The departure this weekend of two of England’s most influential and successful football managers will be felt beyond sport. There’s no doubt that the loss of Chelsea’s Emma Hayes from the Women’s Super League and Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp from the Premier League offers important lessons for the game on why leadership matters. Their personalities and tactical nous demonstrated why managers can help clubs do better than their players’ skills alone suggest.
Both managers also gave football a human face. Hayes was appointed by Chelsea in August 2012. Her team won 15 trophies, averaging more than one a year. She could sign off with a 16th on Saturday, with this season’s title race between Chelsea and Manchester City going down to the final match. She became synonymous with the English game at home and abroad and displayed her acute analytical sense of the game as a TV pundit.
In 2021, she rightly described as “an insult” to women’s football the notion that a move to a men’s League One role would be considered a step up. The message was that women’s football was equal though distinct. Her warning that parenting demands on female coaches were causing some to leave the jobs they love must be heard – not just by clubs but by partners too. Hayes’s move to manage the US women’s team is not just about taking to the world stage, but also about seeking a better work‑life balance after tragic personal loss. She is the greatest but she is also human.
Klopp also transcended the sport. His near decade rivalry with Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola produced some of the best football, and some of the best matches, seen in England’s Premier League. Klopp won eight trophies. His last game in charge against Wolves on Sunday will be long remembered. His reason for going – that he had run out of energy – showed him to be human and to care about being human.
Klopp’s triumph was to personify his football club’s home city. He had an irreverent, irrepressibly pro-European, temperamental character that played into a view many local fans had of themselves. Even rival supporters sometimes conceded they would have liked to have had managers that sounded like Klopp.
He spoke out against Liverpool’s attempt to form a breakaway Super League, echoed fans’ concerns over ticket prices and took a firm stand against unvaccinated football players during the pandemic. In his final pre-match press conference he came out against video assistant referees. Our sportswriter Jonathan Liew put it best when he wrote that Klopp had come to “represent a kind of resistance: putting the human being back in the machine, the idea that superior wealth and autocratic power could be overcome through the ingenuity of collective spirit”.
Modern football coaches are often seen as the spokespeople for their clubs. This makes it easy to overrate their importance. But Hayes and Klopp stand out for their impact both on the game they loved and the wider society they shaped for the better.
