I’m part of a WhatsApp chat dedicated to Liverpool football club. The group picture? Jürgen Klopp holding the Premier League trophy aloft. Our first league title in 30 years. The first I’d been able to celebrate in my lifetime, as a fan who kicked a ball from the age of five and at one point played for the club’s girls’ team.
We are bereft. Since Klopp arrived in 2015, much hyped after his Bundesliga successes and much welcomed after a period of diminishing returns at Anfield, the German has won a panoply of honours.
But loving Klopp has been as much about the man lifting the silverware as the silverware itself. From humble origins in the Black Forest, Klopp studied for a sports science master’s alongside pursuing his playing career. “I had fourth division feet and a first division head,” he said of his desire to turn to management.
His keen intelligence is a key part of his character, along with the overt passion, left-of-centre politics and self-deprecating sense of humour. During the pandemic, he pleaded for people to listen to the experts in this anti-expert age. He talked eloquently about Brexit.
His politics are one of the reasons he has been such a good fit for my home city. “I will never vote for the right,” Klopp once told an interviewer. “I believe in the welfare state.” In this, he echoed perhaps the club’s most iconic manager, Bill Shankly. Klopp understands Liverpool implicitly, and in his exit announcement talked about how much receiving the freedom of the city meant to him.
Even rival supporters like and respect the man in the permanent baseball cap with the blinding veneers. I have friends who otherwise have zero interest in football but love Klopp. The memes and social media clips abound.
There was the time he pulled a hamstring while celebrating. Or when, in a sport still rife with homophobia, he joked with an especially dulcet-toned male translator about being attracted to his “erotic voice”. But my favourite off-field Klopp moment was when, during a press conference, he realised after many years in England that he’d been saying “brain fuck” instead of “brain fog”.
It is so rare in the present era to have a manager of such longevity and unanimously adored. Klopp’s triple fist pumps to the Anfield home crowds after matches are the endorphin equivalent of a marathon finish. His hand on heart is a symbol of his devotion. Even Klopp’s wife, Ulla, has become an idol with her own fan song.
“Hits different” has become an internet phrase to describe an elevated feeling. The club’s recent great times, and the bad – our miraculous Champions League semi-final comeback against Barcelona (which I watched, spellbound, in a Cuban hotel room); missing out on the league by a single point (twice) – have hit different because of Klopp and everything he has given.
As much as the forward Mohamed Salah is our talisman, it is Klopp who has been the real star of LFC for the past eight years. Auf wiedersehen, pet. You’ll never walk alone.
