https://twitter.com/skysportsnews/status/1751352446033543462?s=46
Some classic posts early in this thread
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Another poster broken by Klopp
This must be the best week in years for united fans. Almost make them forget about the rapists and the leaky roof
Telpis
We’re still in the doldrums over Jurgen’s decision to leave at the end of the season but hope springs eternal and the thought of a Meath U16 county title winner leading LFC is enticing. Xabi sharpened his English and kick passing during his stint over the road from Ratoath in the late 90’s.
Jürgen Klopp’s human side forced him to walk away from Liverpool
Football on Merseyside and throughout the nation will lose so much more than a manager when the German leaves the Anfield dugout this season
, Football Correspondent
Sunday January 28 2024, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
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Scott and Rebecca are friends of mine. Their beautiful daughter, India, passed away last year. Zac, their son, has found things hard and in November received an unexpected letter.
“Dear Zac, firstly I hope you don’t mind me writing to you. I have been told about your situation so, just as you have always supported us, now I would like to let you know that you have the support of everyone at Liverpool FC,” it began.
“As a club, we pride ourselves in always standing together in times of need. This is part of our DNA and it makes us who we are so it makes sense that we should stand with you now.”
The letter went on to talk about the “collective strength” of the football club and its community, “that we hope can reach any individual”, letting Zac know “on a personal level, I can assure you that you are in my thoughts and prayers.”
Klopp, seen here putting a consoling arm around Roberto Firmino after a game at Manchester City, had a knack of always reaching out to people
JON SUPER/AP
It was signed, “You’ll Never Walk Alone, Jürgen Klopp.”
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Liverpool and English football are going to lose more than a football manager. That was obvious when another friend visited Liverpool city centre in the hour after Klopp announced he was leaving the club after this season, describing it as “the world’s biggest funeral — just men staring into their phones”.
It was obvious from the reaction of Klopp’s biggest rival, Pep Guardiola, who said with sad warmth, “I have this feeling that he’s leaving part of us at Man City too.” At Anfield, at Sunday’s FA Cup tie with Norwich City, the noise, tears and banners will make it glaring.
It was telling, in the video he recorded for supporters, that Klopp, 56, spoke of finding ways to explain his decision to his wife, Ulla. She loves Merseyside and their life in the coastal village of Formby and persuaded him to stay when he was close to quitting midway through last season. Fatigued and mindful of his health, Klopp found 2022-23 a “dog year”, as he put it in his press conference on Friday.
Klopp obliges with a selfie for fans before the game away to Bournemouth last weekend
ROBIN JONES/GETTY IMAGES
He needed to rebuild his team, especially its midfield, and was fed up with the relentless schedule and noise. Among experiences that disillusioned him was one where, during Liverpool’s defeat at Old Trafford in August, a Liverpool fan stood behind Ulla yelling negatives about him throughout the game.
He was snapping at benign journalists in press conferences and overseeing performances that baffled him, like a 3-0 defeat against Wolves for which, he said afterwards, “I have no words.” But, with Ulla leading those who encouraged him to continue, Klopp regathered his fight and threw himself into the job with fresh energy, pushing Liverpool up the table and with help from an interim sporting director recruited to assist him — an old associate, Jörg Schmadtke — overhauled his squad, buying an entirely new midfield.
This season evokes even more parallels with Sir Alex Ferguson: a managerial tour de force where sharp recruitment, leadership and brilliant decision-making (witness the boldness and extraordinary impact of Klopp’s substitutions) has put a non-vintage Liverpool top of the league just as Fergie did with a non-vintage Manchester United in his final campaign.
But the underlying tiredness didn’t go away. It was also telling that the moment which made Klopp realise it was time for a break came when he sat down with staff to plan the next pre-season. He had the sudden thought, ‘What if I’m not here?’ and found it not daunting but enticing.
It’s “just the stuff you have to do next to it [the football],” Klopp said, explaining what drained him. An experienced fellow manager understands. “It’s the decision-making that tires you out. ‘What time are we eating dinner?’ ‘When’s the team meeting?’ ‘Where are we staying?’ ” he says.
Klopp’s presence on Merseyside is symbolised in so many ways: in this instance with a mural by artist Hugh Whitaker
PAUL ELLIS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
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On top of this there are media demands that have “gone to a totally different level in the past five years”. Before games there are press conferences and interviews with rights holders which, in an age saturated with content, are getting ever more left-field and demanding. Nobody wants a quick sit-down discussing team news any more — broadcasters want to take you on a walk round the training ground, throw a quiz at you, ask quirky lifestyle stuff, in the attempt to “get something different”. Quickly, that becomes grating and time-consuming.
After games a manager — especially of a club with Liverpool’s profile — will routinely have ten and more media assignments, hopping from podium to pitch-side podium for post-match broadcast interviews with domestic and foreign rights holders before doing radio, club channels and their post-match press conference.
Then there is the increasing complexity of coaching, analysis, recruitment and dealing with players. And logistics. In the Europa League, Liverpool are having one of those dreaded Thursday-Sunday-Thursday-Sunday seasons while maintaining runs in both domestic cups. The past week typified the toll on personal schedules.
Liverpool had a late Sunday afternoon kick off in Bournemouth and couldn’t fly home from there (for the second time this season) because of storms. Players were couriered home in luxury vans but for everyone else, including coaching staff, there was a five-hour bus journey back to John Lennon Airport, where their cars were parked, and then for Klopp another 90 minutes’ drive home. He got in close to 1am, had training the next day, then the next was on the road again — to London where, on Wednesday, Liverpool played Fulham.
At a League Managers Association conference before Christmas the keynote speakers included a brain expert who talked about sleep, a psychologist, a heart specialist and a business guru whose presentation was about reinventing yourself in middle age. This is a profession under increasing strain, increasingly conscious of workers’ need to look after themselves.
Klopp and Dalglish have been the bonds that have joined the club and community for so long
ANDREW POWELL/GETTY IMAGES
The reaction from those who know Klopp well is unanimously “good for him”. “He’s superman but people love him because he’s everyman, yet that means he has everyman issues,” one said. In the summer he became a granddad for the first time and is besotted with the child, a boy, yet has only seen him in snatched moments because (born to his stepson, Dennis) he lives in Germany.
At Klopp’s press conference it was poignant when he said, “I don’t want to wait until I’m too old to have a normal life” but also “I don’t know how normal life is. I have to figure it out.” This is a guy who became a father at 20, when he was playing amateur football, attending university and doing 6am shifts in a warehouse to pay for his studies. “I had to become a very serious person at a young age. All my friends would be calling me to go to the pub at night and every bone in my body wanted to say, ‘Yes! Yes! I want to go!’ But, of course, I couldn’t go,” he recalled. From there he went into professional playing and, for the last 24 years, the consuming world of coaching.
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He told Mike Gordon, president of Fenway Sports Group and the ownership’s man running Liverpool, of his intentions in November. Their bond is incredibly close and after establishing there was no chance of Klopp reconsidering, Gordon understood. However the players didn’t know until Klopp called a meeting before practice on Friday and told them in a dressing room at the training ground. Staff received an email and then the video for supporters was released.
Recorded in one take on Thursday, it was unscripted with Klopp wearing the gear of a normal middle-aged bloke — jumper, jeans and trainers. A nod to the civilian life he can’t wait to try on for size.
Liverpool have lost just one league game this season and even then it involved a VAR farce that went against them. The unknown is how this news will affect players but, when Liverpool try to fill what Jamie Carragher suggests will be a post-Klopp “vacuum”, finding someone who can captivate footballers in quite the same way might be impossible.
Ralf Rangnick described Klopp to me as a “menschenfänger” — a German word to describe charisma that literally means “people-catcher” — and nine seasons of listening to players speak about the Liverpool manager has brought home how special he is in this regard. Ibrahima Konaté told me about facing a choice between Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester United and Real Madrid and having his mind made up by a video call with Klopp. “I watched nothing else but his eyes. And I saw sincerity,” Konaté said.
Guardiola admitted on Friday that Klopp “would be leaving part of us at Man City” when he departed
ISAAC PARKIN/PA
Then there was Jan Kirchhoff, recalling for me how it was playing for Klopp at Mainz. “When he comes into a room it feels like the room is full of him,” Kirchhoff said. “He has — as we call it in German — he is able to deduct his thoughts. That means really complex things, he is able to break [them] down into simple sentences. Into player language. So it’s easy to give him what he wants.”
Yet Liverpool are losing someone who can do the ruthless side of leadership too. A fringe player who Klopp wanted to put in their place was told, “Listen, if my mum and dad hadn’t got together and had me you would never be a Premier League footballer”. Ask Mamadou Sakho, the former fan favourite who on a 2016 tour of the US delayed the squad’s outgoing flight by arriving at the airport late, was then late for a team meal, then didn’t show for a recovery session which impacted the schedule of physios. Klopp sent him home. Until a move to Crystal Palace, Sakho spent the next five months playing for Liverpool’s under-23s.
Ilkay Gundogan tells a story of a ferocious dressing-down at Dortmund (Gundogan’s crime was breaking club rules by reporting for training with a muscle problem without giving the physios notice). Gundogan kept protesting that he was still OK to train until Klopp yelled at him: “Do whatever the f*** you want to do!” But later, Klopp sidled up on the practice pitch and put a big arm round his midfielder. “My friend, do you know why I was so angry? I just care about you. And I don’t want you to get injured,” Klopp said, giving him a hug.
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Liverpool are losing the captain of their culture, someone who stood up for the collective ethic in Doha when they won the Club World Cup in 2019. At the presentation, upon hearing fringe players might not receive medals, Klopp threatened, “OK, I will go there and when the Sheikh or whoever wants to give me a medal I won’t take it. Tell them I will kill the whole ceremony.” Extra medals were duly found.
At the old training ground, Melwood, there was a portrait of Klopp made up of the names of every single employee who worked there and this is a manager who has the perhaps old-school view that his job is to carry everyone at the football club, whether in the football department or not.
He set a tone at the end of his first season after Liverpool lost the 2016 Europa League final to Sevilla in Basel. With a whole room of employees moping at the post-match party Klopp strode across the dancefloor, grabbed the mic and said: “Two hours ago, you all felt shit. But now hopefully you all feel better. This is just the start for us. We will play in many more finals.” Then he broke into a rendition of, “We are Liverpool, tra la la la la.”
What now? Billy Hogan, Liverpool’s CEO, promised that in the hunt for a successor the club will go through “the same process that brought us Jürgen”, which involved compiling a 60-page dossier on the German, drawn from info from journalists, players, colleagues and Liverpool’s then director of research, Ian Graham, who provided detailed statistical analysis showing that in all but two of 14 previous seasons as a boss Klopp had significantly overperformed given his budget.
Michael Edwards, the former sporting director, even sat, anonymously, in a hotel where Klopp was staying, listening to him talking on the phone, to get a sense of his dealings with people. Though Edwards and Graham are gone, Gordon remains and crunching the numbers will be Will Spearman, Graham’s successor, well-apprenticed in the “Liverpool way” of using data. There is confidence at the club that the systems and knowledge in place will lead them to the right successor.
Alonso is among the early favourites to become Klopp’s successor
THILO SCHMUELGEN/REUTERS
Xabi Alonso is the early favourite and Roberto De Zerbi is in the frame but nobody should jump the gun. A year ago many were predicting Jude Bellingham was Anfield-bound but in pulling out of the race for him in order to spread their budget on four midfielders, not one, Liverpool showed themselves willing to risk criticism and go against fan and media opinion to make appropriate recruitment decisions.
With that remarkable knack for finding the right phrase, at the right moment, and being at the same time both lighthearted and affecting, the grizzled, mellower (say managerial adversaries) Klopp mused at his press conference, “We are not young rabbits any more, we don’t jump as high as we once did”, and it spoke of a man who has seen a world only filled with football, but whose life has had room for too little else for too long.
A few years ago, he mused about why we are all on this earth. He suggested life was “about leaving better places behind. About not taking yourself too seriously. About giving your all. About loving and being loved”.
He has not gone yet but even if he left tomorrow how very thoroughly, at Liverpool, he has lived out that mission.
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Ulla sounds like a proper lady, Jurgen is lucky to have her in his corner.
He surely will never walk alone.
She’s the apple of his eye
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Wow. A tough read for any liverpool fan that. Knowing that it was the abuse his wife heard him take from the liverpool fans that got him thinking of leaving.
Now that’s one powerful word
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Ulla up there with the great managerial LFC wives who fell in love with the city and people of Liverpool like Marina Dalglish and Montse Benitez (and Nessie Shankly long before me time). YNWA Ulla.
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Eh its too late for that mate. Your abuse of him in front of her turned his thoughts to leaving.
I’d never abuse Jurgen mate. I love the man. Him and Ulla are very welcome any time they’d like to visit us in Ratoath.
PS I’m usually on the Kop as well @myboyblue, which most MGFs would tell you is not where the players’ families go to watch games.
So, more lies. You hate to see it. I believed in you and continue to do so.
I’m sure you’ve a few idiots in the crowd giving him abuse. Furthermore, you’ve the occasional Man U fan like @Raylan attending Liverpool games at Anfield.
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Eh, that ship has sailed
What will Jurgen get? A statue or a stand? Both?