Jurgen Klopp will leave his post as Liverpool manager in the summer

Before the next weekend, Liverpool fans experienced a severe shock. German coach Jurgen Klopp, who has led the Liverpool team since 2015, turned them into an undisputed football giant and won a bunch of prestigious trophies with the club, announced that at the end of the current season, which also promises to be very successful, he will leave his post. Klopp said that he no longer has enough energy to lead the team as before.

Today, all leading British publications published a rather long speech that Liverpool coach Jurgen Klopp delivered at a press conference. And there is nothing strange in the fact that it instantly turned into an informational super hit.

At the very beginning of his speech, Klopp admitted that he understood that everything he would say would come as a real shock to Liverpool fans. And then he announced that at the end of the season he would leave the club along with most of the members of his staff. The coach spent a long time explaining why he made this decision, despite the fact that he “loves absolutely everything connected with the club.” But it was not difficult to isolate the keywords. They are about the fact that 56-year-old Klopp “no longer has enough energy” to lead Liverpool in the previous regime, which is an endless race – for prizes, for great football players on the market.

Why the definition of “shock” in this case sounded quite natural is understandable. For two reasons. The first is that Liverpool have recently been associated in many ways with Jurgen Klopp.

In a statement announcing Klopp, the president of the club’s owner, Fenway Sports Group, Mike Gordon, called his hiring “one of the greatest insights” the company has had. Of course, this is a bit of hyperbole. After all, when Liverpool signed a contract with the German in October 2015, appointing him to replace the fired Brendan Rodgers, he was already considered a star among young professionals – two German championship gold medals with Borussia Dortmund, a breakthrough to the Champions League final, curious game schemes. But there is no escaping the fact that Klopp’s arrival at Liverpool truly transformed the club’s status.

Even before him, he was a grandee, a giant, but with reservations, because despite all the brightness of the brand, he rarely reaches prestigious trophies, and in the English championship he often finds himself outside the top three. In general, not the same level as Manchester United or front-line neophytes Chelsea and Manchester City.

With Klopp, Liverpool quickly found stability. In 2018, he already played in the final match of the Champions League, losing to Real Madrid, in 2019 he won it, in 2020, after a 30-year break, he took gold in the English Championship, while simultaneously receiving other awards – for winning the UEFA Super Cup , in the Club World Cup, in English cup competitions.

At the same time, Liverpool has acquired a trendiness that makes experts relish the integrity and flexibility of its formations, and stability.

Let’s say, in 2022, Liverpool’s prize catch was formally not great and consisted of the FA Cup and the English League Cup, but he again played in the decisive match of the Champions League (again Real Madrid tripped him up), and in the national championship he gave gold to Manchester City” only on the flag. And this stability is also well described by the percentage of victories won by the Liverpudlians under Klopp – it goes beyond 60, and none of their coaches has had this in history.

The second reason is the fact that it seems that the right moment for Jurgen Klopp to leave, citing fatigue, would have been last season, which Liverpool, in fact, failed. But now he is at the top again – he is leading the championship, five points ahead of Manchester City, albeit with an “extra” match, he has just reached the League Cup final, has not yet been eliminated from the FA Cup, will play in the League play-offs Europe. But Klopp still wanted to leave, leaving, as he put it, the team in “good hands.” True, it is not yet known whose hands these will be. British media resources are hesitant to name the most likely successor to the German, limiting themselves to assumptions like that made by The Guardian, which believes that the owners of Liverpool, remembering the “insight” from Germany, will definitely contact Xabi Alonso: the Spanish specialist’s Bayer is now on top of the German championship table.

Alexey Dospehov