A THREAD TO all of the end-of-reign tributes to Jurgen Klopp is the idea that he simply got Liverpool and its biggest football club, but that is to tell the story the wrong way round.
Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
“His connection with the city was not him connecting with the city,” says journalist Tony Evans. “It was the city connecting with him. I once asked him about it. He said, ‘I didn’t get the city: I don’t go out, how can I go out!? I get mobbed.’ So instead, the city got him.”
Klopp did not bend Liverpool to his will as Alex Ferguson did at Manchester United. Instead, he magnetised the place to his personality. Klopp’s was a softer power.
But like Ferguson, everything that happened at his club – for better and for worse – flowed from Klopp’s unique, irresistible character.
And this is why the story of Klopp’s Liverpool years cannot be neatly told by stats or numbers. Klopp’s reign was to be experienced rather than understood. Less important than what he taught those around him was how he made those people feel.
******
He made everyone he met feel like they were at the centre of the world. German journalist Uli Hesse told me in 2015 that Klopp’s ability to live totally in the present moment was similar to that of a Tibetan monk: he will look at you directly in interviews, and won’t allow his gaze wander off to the side.
Daire Gorman met Klopp at Liverpool’s training ground last year, and you are one of millions to have seen their encounter.
“That day, me and Klopp just clicked,” he says. “It felt like he didn’t know the cameras were there. I forgot about them for a while, too. It felt like it was just me and Klopp in the same room.
“He spoke to Mo Salah the exact same way as he spoke to the cleaner upstairs and the chef in the kitchen. He treated Diaz and Nunez the exact same way as he treated me.”
Those who have been drawn into his orbit all attest to the impression that Klopp is genuinely interested in their lives. When the life of Sean Cox was changed forever in an unprovoked attack by a Roma fan outside Anfield in 2018, Klopp wrote the family a letter condemning the incident and wishing Sean well. He has met the Cox family on an annual basis around their subsequent trips to games, and they met in the tunnel after the victory over Brighton in April.
“Sean stood up and I think Jurgen was taken aback by it,” says Sean’s wife, Martina. “He was like. ‘Wow.’ They have this little rapport between them, he really encourages Sean, saying ‘You’re doing really well, keep up the good work.’
“I was there, my daughter and her boyfriend were there, we had a carer with us, and a friend of mine. He made sure to have a little chat with everybody. What you see is what you get, it is pure and genuine.”
“He is really unselfconscious and does not give a flying fuck what people think about him,” says Evans. “That’s the thing about Klopp: there’s nothing fake about him and that endeared him to the city.”
******
It endeared him to everyone at the club, too. Chiefly the owners. Eddie Howe and Carlo Ancelotti were in the mix for the job, but their hopes were ended the moment Klopp told Fenway Sports Group that he could fight on all four fronts with Brendan Rodgers’ hodgepodge squad.
That squad bought in quickly: running 8km further than they had under Rodgers in Klopp’s first game.
An exhausted Adam Lallana collapses in Klopp's arms after the fist game against Tottenham. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
“In football, your past with other clubs buys you some time,” says Richie Partridge, a former Liverpool player who returned to the club as a physio during Klopp’s tenure. “But footballers will give you one or two weeks and if they are not having you, they are not having you. Within two weeks, every player – to a man – would have bent over backwards to do anything he wanted. It’s down to his man-management skills and his personality.”
The style of play was soaked in Klopp’s own character: the players were as frenzied and emotional as their manager on the sideline. The fans responded and swelled the legion of the early believers, and Klopp reciprocated in celebrating a late equaliser against West Brom in front of the Kop. It was an exuberant means of greeting a humdrum result but it was an early insight that, under Klopp, no ironies or cynicism would survive.
Irish underage international Conor Masterson trained with Liverpool’s first team under Klopp across two seasons, making the bench for the 2018 Champions League quarter-final win against Manchester City.
“He is so passionate, so infectious, and so all-in,” he says of Klopp. “And that’s why the team was like that. It’s because of him. He will speak in calm moments but he is very motivational. He makes you feel like you can do anything.”
I ask Masterson for his memories of the team-talk ahead of that City victory, but he tells me he remembers the speech before the following game against Everton instead.
“We had just beaten Man City and he knew that we were on such a high, it’s natural you would have a little bit of a dip, mentally,” he says. “He was so calm, but he was saying it in a manner that you had to do it. As if your life depended on it. We drew 0-0 but he made sure we didn’t lose that game. I remember walking out thinking, ‘This guy is unbelievable.’ And I knew, ‘Yeah, we are ready to go here, we are focused.’”
As Masterson describes it, Liverpool’s players connected partly with Klopp’s motivational powers and his ambition, but mostly with his ability to reassure. The tactical and physical demands were clear and consistent, and the focus was never allowed to wander beyond the next game. “It was ‘don’t worry about this, don’t worry about that, this is what we are going to do’”, says Masterson. “He was always in control. It is a great quality.”
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Klopp also knew when to diffuse tension with a laugh. Ahead of the 2018 Champions League final against Real Madrid, he gathered the squad in the dressing room before pulling up his shirt to show he was wearing a brand-new pair of Cristiano Ronaldo-branded underpants. That night ended in defeat, and Klopp forged the bonds of his early seasons in the smithy of similar losses.
Klopp after the 2018 Champions League final loss. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
His first season featured a run to the League Cup and Europa League finals -the latter turbocharged by wins over Manchester United and Borussia Dortmund – but they lost them both. The function room of their hotel in Switzerland after the Europa League final was the scene of the post-match bash, the atmosphere of which was funereal in the aftermath of defeat to Sevilla. Players, staff and invited guests drifted slowly down from their rooms to show face, with Klopp the last to arrive. He took a look around him, strode up to the DJ and took his microphone.
Jason McAteer was in the room, and recalls Klopp’s speech. “This feeling we have right now is one we never want to feel again. The expectation is for more finals and success and I hope everyone is on board. Now, I’ve done my little speech, everyone get pissed and have a good time.” The atmosphere instantly changed.
Partridge was at the club for the Champions League triumph in 2019, but when I ask for his favourite Klopp memories, he picks a couple of defeats. The first was a 3-0 defeat to Watford in December 2015 on the day of the club’s Christmas party, and the second a 4-3 collapse to Bournemouth hours before a flight to Barcelona for a team-bonding session.
“We were all expecting for there to be a massive downer on things as we have just got beaten, and we’ll have to pretend we are having fun here,” says Partridge. “On both occasions – once on the plane and once on the team bus – Jurgen stood up in front of everyone and told everyone in no uncertain terms to forget about the result, as we are going out and have a good time because we win together and we lose together.”
This ethos eventually pervaded the whole club.
“He has made Liverpool a family and more than a football club”, says Daire when I ask him about Klopp’s achievements. “We win together, we lose together, and we fight together, is what I always say.”
******
The winning wasn’t inevitable. In the early stages of the 2017/18 season, a couple of Liverpool players were privately wondering whether the team had hit their ceiling, fearing there was no Plan B. Liverpool were brilliant but brittle. Salah had joined Firmino, Mane, and Coutinho at the club so the they were scoring goals at a ferocious rate but they were also leaking them just as fast. They started the season with a 3-3 draw at Watford, got thumped 4-1 by Spurs and 5-0 by Man City, and blew a three-goal lead to draw away to Sevilla in the Champions League.
2018 brought two major turning points.
The most significant was the signing of Virgil van Dijk in January, the £75 million fee leaving those unconnected with Liverpool agog at the fee. Fans were even more shocked by the price: it was the top-dollar transfer fee that Liverpool’s moneyball-loyal owners hadn’t dreamed of spending. Klopp’s powers of persuasion meant his bosses stumped up.
Van Dijk’s impact in leading Liverpool to the Champions League final – and Loris Karius’ performance in that final – paved the way for another massive outlay on Alisson Becker in the summer.
Crucial, too, was the return of Pep Lijnders to Klopp’s staff in the summer of 2018, after a brief and unhappy spell in charge of NEC Nijmegen, whom he had joined from Liverpool at the start of the year. Van Dijk and Alisson brought leadership and solidity, while Lijnders some of the tactical detail Klopp lacked.
“Pep was massive for him,” says Masterson. “Klopp knows what he is good at but he also knows what he needs help with. Pep was so detailed, and he changed how the team played and how the team functioned. Klopp had his heavy metal football but Pep brought in little details that maybe Klopp wouldn’t have used before.
“Klopp is clever. He knows he is very good with people, but to get the detail in the games and to improve the team where it needed to get better, he brought Pep up.”
Lijnders made the subtle game-to-game tactical tweaks, often expressed in terms of which opponent to press and when to press them. Klopp would later say Ljinders changed how he viewed the game.
******
Soon the world changed their view of Liverpool. The 2018/19 season was the first crank of a machine that delivered the Champions League and the Premier League across two seasons. It’s rare you can precisely measure how close they came to more, but in Liverpool’s case it was all of 11mm: had Salah’s shot crossed the line away to Manchester City, Liverpool would have won their first Premier League title undefeated. They responded to that defeat by picking up 104 points over their next 38 league games.
The relentlessness of the team reflected that of their manager: there’s a reason Masterson found the team-talk before the lower-key Everton league game more powerful than the one before the megawatt Champions League tie with City.
A centre-back injury crisis precipitated the slump following the title win in 19/20, but they recovered to salvage Champions League qualification ahead of a season in which they added two domestic cups to complete a clean sweep of trophies under Klopp. But again they lost a Champions League final to Real Madrid and a league title by a single point to Manchester City, and Klopp explained his side’s capacity for heartbreak at the end of the season by saying that, “to win big, you have to risk losing big”.
One irony that did persist through the glory years. While the team was built in Klopp’s image and maintained and propelled by Klopp’s energy, it was all possible because he wasn’t its only architect.
Masterson uses an interesting phrase to describe Klopp’s work at Liverpool.
“He knitted it all together.”
******
For all of Klopp’s charisma, Liverpool’s brilliance was the product of the greyer fact of a series of smart people in a room together, making all of the right decisions.
Michael Edwards. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
The recruitment led by sporting director Michael Edwards delivered hit after hit after hit on Liverpool’s comparatively lower budget. Edwards’ eye for talent was critical: he drove the signing of Salah when Klopp wanted Julian Brandt. In turn, the clarity of Klopp’s style and tactical demands made it easier for Edwards to identify the right player because, in football, everything is contingent on the right environment and the right relationships. To give one example, Edwards loved Roberto Firmino so much he called his dog after him, but it took Klopp to turn Firmino into a club hero. Brendan Rodgers had him playing at right wing-back.
Their working dynamic clicked, but the equilibrium didn’t last forever. Liverpool’s Camelot gradually fell, to the point that Klopp was one of the last men standing.
There was a lot of turnover behind the scenes, and Klopp could be difficult and abrasive in driving standards. The has delivered enough tetchy TV interviews and snarling tirades in the face of fourth officials for that fact to be no secret.
When I ask Partridge the stock, what’s he like? question about Klopp, he splits his answer in two.
“On a social and personal level, he is one of the most remarkable men you will ever come across. From a professional side of things, he was extremely, extremely intense.”
This intensity meant Klopp could live in moments while unaware of the collateral being taken at the fringes. During an interregnum among the physio staff, Partridge had a brief stint as the run-on physio during first-team games and on his first outing, he ran onto treat a player and then returned to the bench to follow protocol and inform Klopp of the situation.
“As you might imagine, Jurgen was totally engrossed in the game,” says Partridge. “The player had a tight hamstring and I wanted to tell him ‘Listen, give him five minutes and see how he is, and if he is struggling he will let us know by sitting back down.’ I, in my thick Irish accent, spouted this out very quickly, and he turned around at me, glared and said, ‘Will you speak fucking English to me.’”
Klopp never mentioned the moment again. Partridge believes it’s not that he forgot about it, but that he never realised it had happened. He has no issue with Klopp, but admires his ability to move on and hold no personal grudges, which is far from general across the game.
“I know the demands and at that level, the buck stops with him”, says Partridge. “He needs to be like that. What people can sometimes mix up is what’s professional and what’s personal. I can guarantee anything he has said that has upset people, it wasn’t personal.
“He wants to strive for a better professional environment, and people who have not been involved in football for a long time, or are just used to Liverpool and haven’t seen lower leagues or the other side of football, I can understand it. But I can guarantee that however difficult he can be to work with at times, none of it is personal.”
The most significant behind-scenes exit was Edwards, and he was soon followed by his successor, Julian Ward. Both are coming back to Liverpool as part of the post-Klopp future.
In his farewell announcement interview with the club’s media, Klopp said he had accumulated more power than was ever envisioned, and one of the reasons he was standing down was because nobody was ever going to sack him. The power vacuum post-Ward led Klopp to becoming more involved in transfers than before, with Jorg Schmadtke parachuted in to help get some deals over the line, saying he was working for Klopp.
Amid this, Liverpool bucked a years-long policy in becoming drawn into a messy and public saga around Moses Caicedo and Romeo Lavia, ultimately ending up with neither. Those who did arrive didn’t quite hit the same heights: neither Luis Diaz and Darwin Nunez were signed by Edwards, and neither proved to be quite as reliable and effective as Mane and Firmino.
These added stresses and responsibilities may have played a role in draining the last of Klopp’s energy, and led to his decision to resign just 18 months after signing a contract through to 2026.
The full story behind Edwards’ exit have never been disclosed, but Jamie Carragher suggested it was influenced by the decision to grant a then 31-year-old Jordan Henderson a lengthy contract extension in 2021.
Klopp’s penultimate season brutally exposed the aged legs of the midfielders to whom he had remained too loyal, Henderson among them. But is this a fault of a man who allowed personal relationships cloud his judgement, or is this decline just priced into Klopp’s means of success?
Liverpool achieved what they did during Klopp’s tenure because of the loyalty and effort he inspired among his players. The players responded because they connected with his authenticity and, in Partridge’s words, wanted to please him.
Kicking those players to the curb the moment they pass their physical peak would be the ruthless and pragmatic thing to do, but it wouldn’t have been in Klopp’s personality.
When I ask Partridge for his favourite moment from his time at Klopp’s Liverpool, he picks an image: Jurgen Klopp and Jordan Henderson in each other’s arms in the moments after the Champions League final win, sobbing.
Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
******
If Klopp did knit Liverpool together, he was the golden seam all the same.
While he won every major trophy, even that feels like an unsatisfactory bottom line. But then again they jousted with Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, the greatest, best-resourced team English football has ever seen.
But no Liverpool fan cycling through their memory this weekend will tell you it was only ever about the trophies.
Klopp satisfied one fan base’s appetite for the vicarious: they lived every moment of a wild ride through a guy with whom they connected. The guy on the sideline jumped and screamed and pumped his fists as they would; he berated and embraced his players like they would; he laughed and drank and sang as they would. And he did it for nine years that both whizzed by and feel like an eternity: Liverpool fans can measure the length of his reign by looking at a picture of themselves from the year he took over. Or they can do what they’ve always done, and look at him instead.
In October 2015, and April 2024. Alamy
Alamy
At his press conference on the day he was unveiled as Liverpool manager, Klopp said it “doesn’t matter what people think when you come in. It’s much more important what people think when you leave.”
So let’s leave the final word to Daire Gorman.
“He has made me a Liverpool supporter and has made me love the club more by meeting him. If I’ve had a long week or bad week at school, I’ll remember that Liverpool are playing on Saturday or Sunday. It really gives me something to look forward to.”
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From inspiring devotion to misunderstanding Dublin accents - Liverpool's Irish on 'intense' Klopp
A THREAD TO all of the end-of-reign tributes to Jurgen Klopp is the idea that he simply got Liverpool and its biggest football club, but that is to tell the story the wrong way round.
“His connection with the city was not him connecting with the city,” says journalist Tony Evans. “It was the city connecting with him. I once asked him about it. He said, ‘I didn’t get the city: I don’t go out, how can I go out!? I get mobbed.’ So instead, the city got him.”
Klopp did not bend Liverpool to his will as Alex Ferguson did at Manchester United. Instead, he magnetised the place to his personality. Klopp’s was a softer power.
But like Ferguson, everything that happened at his club – for better and for worse – flowed from Klopp’s unique, irresistible character.
And this is why the story of Klopp’s Liverpool years cannot be neatly told by stats or numbers. Klopp’s reign was to be experienced rather than understood. Less important than what he taught those around him was how he made those people feel.
******
He made everyone he met feel like they were at the centre of the world. German journalist Uli Hesse told me in 2015 that Klopp’s ability to live totally in the present moment was similar to that of a Tibetan monk: he will look at you directly in interviews, and won’t allow his gaze wander off to the side.
Daire Gorman met Klopp at Liverpool’s training ground last year, and you are one of millions to have seen their encounter.
“That day, me and Klopp just clicked,” he says. “It felt like he didn’t know the cameras were there. I forgot about them for a while, too. It felt like it was just me and Klopp in the same room.
“He spoke to Mo Salah the exact same way as he spoke to the cleaner upstairs and the chef in the kitchen. He treated Diaz and Nunez the exact same way as he treated me.”
Those who have been drawn into his orbit all attest to the impression that Klopp is genuinely interested in their lives. When the life of Sean Cox was changed forever in an unprovoked attack by a Roma fan outside Anfield in 2018, Klopp wrote the family a letter condemning the incident and wishing Sean well. He has met the Cox family on an annual basis around their subsequent trips to games, and they met in the tunnel after the victory over Brighton in April.
“Sean stood up and I think Jurgen was taken aback by it,” says Sean’s wife, Martina. “He was like. ‘Wow.’ They have this little rapport between them, he really encourages Sean, saying ‘You’re doing really well, keep up the good work.’
“I was there, my daughter and her boyfriend were there, we had a carer with us, and a friend of mine. He made sure to have a little chat with everybody. What you see is what you get, it is pure and genuine.”
“He is really unselfconscious and does not give a flying fuck what people think about him,” says Evans. “That’s the thing about Klopp: there’s nothing fake about him and that endeared him to the city.”
******
It endeared him to everyone at the club, too. Chiefly the owners. Eddie Howe and Carlo Ancelotti were in the mix for the job, but their hopes were ended the moment Klopp told Fenway Sports Group that he could fight on all four fronts with Brendan Rodgers’ hodgepodge squad.
That squad bought in quickly: running 8km further than they had under Rodgers in Klopp’s first game.
“In football, your past with other clubs buys you some time,” says Richie Partridge, a former Liverpool player who returned to the club as a physio during Klopp’s tenure. “But footballers will give you one or two weeks and if they are not having you, they are not having you. Within two weeks, every player – to a man – would have bent over backwards to do anything he wanted. It’s down to his man-management skills and his personality.”
The style of play was soaked in Klopp’s own character: the players were as frenzied and emotional as their manager on the sideline. The fans responded and swelled the legion of the early believers, and Klopp reciprocated in celebrating a late equaliser against West Brom in front of the Kop. It was an exuberant means of greeting a humdrum result but it was an early insight that, under Klopp, no ironies or cynicism would survive.
Irish underage international Conor Masterson trained with Liverpool’s first team under Klopp across two seasons, making the bench for the 2018 Champions League quarter-final win against Manchester City.
“He is so passionate, so infectious, and so all-in,” he says of Klopp. “And that’s why the team was like that. It’s because of him. He will speak in calm moments but he is very motivational. He makes you feel like you can do anything.”
I ask Masterson for his memories of the team-talk ahead of that City victory, but he tells me he remembers the speech before the following game against Everton instead.
“We had just beaten Man City and he knew that we were on such a high, it’s natural you would have a little bit of a dip, mentally,” he says. “He was so calm, but he was saying it in a manner that you had to do it. As if your life depended on it. We drew 0-0 but he made sure we didn’t lose that game. I remember walking out thinking, ‘This guy is unbelievable.’ And I knew, ‘Yeah, we are ready to go here, we are focused.’”
As Masterson describes it, Liverpool’s players connected partly with Klopp’s motivational powers and his ambition, but mostly with his ability to reassure. The tactical and physical demands were clear and consistent, and the focus was never allowed to wander beyond the next game. “It was ‘don’t worry about this, don’t worry about that, this is what we are going to do’”, says Masterson. “He was always in control. It is a great quality.”
Klopp also knew when to diffuse tension with a laugh. Ahead of the 2018 Champions League final against Real Madrid, he gathered the squad in the dressing room before pulling up his shirt to show he was wearing a brand-new pair of Cristiano Ronaldo-branded underpants. That night ended in defeat, and Klopp forged the bonds of his early seasons in the smithy of similar losses.
His first season featured a run to the League Cup and Europa League finals -the latter turbocharged by wins over Manchester United and Borussia Dortmund – but they lost them both. The function room of their hotel in Switzerland after the Europa League final was the scene of the post-match bash, the atmosphere of which was funereal in the aftermath of defeat to Sevilla. Players, staff and invited guests drifted slowly down from their rooms to show face, with Klopp the last to arrive. He took a look around him, strode up to the DJ and took his microphone.
Jason McAteer was in the room, and recalls Klopp’s speech. “This feeling we have right now is one we never want to feel again. The expectation is for more finals and success and I hope everyone is on board. Now, I’ve done my little speech, everyone get pissed and have a good time.” The atmosphere instantly changed.
Partridge was at the club for the Champions League triumph in 2019, but when I ask for his favourite Klopp memories, he picks a couple of defeats. The first was a 3-0 defeat to Watford in December 2015 on the day of the club’s Christmas party, and the second a 4-3 collapse to Bournemouth hours before a flight to Barcelona for a team-bonding session.
“We were all expecting for there to be a massive downer on things as we have just got beaten, and we’ll have to pretend we are having fun here,” says Partridge. “On both occasions – once on the plane and once on the team bus – Jurgen stood up in front of everyone and told everyone in no uncertain terms to forget about the result, as we are going out and have a good time because we win together and we lose together.”
This ethos eventually pervaded the whole club.
“He has made Liverpool a family and more than a football club”, says Daire when I ask him about Klopp’s achievements. “We win together, we lose together, and we fight together, is what I always say.”
******
The winning wasn’t inevitable. In the early stages of the 2017/18 season, a couple of Liverpool players were privately wondering whether the team had hit their ceiling, fearing there was no Plan B. Liverpool were brilliant but brittle. Salah had joined Firmino, Mane, and Coutinho at the club so the they were scoring goals at a ferocious rate but they were also leaking them just as fast. They started the season with a 3-3 draw at Watford, got thumped 4-1 by Spurs and 5-0 by Man City, and blew a three-goal lead to draw away to Sevilla in the Champions League.
2018 brought two major turning points.
The most significant was the signing of Virgil van Dijk in January, the £75 million fee leaving those unconnected with Liverpool agog at the fee. Fans were even more shocked by the price: it was the top-dollar transfer fee that Liverpool’s moneyball-loyal owners hadn’t dreamed of spending. Klopp’s powers of persuasion meant his bosses stumped up.
Van Dijk’s impact in leading Liverpool to the Champions League final – and Loris Karius’ performance in that final – paved the way for another massive outlay on Alisson Becker in the summer.
Crucial, too, was the return of Pep Lijnders to Klopp’s staff in the summer of 2018, after a brief and unhappy spell in charge of NEC Nijmegen, whom he had joined from Liverpool at the start of the year. Van Dijk and Alisson brought leadership and solidity, while Lijnders some of the tactical detail Klopp lacked.
“Pep was massive for him,” says Masterson. “Klopp knows what he is good at but he also knows what he needs help with. Pep was so detailed, and he changed how the team played and how the team functioned. Klopp had his heavy metal football but Pep brought in little details that maybe Klopp wouldn’t have used before.
“Klopp is clever. He knows he is very good with people, but to get the detail in the games and to improve the team where it needed to get better, he brought Pep up.”
Lijnders made the subtle game-to-game tactical tweaks, often expressed in terms of which opponent to press and when to press them. Klopp would later say Ljinders changed how he viewed the game.
******
Soon the world changed their view of Liverpool. The 2018/19 season was the first crank of a machine that delivered the Champions League and the Premier League across two seasons. It’s rare you can precisely measure how close they came to more, but in Liverpool’s case it was all of 11mm: had Salah’s shot crossed the line away to Manchester City, Liverpool would have won their first Premier League title undefeated. They responded to that defeat by picking up 104 points over their next 38 league games.
The relentlessness of the team reflected that of their manager: there’s a reason Masterson found the team-talk before the lower-key Everton league game more powerful than the one before the megawatt Champions League tie with City.
A centre-back injury crisis precipitated the slump following the title win in 19/20, but they recovered to salvage Champions League qualification ahead of a season in which they added two domestic cups to complete a clean sweep of trophies under Klopp. But again they lost a Champions League final to Real Madrid and a league title by a single point to Manchester City, and Klopp explained his side’s capacity for heartbreak at the end of the season by saying that, “to win big, you have to risk losing big”.
One irony that did persist through the glory years. While the team was built in Klopp’s image and maintained and propelled by Klopp’s energy, it was all possible because he wasn’t its only architect.
Masterson uses an interesting phrase to describe Klopp’s work at Liverpool.
“He knitted it all together.”
******
For all of Klopp’s charisma, Liverpool’s brilliance was the product of the greyer fact of a series of smart people in a room together, making all of the right decisions.
The recruitment led by sporting director Michael Edwards delivered hit after hit after hit on Liverpool’s comparatively lower budget. Edwards’ eye for talent was critical: he drove the signing of Salah when Klopp wanted Julian Brandt. In turn, the clarity of Klopp’s style and tactical demands made it easier for Edwards to identify the right player because, in football, everything is contingent on the right environment and the right relationships. To give one example, Edwards loved Roberto Firmino so much he called his dog after him, but it took Klopp to turn Firmino into a club hero. Brendan Rodgers had him playing at right wing-back.
Their working dynamic clicked, but the equilibrium didn’t last forever. Liverpool’s Camelot gradually fell, to the point that Klopp was one of the last men standing.
There was a lot of turnover behind the scenes, and Klopp could be difficult and abrasive in driving standards. The has delivered enough tetchy TV interviews and snarling tirades in the face of fourth officials for that fact to be no secret.
When I ask Partridge the stock, what’s he like? question about Klopp, he splits his answer in two.
“On a social and personal level, he is one of the most remarkable men you will ever come across. From a professional side of things, he was extremely, extremely intense.”
This intensity meant Klopp could live in moments while unaware of the collateral being taken at the fringes. During an interregnum among the physio staff, Partridge had a brief stint as the run-on physio during first-team games and on his first outing, he ran onto treat a player and then returned to the bench to follow protocol and inform Klopp of the situation.
“As you might imagine, Jurgen was totally engrossed in the game,” says Partridge. “The player had a tight hamstring and I wanted to tell him ‘Listen, give him five minutes and see how he is, and if he is struggling he will let us know by sitting back down.’ I, in my thick Irish accent, spouted this out very quickly, and he turned around at me, glared and said, ‘Will you speak fucking English to me.’”
Klopp never mentioned the moment again. Partridge believes it’s not that he forgot about it, but that he never realised it had happened. He has no issue with Klopp, but admires his ability to move on and hold no personal grudges, which is far from general across the game.
“I know the demands and at that level, the buck stops with him”, says Partridge. “He needs to be like that. What people can sometimes mix up is what’s professional and what’s personal. I can guarantee anything he has said that has upset people, it wasn’t personal.
“He wants to strive for a better professional environment, and people who have not been involved in football for a long time, or are just used to Liverpool and haven’t seen lower leagues or the other side of football, I can understand it. But I can guarantee that however difficult he can be to work with at times, none of it is personal.”
The most significant behind-scenes exit was Edwards, and he was soon followed by his successor, Julian Ward. Both are coming back to Liverpool as part of the post-Klopp future.
In his farewell announcement interview with the club’s media, Klopp said he had accumulated more power than was ever envisioned, and one of the reasons he was standing down was because nobody was ever going to sack him. The power vacuum post-Ward led Klopp to becoming more involved in transfers than before, with Jorg Schmadtke parachuted in to help get some deals over the line, saying he was working for Klopp.
Amid this, Liverpool bucked a years-long policy in becoming drawn into a messy and public saga around Moses Caicedo and Romeo Lavia, ultimately ending up with neither. Those who did arrive didn’t quite hit the same heights: neither Luis Diaz and Darwin Nunez were signed by Edwards, and neither proved to be quite as reliable and effective as Mane and Firmino.
These added stresses and responsibilities may have played a role in draining the last of Klopp’s energy, and led to his decision to resign just 18 months after signing a contract through to 2026.
The full story behind Edwards’ exit have never been disclosed, but Jamie Carragher suggested it was influenced by the decision to grant a then 31-year-old Jordan Henderson a lengthy contract extension in 2021.
Klopp’s penultimate season brutally exposed the aged legs of the midfielders to whom he had remained too loyal, Henderson among them. But is this a fault of a man who allowed personal relationships cloud his judgement, or is this decline just priced into Klopp’s means of success?
Liverpool achieved what they did during Klopp’s tenure because of the loyalty and effort he inspired among his players. The players responded because they connected with his authenticity and, in Partridge’s words, wanted to please him.
Kicking those players to the curb the moment they pass their physical peak would be the ruthless and pragmatic thing to do, but it wouldn’t have been in Klopp’s personality.
When I ask Partridge for his favourite moment from his time at Klopp’s Liverpool, he picks an image: Jurgen Klopp and Jordan Henderson in each other’s arms in the moments after the Champions League final win, sobbing.
******
If Klopp did knit Liverpool together, he was the golden seam all the same.
While he won every major trophy, even that feels like an unsatisfactory bottom line. But then again they jousted with Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, the greatest, best-resourced team English football has ever seen.
But no Liverpool fan cycling through their memory this weekend will tell you it was only ever about the trophies.
Klopp satisfied one fan base’s appetite for the vicarious: they lived every moment of a wild ride through a guy with whom they connected. The guy on the sideline jumped and screamed and pumped his fists as they would; he berated and embraced his players like they would; he laughed and drank and sang as they would. And he did it for nine years that both whizzed by and feel like an eternity: Liverpool fans can measure the length of his reign by looking at a picture of themselves from the year he took over. Or they can do what they’ve always done, and look at him instead.
At his press conference on the day he was unveiled as Liverpool manager, Klopp said it “doesn’t matter what people think when you come in. It’s much more important what people think when you leave.”
So let’s leave the final word to Daire Gorman.
“He has made me a Liverpool supporter and has made me love the club more by meeting him. If I’ve had a long week or bad week at school, I’ll remember that Liverpool are playing on Saturday or Sunday. It really gives me something to look forward to.”
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Conor Masterson Jurgen Klopp Liverpool richie partridge ynwa