“I know for a fact he wanted to go out at the top. I sometimes wonder whether he’d have left if we’d won the league the year before.”
In 2013, Sir Alex Ferguson announced out of the blue that he was stepping down as Manchester United boss at the end of the season. There have been few moments that have shocked the Premier League in quite the same way since, until Jurgen Klopp’s surprise revelation that he was leaving Liverpool.
Ferguson’s announcement came two weeks after he’d clinched his 13th and final Premier League title, with several matches of the campaign still to play. He’d looked all set to clinch that title a year earlier, only for Manchester City to pip their rivals on the final day, thanks to Sergio Aguero’s famous winner over QPR.
In the current issue of FourFourTwo magazine, Ferguson’s long-serving kitman and friend Albert Morgan pondered whether the Scot would have retired there and then in May 2012, had the Aguero moment not happened.
After so many successful years in charge of a team, choosing the right moment to go is not easy. Understandably, you want the fans’ last memories of you to be happy ones, the final seal on your legacy at the club.
Ferguson got it right, in a way that Arsene Wenger didn’t – he’s still revered at Arsenal, and rightly so, but it’s hard to erase the memories of those turbulent final years, when a section of the club’s fanbase campaigned for him to leave. To them, he’d outstayed his welcome – a sad state of affairs for someone who’d given so much to the Gunners.
Klopp has been Liverpool boss for more than eight years, but has explained that he was running low on energy. His departure, then, became a question of when and not if.
At Borussia Dortmund, he stayed for seven years, and didn’t entirely get the timing of his exit right. They’d won the Bundesliga title in 2011 and 2012, but finished seventh in his final season.
At Liverpool, his seventh year saw the Reds disappointingly finish fifth last term, as they took time to rebuild after the loss of Sadio Mane, introducing new blood with the likes of Darwin Nunez and Cody Gakpo, but needing to give them time to gel.
If he’d already been thinking about leaving – and only Klopp himself will know that – then it wasn’t the right moment to say his final farewell.
This season, Liverpool are five points clear at the top of the Premier League, with a real chance of winning a second title in the space of five years. Achieve that, and there could be no more perfect ending – something Klopp is probably well aware of.
The risk he’s taken is by announcing his departure with four months of the season still remaining. He probably knew it would leak in the media eventually, so wanted to be the man to tell the fans himself, and do things in his own way.
It should be remembered that Ferguson announced his retirement once previously, at the beginning of what was due to be his final season in 2001/02. He was later talked out of it by his wife, having seen Manchester United labour at times that campaign, believing the uncertainty over the future had affected the players. It wasn’t an ending he was comfortable with.
Will that happen to Liverpool, who still face a fierce battle for the title, from Manchester City in particular? Or will players and fans galvanise even further to give him the send-off he truly deserves, holding that Premier League trophy aloft in May? He’ll hope for the latter – expect no shortage of ‘do it for Klopp’ calls over the next few months.
After decades in the wilderness, in the Premier League at least, it was Klopp who finally took Liverpool back to the summit. Now, his mission is to leave on top, having conquered the mountain once more.
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