a checked definition, and the peer-reviewed study on physical load that this analysis opened does not settle the matter. Sportschau saw traces of Klopp's football against the Netherlands. The next game, against Greece, was scheduled by the DFB for 27 September 2026 at 20:45 at the WWK Arena in Augsburg, as Klopp's first home game. Whether the press wins games is a question that calls for open data, not catchphrases.