By increasing the temperature of hadronic matter one crosses over from a system of bound states (hadrons) to a plasma where the relevant degrees of freedom are quarks and gluons. Experimental evidence suggest that in a relevant energy regime for heavy ion collisions, from RHIC to LHC, this plasma does not behave as a gas of weakly interacting quasi-particles but rather as a strongly coupled liquid. These features are intimately linked to the infrared, long-range behavior of QCD and are beyond the scope of improved perturbation theory, the so-called hard thermal loop resummation, due to the celebrated Linde problem. In order to address these issues more carefully a non-perturbative gauge fixing procedure, originally due to Gribov, is employed. This introduces a physical QCD scale to the problem, which at finite temperatures corresponds to the (chromo)magnetic screening scale. Firstly, we analyze the relevant degrees of freedom in the quark sector and find a genuine non-Abelian contribution from a massless mode which signals the presence of long-range correlations in the system. Secondly, we study transport coefficients of this system, such as the jet quenching parameter and the shear and bulk viscosities.