‘It’s not so important what people think when you come in,” Jürgen Klopp observed on being unveiled as Liverpool manager in October 2015. “It’s much more important what people think when you leave.”
Today is the day Klopp leaves. It is the final day of the Premier League season in England, and Manchester City will probably be (again) crowned champions. It is also the final day of Klopp’s tenure as Liverpool manager, a moment that will wring the emotions, and not just at Anfield. Football is deeply tribal, but Klopp stepping down is an event that resonates well beyond Liverpool supporters, even beyond the world of football.
Football managers come and go. Since Klopp arrived in Liverpool, Nottingham Forest have gone through nine permanent managers, Everton eight, Chelsea seven, Spurs five and Manchester United four. Managerial instability has become part of the landscape of football. So why has Klopp’s leaving stirred such emotions?
Part of the answer is that Klopp is a world-class coach, probably one of the top five of his generation. Under his tutelage, Liverpool won the Premier League title for the first time in 30 years, their first Champions League since 2005, the Club World Cup, as well as a bevy of domestic cups.
Klopp’s rivalry with Pep Guardiola, the Spaniard who became Manchester City manager four months after Klopp arrived at Liverpool, and who may be the greatest of modern managers, has not only come to define the contemporary Premier League but also to reshape the character of English football. Guardiola said of Klopp’s retirement: “I felt when I heard it that a part of Man City… we will lose something. We cannot define our period here without him. Impossible.”
And yet, for all this, Klopp’s legacy lies not just in the winning of trophies, or in the reinstating of an ailing club to the top of the world game, or in helping to reshape the English game. It is also in his ability to personify the idea of football as a game for fans and not just for finance. Most managers are former players, all are fans of the game. But few have managed as Klopp has to fuse the rational detachment necessary to be a great manager with the emotion and fervour felt by fans.
“This is one thing about football that people don’t always understand,” he once observed. “The results, you forget. You get them all mixed up. But those little stories… I will never forget them.”
For a fan, sport is more than simply a spectacle. Yes, we value skill and speed and beauty. But, beyond all that, what sports fans really live on, and for, is passion. Sport, and football in particular, is nothing without emotional attachment. Supporting a team becomes a strand of who you are and is absorbed into your identity.
What gives football its heart, its soul and its drama is that every game, every fan, is part of a wider story, a thread within a collective memory and an imagined community. It is why every week hundreds of thousands travel to the ends of the country to follow teams that have never won a major trophy and may never do so. It is why many lower league clubs, from Barnsley to Swindon, become so important as social institutions in their towns, providing a feeling of civic pride and a kind of mutual hope and aspiration.
Football, though, and the English Premier League in particular, is also big business. When the Premier League launched in 1992, total revenue in its first season was £205m. Last year, Manchester City alone boasted revenues of £713m – more than three times the aggregate revenues of all the clubs 30 years ago.
Manchester City is owned by Sheikh Mansour, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family and vice-president of UAE. The club’s alleged stretching of football’s financial rules has become symbolic of the new face of football finance. It is currently charged with 115 counts of alleged financial irregularity. Whereas smaller clubs, such as Everton and Nottingham Forest have been swiftly deducted points for breaking financial rules, City have managed to drag out its far more serious case for years, without it coming to court.
As money has started ruling the game, so the football itself – the skill, the beauty, the passion – has become subservient to the product and the brand. A club like Liverpool may not possess Man City’s riches, but it is nevertheless part of football’s elite. Three years ago, it joined in the attempt to create a breakaway European Super League, whose sole purpose was minting money. Only pressure from supporters forced the clubs to back down.
This is why a figure like Klopp – a self-described “football romantic” – commands respect. Not just because he is great coach but also because of his investment in the emotion of football, his ability to feel the game as a supporter does. Even Klopp’s less admirable traits – his touchline antics, his sometimes uncontrolled fury at match officials, his sniping at critics – draw on that connection. It may be unseemly for a manager to let his emotions get the better of him, but it is how a supporter lives the game.
Football romanticism can easily give way – and often does – to the maudlin or the mawkish. Klopp sometimes crosses the line, but he is also aware of it. He has a deep respect for Liverpool, both club and city, its people, its history and its traditions. But, in that first press conference, he insisted that fans should not “put that history, a big history, in a backpack and carry it [around] all day. We have to work in the present.”
Klopp has described football as “the most important of the least important things”. In allowing us to recognise the importance of passion and joy, of solidarity and collective identity, it can allow us to think more seriously about the more important things, too. In an age in which there are fractious debates about cosmopolitanism and rootedness, about identity and belonging, Klopp, a German who has laid down genuine roots in a northern English city, has, without consciously setting out to do so, shown the possibilities of negotiating between the two, of finding a sense of belonging that is neither stifling nor precious.
As the curtain comes down on Klopp’s Liverpool reign today, many of us will be shedding more than a tear or two.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
