Until the end, Jürgen Klopp’s sense of theater never left him. The little pregnant pause at the beginning of the video where he announces his departure, when everyone knows what’s coming, but still wants to hear him say it from his own mouth. The way his voice cracks and breaks. The way he stares straight into the camera so you can’t look away. And of course the impeccable timing, the disorienting flourish, a sense of pure shock that will reverberate through the last four months of this season. One last mind game. One final competitive advantage. For Klopp, the business and pleasure of football have always been symbiotically linked, one at the service of the other.
This was the talent, and these were the beliefs, that could hold a locker room, an auditorium or a stadium in the palm of his hand. In a foreign land and in his second language, he forged lasting bonds in this most entropic and bitter of sports. He changed the way people thought about one of England’s most maligned cities. To this day, Christian Benteke – a striker who never remotely rated Klopp, played as little as possible and sold to Crystal Palace at the first opportunity – describes Klopp as “the best manager I have ever worked with”. This is also talent, and it also tells you pretty much everything you need to know about Jurgen Klopp.
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He was the man who won it all, who took over one of the most important clubs in this country at a time when their reputation was probably lower than his, and made them serious again. When he took office in 2015, the average attendance at Anfield was about the same as Sunderland. He inherited a squad of Steven Caulker, Joe Allen and Lazar Markovic, rebuilt it, won the Champions League within four years and then rebuilt it again. He gave Liverpool the league title that fans had convinced themselves they would never regain for the past thirty years. But this is not how Klopp will be remembered.
He was the coach who took his inimitable brand of heavy-metal, which pushed football from Dortmund to the Premier League, and then shaped it for a rapidly evolving modern game. Klopp’s teams, like him, grew older and more mature. Over time they became more controlled, more dominant and complex, less chaotic, less dependent on counter-attack and less dependent on great outbursts of emotion. He borrowed a little from Pep Guardiola and Guardiola in turn borrowed a little from him. Their eight-year double act produced some of the best football matches and some of the best football matches on English pitches. But this is also not how Klopp will be remembered.
He was the coach who made bruised, raw or unproven talent the envy of the world through a combination of elite scouting, elite coaching and elite interpersonal skills. Alisson, Virgil van Dijk, Mohamed Salah, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Sadio Mané, Andrew Robertson: all good or very good players who have become generational greats under his leadership. He firmly believed in giving young players a chance, not as a way to fatten prized assets for the books, but because it was the most efficient way to create the heroes of the future. On Wednesday at Fulham, with time running out and the tie hanging in the balance, he threw it at an 18-year-old called Bobby Clark and said: go on, win a cup semi-final. Klopp believes in Clark and so Clark has no choice but to believe in himself. But this is also not how Klopp will be remembered.
Because in the real world, where real people live, this is not really how football is remembered. The only thing that will truly survive from those years of toil are the human moments, the flesh and blood moments when Klopp and his team reached through the fourth wall and made you feel. The much-derided curtain call after a 2-2 draw against West Brom. The broken glasses against Norwich. The beautiful bender after Kiev. The way Anfield sounded on the night they beat Barcelona 4-0 or destroyed Manchester United 7-0, where you were, who you were with.
Football has never been purely an intellectual pursuit, and it has never been purely a professional pursuit. At its best, it’s the background music of life, the backdrop to nights in and nights out and comedowns and breakdowns and relationships and breakups. Not everyone in the navel-worshipping football world really understands that. Somehow you always had the feeling that Klopp did that. Liverpool is not my club and Klopp has never been my manager, but perhaps the greatest tribute you can pay him is that sometimes I wish he were.
And yet, as a competitor to his core, Klopp always realized that there was little point in making people feel good unless you could also do good. His work with the club’s foundation, the way he made time in his schedule to meet disabled or elderly fans, made for irresistible online content, but also came from a sincere and genuine place. “We must all do what we can to protect each other,” he wrote to Liverpool fans in March 2020, as the country prepared for lockdown. “In society, I mean. This should always be the case in life, but right now I think it matters more than ever. Please look out for each other.”
Klopp was never the Shankly-like socialist his most ardent fans liked to claim. You only had to look at his vast array of commercial endorsements to understand that. Nor did he ever seek to position himself as a beacon of virtue. Some of his most unappealing moments occurred when he lapsed into self-pity, lashing out at slights real or imagined, and complaining bitterly about the 12:30 kick-off in a world where people were struggling to heat their homes. But somehow, whether by design or projection, he represented a kind of resistance: the putting of man back into the machine, the idea that superior wealth and autocratic power could be overcome through the ingenuity of the collective mind. Like Arsène Wenger before him, it was often difficult to analyze his self-interested opposition to state investment or overpopulation. But mostly he fought the right fights.
And so, in addition to the rightful celebration of his Liverpool career, there must also be a hint of melancholy. Did Klopp ultimately get what he came for? One Premier League, won under sterile pandemic conditions. One Champions League, won in a sub-par final thanks to a questionable penalty. One FA Cup and one League Cup, each won on penalties after a 0-0 draw against Chelsea. Meanwhile, the wider football landscape that Liverpool so fervently sought to disrupt remains largely in place. Manchester City have won five of the last six titles, Chelsea can still outbid them for the best young players and now Saudi money is once again unbalancing the playing field. Liverpool have picked some apples. But it’s still not their orchard.
That’s why the next four months, and how Liverpool negotiate them, still matter. It will be months of feverish distraction and disinformation as both Klopp’s and Liverpool’s next moves are discussed in unhealthy detail. There will be a long, drawn out and excruciating farewell tour, memes and montages and memories. But there will also be one last chance at the title in a competition where Liverpool are five points clear and a resurgent City are nipping at their heels. Klopp has had enough unhappy endings in football to forever shake his belief in happy endings. But he still believes in this one. In many ways, it is his greatest act of faith yet.