What impresses me most with that Liverpool team is how much energy they are putting in every game from start to end.
Normally, you have to pay for it and the athleticism level drops on second half of the game or during the season. But they manage to keep doing it. This is why they are hard to keep at bay. Despite all the tactics, football still remains a sport where athleticism matters.
Not saying Liverpool is just a team of marathonians though. They have one of the best goalkeeper in the world, a very good attacking trio (the sum of these three players being higher than their individual worth as they are connecting so well with each other), a top class cb, good fullbacks.
I watched some statistics about top teams and Liverpool particularly stood out for the high number and the high accuracy of their long balls. The fullbacks (TAA especially) and also VVD are notably above the rest of the competition in those stats. They are scoring a lot of goals from those long balls across the field.
Yea, they are super athletic and, dare I say in the spirit of British teams, they are used to running and working hard on the field. Very few primadonnas if any. Everybody carries their weight, including their so-called star players like Salah and Mane.
Their long balls are easily their biggest asset in positional attacks. This is a super strong weapon when you make overloads in one side like Liverpool do. When you overload a side, you basically have two objectives. To obtain numbers in that space and pass your way through, using this superiority. Or, if not possible (or the plan is different), to do quick switches on the opposite wing when more space is available as a result of the overload.
I'm gonna tell you something Gica Popescu, former captain of Barcelona in the 90s, who used to play under Cruyff, spoke about in Romanian media about modern football and tactics and about why Cruyff was a genius of the game far ahead of his time.
Cruyff told the Barcelona players before a game in the Spanish League to press in defense and overload the close range areas around the ball. This meant the opposite wing areas were supposed to be left open, in order for the short and medium range to be covered more intensely.
Giga Popescu and other Barca players were bewildered by this notion, that they should leave players who are traditionally marked to stand free in space. They told Cruyff: "Mister, but we can't do this. What happens when the ball is on our left side and the opponent's right-back or right midfielder makes a long diagonal ball on our right, in the space we leave open? If we leave it open the left-back who goes up in space will cause us real damage".
Cruyff told them: "Trust me, it won't happen, they won't do that, they will almost always try to play short and we will get the ball back because we have the numbers".
The players then said: "But, how do you know, what if it does happen?".
And in the end Cruyff told them: "The opponent doesn't have the player who can pull off that pass consistently, because if they had that player he'd play for us instead". That model of defending is now used by almost every pressing team, from Pep's Barcelona, to Klopp's Dortmund and Liverpool.
