Who should they be looking at?
Last year, an analyst named James McMahon threw some match data into an algorithm and had it organize coaches into a number of stylistic clusters. The cluster that tended to produce the best performances was the one he characterized as "relentless." They are, as McMahon writes, "Dominant in possession and aggressive in the press, with a high defensive line (judging by the metrics surrounding loose ball recoveries and opposition through balls and offsides) and a short-passing attacking style that keeps opponents firmly entrenched in their own half."
That sounds a lot like the style we described above, and 15 of the previous 16 Champions League semifinalists were classified as such. (The only holdout was Ajax because McMahon didn't have data for them, but they absolutely would've qualified if he did.) Because he's a good data scientist, though, McMahon didn't definitively label any manager with one particular style; instead, he gave a confidence interval for how likely that manager's team was to produce a performance that would get label within a given cluster.
We don't want an extremely possession-dominant manager, so let's take a look at a list of the coaches that get at least a 20% confidence interval for being "relentless" and at least a 10% interval for being what McMahon labels as "pressing", which essentially means you still press a ton but the opposition breaks through the press more often. This should produce a list of coaches who don't skew too far toward the slow passing we're trying to avoid.
The names who fit the criteria: Hansi Flick, Klopp, Bob Bradley, Gian Piero Gasperini, Pochettino, Luciano Spalletti, Solskjaer, Unai Emery, Niko Kovac, Julian Nagelsmann, Edin Terzic, Frank Lampard, Rudi Garcia, Antonio Conte, Ronny Delia, Eduardo Berizzo, Jesse Marsch, Eusebio Di Francesco, Paulo Fonseca and Vincenzo Montella.
