Every great manager arrives at a new club carrying not just a philosophy and a tactical identity but a set of relationships built over years of shared experience, shared victories and shared setbacks. The people who sit beside you on the bench, who challenge your thinking in the training ground meeting room, who help you decode the culture of a new dressing room and translate your ideas into something the players understand and embrace, those people matter enormously. Andoni Iraola knows this better than most. Which is precisely why, in the days following his appointment as Liverpool head coach, four members of his trusted backroom staff from AFC Bournemouth made the same journey north to Merseyside. Tommy Elphick, Shaun Cooper, Pablo de la Torre and Tom Webber are now part of Liverpool Football Club, and in a detailed and revealing interview at the AXA Training Centre, Iraola explained exactly why bringing them with him was non-negotiable.
Pablo de la Torre: A Decade of Trust and Understanding
Of the four arrivals, none carries a longer or deeper history with Iraola than Pablo de la Torre. The Spaniard, who has been elevated to the role of assistant coach at Liverpool, first worked alongside Iraola at AEK Larnaca in Cyprus in 2018-19 and has followed him through every subsequent chapter of his managerial career. From Larnaca to Rayo Vallecano in Madrid, from Rayo to Bournemouth, and now from Bournemouth to Anfield. Five clubs, one partnership, and a working relationship that has been refined and deepened with every passing season.
“Pablo is a physical coach but has been with me almost all the years I have been coaching,” Iraola explained. “So for me, he is much more than a physical coach really. He is an assistant and we know each other very well.” That final sentence carries enormous meaning in a football context. The relationship between a head coach and their closest staff member is built on a specific and hard-to-replicate kind of trust, the knowledge that the person beside you thinks about the game in a compatible way, challenges you when necessary, supports you unconditionally, and understands the vision you are trying to build without needing it explained every time. Iraola has that in De la Torre, and bringing it with him to Liverpool rather than starting from scratch with an unfamiliar face was, as he made clear, a straightforward decision.
Those who have followed De la Torre’s work across his career describe him in consistent terms. Meticulous, ambitious and detail-obsessed are words that appear repeatedly in assessments of his approach to physical preparation and tactical analysis. His promotion to assistant coach at Liverpool, above the formal first-team coach titles given to Elphick and Cooper, reflects both the depth of his relationship with Iraola and the breadth of his responsibilities within the setup.
Elphick and Cooper: The Cultural Bridge
The stories of how Tommy Elphick and Shaun Cooper came to be part of Iraola’s staff at Bournemouth, and how that relationship has now brought them to Liverpool, are equally compelling. Iraola arrived at the Vitality Stadium in June 2023 under difficult circumstances. His previously planned assistant coach Inigo Perez, who had worked closely with him at Rayo Vallecano, did not make the move with him. Rather than viewing this as a setback, Iraola found a solution that proved transformational. Elphick and Cooper, who had been part of Bournemouth’s coaching setup under Gary O’Neil, were already at the club and available.
“I was very lucky with Tommy and Shaun when I arrived at Bournemouth, because I was unlucky to have the issue with my former assistant coach Inigo Perez,” Iraola recalled. “After it, it worked out very well for him because now he is coaching Villarreal, maybe we play him in the Champions League. But when I had Tommy and Shaun there, we did not feel the need to send in another assistant.” That final line speaks volumes. Iraola had the option of bringing in his own people. He chose not to, because what he found in Elphick and Cooper exceeded his expectations.
The specific qualities they brought were ones that Iraola, as a Basque Spaniard arriving to manage in England for the first time, genuinely needed. “They were very prepared, they were very helpful for me in terms of understanding the English culture, the mentality of the players, what they were used to, what they like in training, even the small details that maybe in Spain are different,” he explained. That cultural translation is a function that receives little public attention but is enormously important in any management situation, and particularly so when a foreign coach is entering an established Premier League dressing room for the first time.
Tommy Elphick brings a playing background that resonates specifically in a Liverpool context. The 38-year-old former centre-back, who was Bournemouth’s captain during their historic rise from the lower leagues to the Premier League under Eddie Howe, is a boyhood Liverpool supporter whose hero growing up was Jamie Carragher. He made over 400 appearances across his playing career at clubs including Brighton, Bournemouth, Aston Villa and Huddersfield, and that wealth of experience as a player gives him an authority in individual conversations with current players that complements Iraola’s own coaching voice perfectly. “The experience Tommy has at Aston Villa, Bournemouth, Brighton, Huddersfield, they can be in a closer position to the players, if you want, they can feel more identified,” Iraola noted. The head coach also acknowledged, with characteristic self-awareness and humour, that his own profile as a player is less immediately recognisable to a young English footballer. “I am a little bit older, some of the players maybe did not know I was a player.” That honesty about the dynamics of his own situation, and the practical solution he found in Elphick and Cooper, speaks to the emotional intelligence that makes Iraola such a compelling and thoughtful leader.
Set-Pieces: A Clear Division of Responsibility
One of the specific areas where Elphick and Cooper’s contributions have already been clearly defined is set-piece preparation, an area that was identified as a weakness under Arne Slot’s final season. Iraola confirmed the division of responsibilities between his two first-team coaches in detail. “Tommy does defensive set-plays, Shaun does more offensive, more creative ones,” he revealed. “But also we are working very well here with the set-piece analyst, who was very good in the second half of last season. He is already with the club, so they are working on some stuff.” Lewis Mahoney, Liverpool’s first-team set-piece analyst, has been retained from the previous staff and is already collaborating with Elphick, Cooper and Iraola’s new team in developing the patterns and routines that will define Liverpool’s approach to dead-ball situations next season.
Tom Webber: The Analytical Eye
The fourth member of Iraola’s imported backroom group is Tom Webber, who joins as Liverpool’s first-team tactical analyst. Webber’s role involves the detailed video analysis and data processing that underpins modern elite football coaching, providing Iraola and his staff with the statistical and visual information needed to understand opponents, identify tactical patterns and evaluate individual player performances. His presence at Anfield reinforces the message that Iraola’s approach to coaching is as scientifically rigorous as it is instinctive and relational.
A Cohesive Unit Ready to Build Something Special
What emerges from Iraola’s discussion of his backroom staff is a portrait of a coaching unit that has been assembled not through convenience or compromise but through genuine trust, shared experience and complementary strengths. De la Torre provides the longest relationship and the deepest tactical alignment. Elphick and Cooper provide the cultural understanding and the proximity to players that a foreign head coach needs in his first year at a new English club. Webber provides the analytical foundation. And Iraola himself provides the vision, the intensity and the personality that binds it all together.
“They are very good coaches,” he said simply. “We kind of understand the game similarly and they have different roles in the coaching staff. They help with set-pieces also. That is the reason I continued with them.”
Simple, clear, and direct. Much like the man himself. The new era at Liverpool is taking shape, and it is being built on a foundation of trust that has been earned over years, not weeks. For Liverpool supporters wondering what Andoni Iraola’s team will look like when the Premier League season begins, this backroom structure offers one of the clearest signals yet. It will be organised, intense, meticulously prepared, and deeply united. That is exactly what this club needs.
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The Liverpool FC Times Team
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