When I was 15 years old, I didn’t really know what I wanted from life, yada yada. But I did know that I loved football and I also knew that I adored Liverpool.
But we weren’t very good. Despite the thrilling Luis Suarez-charged success of the 2013/14 season, Liverpool had spent far too long adrift from the position of prominence and power that was fitting for a club of its stature.
Then Jurgen Klopp came along. The former Borussia Dortmund manager had enjoyed acclaim in his homeland, toppling Bayern Munich to the Bundesliga title in successive years before suffering a nosedive and calling time on his Signal Iduna Park career.
As Liverpool prepare to host Wolverhampton Wanderers in the Premier League for the last dance, fans will cheer Klopp’s name one final time, the 56-year-old having been roared on for the best part of nine years.
Were it not for him, I likely would not be writing this salute to a man who, seriously, has had such a profound impact on so many like myself.
Liverpool’s rise and rise coincided with my conclusion of studies at secondary school, and so I entered into the unknown with no clue where to head. But Klopp sculpted a journey that lifted the hearts of many, and so when it came to choosing a profession at this fledgling phase I followed my love for football and the joy that I had found through his forged connection with the club.
Of course, football’s inevitable circularity precludes lasting success – for most, anyway – and it would be foolish to only take joy in the good times, but Klopp proved that football is a life force that doesn’t need the rubber-stamping of silver objects to provide a sense of fulfilment and wonder that few things else can give to those stalwart supporters.
Klopp, to put it another way, proved that football’s beauty is an incredible, at times ineffable thing, and so this is a profession worth pursuing, for here is the palpable intensity of a person who gets it, a person who provided the balmy warmth that fans crave, to feel worth something, a part of something.
I will forever hold a dear place in my heart for Klopp, whose all-consuming passion for Liverpool and its success has created so many memories, leaving the city aglow. To see him step down from his duties is sad, yes, but it has certainly been worth the tears.
Self-indulgent stream of consciousness out of the way. But this is simply one story in a million of how Klopp stretched his wings down onto Liverpool and touched the lives of so many.
Some footballing figures exist beyond their stay. Klopp is the embodiment of a person who takes a club and its people beyond the mere enjoyment of watching people hoof an object between two sticks.
From doubters to believers
It’s quite hard to articulate just how much football means to many, many people. To those observing from afar, away from the prism, it all must look a bit naff.
Klopp must look a bit naff sometimes, even to those absorbed and engulfed in football and all its myriad facets. But that’s what makes him so brilliant, an irreplaceable part of Liverpool.
Be it his fury of post-match fist pumps, his scorn at the weather and how it stifled his team, or be it his hilarious in-match facial expressions, his explosion of passion when Mohamed Salah curls yet another strike beyond the hapless keeper, Alisson Becker contorts to make an acrobatic, all-important save.
The thing is, Liverpool is an emotional football club; it’s an emotional city. Klopp understood this, alighting in Merseyside following Brendan Rodgers’ dismissal.
There’s something very earnest about Liverpool and its path over the last nine years or so, a deep, visceral connection between player and club and fan and gaffer. Klopp transformed Anfield, wrapped the outfit in on itself with his quirks and convictions and his heart and his soul.
You could feel it in his very first game, which, inaptly perhaps, was a goalless draw against Tottenham Hotspur at White Hart Lane, a fixture that has since produced 62 goals from 19 matches in all competitions.
(GK) – Simon Mignolet
(RB) – Nathaniel Clyne
(CB) – Martin Skrtel
(CB) – Mamadou Sakho
(LB) – Alberto Moreno
(CM) – Lucas Leiva
(CM) – Emre Can
(RW) – James Milner
(AM) – Adam Lallana
(LW) – Philippe Coutinho
(ST) – Divock Origi
The starting line-up for that fixture tells the tale of Klopp’s dynasty, taking a – frankly – average team and turning it into something special. Sure, high-money signings were made along the way but Klopp battled tooth and nail against superior financial powers and cemented legendary status along the way.
What to pin down as the pinnacle of Klopp’s reign? Would it be the historic comeback against Barcelona – corner taken quickly is now a phrase synonymous with his reign – coming from behind to dismantle Lionel Messi’s team to advance to the final and dispatch Tottenham, a first slice of silverware under the 56-year-old?
Or perhaps, a few months into the new era, Liverpool’s 2-2 draw at home against West Bromwich Albion was the watershed moment, when Divock Origi salvaged a deflected last-gasp point and an incensed German manager ordered his team to link hands and celebrate in front of the Kop. It was a ridiculed reaction but Klopp was building something down Anfield Road and it paid dividends.
There are too many to count, but Klopp’s legacy is not defined by trophies and nor is it defined by statistics and tables and tallies, although he sits favourably on many. He changed lives, his influence transcends what it means to be a successful football manager in English football and his absence will leave a disconsolate piece missing from Liverpool and all involved.
The end of an era
But what if this isn’t the end at all? Possibly, Liverpool have simply entered the next phase of a glowing era that started nearly nine years ago, when a gegenpressing, thrash-metal style was inculcated into a football club crying for fresh life.
Klopp arrived and pulled Anfield’s denizens from the shadowed recess where they languished, nurtured them, enriched them and lifted them. This is not the end. This legacy endures.
Football is cyclical. Managers come; managers go. Players come; players go. Success arrives, ephemerally, and then disappears, flaking away and dissipating in the wind, like a sheet of paper caught aflame, as rivals shift ahead and revel in the glow of the limelight.
But while this cynical standpoint carries truth, it’s the fleeting nature of the success that makes it so special. Klopp knows this. The 56-year-old recently remarked that “other managers collect trophies, I collect relationships,” when reflecting on his time at the Anfield helm.
1.
Roberto Firmino
355
2.
Mohamed Salah
348
3.
James Milner
323
4.
Trent Alexander-Arnold
309
5.
Jordan Henderson
304
It was a comment that, naturally, was met with a measure of scorn from rivals, but Liverpool have won it all in the timeframe since the German’s advent. We’ve conquered all of Europe, and thanks to the outfit’s outgoing manager, we’re never going to stop.
Klopp, let’s not forget, restored Liverpool and gave it power and purpose as a behemoth of the global game once more. His mere presence has left fully-grown fans giddy with childish avidity, taking Liverpool’s hard-working, respite-seeking football faithful back to their springtime. To a better time. Away from life and all of its struggles. A utopia sculpted within Anfield’s four stands.
Arne Slot is the man to succeed Klopp, an unenviable task if there ever was one, and while he will come and he will go, Feyenoord’s successful head coach takes the reins of a club geared for more prosperity down the line.
Perhaps this is an end. Maybe that’s okay. It’s one end, an end as such that will close the door on a slice of history in one football club’s journey among many. But it isn’t the end.
To say it’s the end would be to say that Jurgen Klopp and all that he stands for is no more, that this electric, larger-than-life German has been stripped away from the outfit’s DNA like bark from a tree.
So, no. Stand still. Crane your neck. Listen close. He’s here. Can you hear him? He’s in the crowd, cheering Liverpool on come August. It’s a booming, infectious noise, carried with care through the crowd’s song, passed through to the pitch, where Virgil van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold bellow and bay at their teammates, spurring them on.
This isn’t the end. Klopp has etched his name into Anfield’s very core, scrawling his teachings and tricks across Merseyside. And away from the figurative, he truly will return, for real, one day – lopsided grin, gleaming gnashers, awe-inspiring gaze and all. There to watch his club, always his club, to cheer them on.
He’s there, waving, taking it in, lapping it up. Klopp stands, cameras fixed, Anfield fixed, 61,000-odd pairs of eyes pinned on him. For he is here – perhaps he always will be. This isn’t the end.
He’s waving. And he is laughing. And we are singing.
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