Jurgen Klopp has marched Liverpool back into the elite, but 'backwards and in heels'

For a side that were bona fide title challengers on New Year’s Day, staggering over the finish line into the final Champions League place can seem underwhelming, even if a top-four finish has long been billed as a glory in itself. Certainly Liverpool’s erratic form this term and the bizarrely upside-down pattern of their results can’t help but hint at what might have been. Yet it's a measure of the progress made under Klopp that Liverpool’s return to Europe’s elite arrived with minimal triumphalism, a sense of expectations met but not exceeded.

The reality is anything but. Hopes may have been ratcheted up after a high-flying autumn, but the second half of the season – during which a handful of absences revealed the squad to have all the depth of a spray-on tan – has been a harsh if instructive lesson in how much Klopp’s men were punching above their weight to begin with. Zooming out a bit, it’s vital to remember that Klopp took over a Liverpool that sat slumped in 10th, who had finished sixth the previous season, and whose team was playing without plan or purpose. That he has reinvented the side as a frenetic and hungry outfit capable of beating anyone, and done so without a hoard of megabucks signings, reflects glowingly on his capability as a coach and hints at the exponential progress that may lie around the corner given the calibre of recruits Champions League qualification enables.

In a landscape where the transfer market is often seen as the only route up the league, Klopp’s training-ground principles – witness the full-scale transformations of Adam Lallana, Roberto Firmino and Jordan Henderson – can seem to border on the avant garde, and certainly speaks to a side whose growth is more organic than most. He has built a team without a star, one that regularly outweighs the sum of its parts – a refreshing change of tack for a club which has, for the last two decades, leaned so heavily on the match winning individualism of Owen, Gerrard, Torres and Suarez. In a sport governed by short-termism, Klopp’s project looks suspiciously sustainable. You'd call it strong and stable were it not for the images of fragility and chaos those words evoke.

This team is not quite at the level of the title-challengers of 2009 or 2014, but in a sense it compares favourably to both: Benitez took four well-plotted years to put together his side, while the latter arrived where they did on a tidal wave of high-spirits and momentum, a formula that was utterly glorious but completely perishable. Klopp's side inspire no such qualms.

If the micro looks good, then the macro paints a doubly impressive picture. Leicester’s antics last year may have prompted whispers of a newly flattened Premier League hierarchy, but in fact it has simply heralded a double-glazing of the glass ceiling separating the best from the rest: between them, the top six earned 94 more points than they did last year, while Arsenal finished fifth with a points tally that in 1997 would have won them the title. At the start of the season, Liverpool’s were sixth favourites to finish in the Champions League places.

That is the famous quote attributed to performer Ginger Rodgers of her more lauded dancing partner Fred Astair. Similarly, Klopp has returned Liverpool to the elite without the squad or the chequebook of at least some of his competitors. Make no mistake: fourth place represents overachievement.

All of which bodes rather nicely for next season, by which time the squad should conceivably contain one or two high-grade additions and a handful more squad players. Klopp will be aware, though, that no major surgery is needed: his side’s peerless track record against the top six is evidence that the fundamentals are already in place for a continued clamber up the league, and the routine recent wins over West Ham and Middlesbrough represented a belated resolution to the issue which has plagued their season: how to break down defensive-minded underdogs.

With regards to that, it’s surely no coincidence that Liverpool’s ability to beat bottom-half teams by more than one goal – something they hadn’t done since December – was miraculously restored when Daniel Sturridge came into the side for the final two games, which duly heralded seven goals. There is much talk that Sturridge is ill-suited to Klopp’s high-intensity blueprint. Perhaps the more pertinent point is that Klopp’s high-intensity blueprint is ill-suited to taking points from the lesser sides, against whom gegenpressing achieves far less than guile, glitz and a sizeable superiority complex. Sturridge brings all that in spades and, given that it could enable a title challenge, keeping him at Anfield is a risk well worth taking.

Elsewhere up front, Liverpool badly need some more explosive pace in the squad to complement or replace that of Sadio Mane - as colossal an addition as the Senegalese has proved, his absences this term have had a wildly disproportionate impact.

More exhaustive changes are probably necessary at the other end of the pitch, where Liverpool's post-Carragher era of second-rate centre-backs continues its clownish march. Dejan Lovren and Joel Matip are both thoroughly decent on their day, yet the Croatian especially carries the constant threat of self-immolation that is simply incompatible with a top-level side. That high-pressing, high-scoring Spurs have put together an elite-level defensive partnership for roughly the same outlay as Liverpool's on Lovren is proof that it has been personnel, rather than funds or tactics, that has hamstrung Klopp's backline and by extension his team.

In the grand scheme of things, though, these tweaks are merely specifics. More important is the fact that the bigger picture is looking very rosy indeed. And most vitally, at a time when leaders are showing themselves to be disingenuous, defeatist, tedious, overhyped and over the hill - sometimes all at once - Liverpool have got themselves a pretty good one.