Where else is there left to go in football tactics? Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola are both rightly considered pioneers, having had a huge influence on the Premier League with Liverpool and Manchester City respectively, but even their innovations can often be traced back to bygone eras.

To a certain extent, these things go in cycles. After all, each manager only has 11 players, and there are only a finite number of sensible ways to set them up to try and win a football match. It has not gone unnoticed that Guardiola has deployed the 4-4-2 at times this season, even depicting shades of the 'big man, little man' strike partnership to which England was so in thrall 30 years ago.

But Liverpool is on the lookout for someone who can add genuine value with their game-plans. With Klopp leaving, it is in need of a new manager, and Michael Edwards is thought to be prepared to go in an unexpected direction.

A manager whose short coaching career has seen him bounce from Genoa to Spezia to Bologna would certainly count as left-field. But having settled at the latter club, Thiago Motta has made a name for himself, and looks close to securing unlikely Champions League qualification.

Even before going to Italy, though, Motta brought attention to his coaching career. While managing the PSG under-19s, he spoke to Gazzetta dello Sport, and made waves by sketching out his vision of a '2-7-2' formation as the future of football.

So has Motta been conquering Italy with an ultra-attacking shape that sees the goalkeeper step up to become one of seven midfielders? Unsurprisingly enough, no.

Insofar as there has been an innovation from Motta, it comes in how he is visualizing the field. His 2-7-2 is designed to be read from left-to-right, rather than back-to-front, with each 'two' effectively denoting a pretty standard full-back and winger.

In fact, it translates to essentially a 4-3-3. As it happens, that's a shape that suits the Liverpool squad well, with Klopp having used it for the majority of his tenure.

As Matteo Bonetti described before Motta took his first senior job in Italy, 'it's just an offensive 4-3-3 with high press'. That will sound familiar to Klopp.

That being said, Motta credits Guardiola as one of his biggest influences. Fundamental to his system is the idea of providing options to the man on the ball.

"I want the player that has the ball to always have three or four solutions and two teammates close by to help," he said. "The difficulty in football is, often to do things simply but to control the base, pass and get free."

So while Motta might not be as radical as it first appears, he's an overachieving manager with clear influences from Klopp and Guardiola. It's not hard to see why he might have made it onto an Edwards list, and he's one to keep an eye on.