He told them in November. Think about that. If you want to know what Jürgen Klopp created at Liverpool, there’s your answer.
You can wax about results, obviously. You can dive head-first into a lucky bag of special moments, all of them showing what Klopp means to the club and vice-versa. More than that, you can simply feel the vibration his announcement caused around the place.
Short of a sudden death, virtually nothing shocks the world of sport any more. Everybody is too knowing, too connected. There’s so much money and greasy-pole-climbing involved that it will always suit somebody to drop a few breadcrumbs. It’s why no big signing happens out of the blue. It’s why nobody gets popped for a drug test without plenty of suspicion already doing the rounds. In every sport, in every country, there’s always an agenda that is served by a discreet leak.
But for two months, in the middle of winter, when the Premier League has the attention of the sporting public more or less entirely to itself, there wasn’t the slightest whiff that this was in the offing. Nobody blabbed. Nobody broke the confidence. Even in the hours that have passed since the announcement, nobody has tried to make out that they had heard a whisper.
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Klopp and Liverpool got to make their own announcement in their own way in their own time. They got to sit on it for two months and decide how best to explain it. They were able to do so knowing, as far as it is possible to know something this jaw-dropping, that they didn’t need to be rushed into anything or to live by somebody else’s timetable.
Now think back to the last manager Liverpool had and the messy end to Brendan Rodgers’s tenure. Back in October 2015, the Fenway Sports Group had already decided to sack Rodgers before sending him out to take the team for a Merseyside derby at Goodison Park. They sacked him within an hour of the final whistle of a 1-1 draw with Everton and afterwards made it clear to the Liverpool beat writers that no result could have saved him.
An hour. A single, miserable hour. Barely enough time to get showered and changed and back on the bus for the four-mile drive to Liverpool’s training ground at Melwood. They had to do it that quickly for plenty of reasons – no point dragging it out, no need to extend his misery, etc. But as well as all that, Liverpool leaked like a sieve back then.
Go back and read the coverage of the time and the whole build-up to that game was dominated by stories of how Rodgers’s days were numbered. And even though the stories were on the money, FSG still decided to lame-duck him and had him fulfil the fixture and do the press conference and talk about the upcoming games. None of which was deemed out of order, of course. Just the way business is done at a club going through a bad run.
Things are different at Liverpool now. The fact that Klopp could make this decision in November and be comfortable not telling the world about it until January shows how much the culture has changed. Even if only a tiny group of people had any inkling, it’s a tribute to the job he has done there that none of it trickled out. That no staffer or player or agent or bus driver heard a stray word or even added two and two together and shared the four they came up with.
That doesn’t happen by accident. It doesn’t happen by coercion either. It happens when the culture of an organisation creates the conditions for it. Who at Liverpool right now doesn’t owe everything to Jürgen Klopp? Who would dream for a second of taking that moment from him, of getting in the way of him calling his own time? Nobody.
And not because they’re top of the league and not because they’re five points clear and not even because he’s won the league and the Champions League for them and with them. All of that helps, of course.
But winning doesn’t by itself create the sort of culture of solidarity and devotion Klopp has so obviously inspired there. You only need to read any of the stuff about the last few years of Bill Belichick’s time at the New England Patriots to understand that humans are generally governed by self-interest, regardless of how many trophies have been gathered in by a coach.
Klopp’s success at Liverpool has been about more than that. It has been about all that old intangible stuff like connection and emotional investment and, to quote the man himself, all these sorts of things. There was that famous incident in December 2015 – only a few weeks after he’d taken over – when he made his team go and salute the Kop after a 2-2 draw with West Brom. He got sneered at for it, not just by fans of other clubs but plenty of Liverpool supporters too. But he knew instinctively what was important.
He will leave English football as a unique figure. You can hate Liverpool with all your soul and still find plenty of room to admire Klopp and to wish he was in charge of your club. Nobody ever says the same about Pep Guardiola or said it about Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wenger or any of the other monolithic figures of the Premier League era. Nobody would ever have imagined it.
Klopp is different. He’ll be missed. The whole thing already feels greyer without him.
