Whoever takes over from Jürgen Klopp at Liverpool will be lucky to inherit Darwin Núñez. And the current manager may just have primed him for Xabi Alonso.

It almost feels disrespectful to Jürgen Klopp to be so fascinated by his heir already. But it’s precisely because of the success he has achieved with Liverpool that the stakes are so high when it comes to appointing someone else.

And it has to be said that the miracles being worked by Xabi Alonso make it hard not to get at least a little excited at the prospect that he could be the next Liverpool manager, even while the current iteration of the Reds chase the quadruple. If Klopp turned around and said he had decided to stay after all, everyone would take that in a heartbeat — but if there is going to be change, there looks to be no better candidate.

There is no guarantee that Alonso would accept the job, of course. But especially after his dismantling of Bayern Munich at the weekend, it is impossible to resist wondering how his Bayer Leverkusen tactics might map onto the Liverpool squad.

Various players could be in line to benefit from Alonso’s hypothetical arrival. However, perhaps none are quite as exciting as Darwin Núñez.

You might say that Núñez was the first distinctly ‘Liverpool 2.0’ signing for the first team. Klopp was enthused by the idea of working with him, but was also well aware that his eventual successor would get more time with the Uruguayan. He is yet to peak at Anfield, a tantalizing prospect for the next manager.

Explaining his Bayern Munich masterclass to Archie Rhind-Tutt and Thomas Hitzlsperger, Alonso sketched out the role of his current front three. Much like at Liverpool, pressing is fundamental:

“Today, for me, the defensive work of Nathan [Tella], Flo [Florian Wirtz] and Amine Adli has been fantastic. When they have chosen the right time to go to press the center-back, when they need to cut the passes to the midfielders, so our midfielders were not jumping towards the [Bayern] double six and creating that space where Musiala and Sané likes to find space, and Kane was dropping.”

Expanding upon that, The Athletic’s Jon Mackenzie has done a breakdown of Leverkusen’s out-of-possession masterclass. It’s well worth a read, but the essence is quite simple: the forwards struck the balance between depriving Bayern’s midfield two of easy possession and not giving the defenders total freedom on the ball, and this was fundamental in effectively starving Thomas Tuchel’s side of chances.

As Klopp always says, defensive work starts from the front. The direct correlation between Alonso’s instructions to his front three and Harry Kane getting just 18 touches shows that the potential next Liverpool manager is in full agreement.

And thanks to the work of Klopp, there’s no doubt that Alonso would be getting a version of Núñez ready to implement those instructions. Always a willing runner, his early Liverpool years under the German have instilled a more measured approach to pressing, without losing the chaos that makes him so dangerous.

Last season, Klopp likened Núñez to a ‘racehorse’, and not in an entirely complimentary sense. The striker would just keep going and going; he was a one-man pressing machine, but with limited regard for Liverpool’s pressing structures, chasing down the ball with the sole aim of winning it back.

Of course, Klopp loves high turnovers like nobody else, but he also views pressing as his best defensive tool. For all his endeavor, Núñez was a weak link in that regard, but no longer.

Speaking to Amazon Prime, Klopp explained it in conversation with Ben Foster: “The big difference between Darwin now and Darwin last year is obviously he’s completely settled. He was a bit aggressive in a little bit the wrong way in the beginning. Now he is aggressive but in the right way.”

Alonso would be getting a striker more than capable of playing the role performed by Adli against Bayern Munich. There’s an even closer resemblance between Núñez and Victor Boniface, who has been leading the Leverkusen line for most of the season (he’s currently injured).

Of course, Leverkusen rarely has such a low possession share, and neither does Liverpool. Games against Bayern Munich don’t come around often. But that sort of contest really brought Alonso’s out-of-possession philosophy to the fore; it looks tailor-made for Anfield, and Klopp will leave behind a version of Núñez who is willing and able to execute it.