Jurgen Klopp subjected himself to a video nasty recently, watching back one of Liverpool’s defeats. “It was proper torture,” he said. He was not talking about the 2023 losses to Brentford, Brighton and Wolves, matches that could rank among the worst of his reign at Liverpool. Instead, the torturous element was the sense that his side did a lot right. Reliving the 2022 Champions League final for the first time was a different sort of agony. “We played a good game and could have won the game – and that’s the decisive word because we could but didn’t, because they scored and we didn’t, and that’s the decisive reason,” he said.
Klopp, the great proponent of heavy-metal football, watched it with the sound off, immersed in his thoughts, sat on his own. “Unfortunately,” he said. “There was a feeling of here and there and with an extra spark we could have made this thing [happen].” He felt his team were too cautious at times. “We did not take enough risks in little moments, we were not adventurous enough,” he explained. With a bit more boldness, Liverpool could have pulled off a historic cup treble.
Instead, he remains a one-time Champions League winner. It puts him three behind the nonpareil Carlo Ancelotti. A rematch with Real Madrid may not be a revenge mission, but it feels like a clash of opposites. Perhaps Real are Liverpool’s kryptonite. Klopp’s brand of football, after all, is based on the speed and intensity to create chaos. And then there is Real, the veterans who play the game at their own pace, who seem utterly unworried when trailing or dominated, a side with the personality of the managerial king of cool. “I don’t think you can make this team panic,” Klopp reflected. “They don’t lose confidence in one second. Carlo is the most relaxed manager I’ve met in my life. He is one of the best people you could meet, a fantastic, humble person, super-smart and nice and his man management is on a completely different level to anyone. I admire him a lot.”
If Klopp fires his players up, maybe Ancelotti cools his down. Real choose their own speed. Liverpool have to go at 100mph. “If you don’t play your best you don’t have a chance,” Klopp reflected. “Real Madrid don’t have to play their best and still have a chance. That’s the difference and that’s pretty special.”
This may have been the draw he dreaded but he struck an upbeat tone. He is in his eighth year at Anfield and his only Champions League exits have come to clubs from the same city: to Atletico Madrid once and Real three times, including two finals. Facing them could stir memories of Loris Karius’s traumatic night in 2018, of Vinicius Junior getting the better of Trent Alexander-Arnold to score in 2021 and 2022 alike.
Yet if Klopp’s sense of anticipation stemmed in part from Borussia Dortmund’s 4-1 demolition of Jose Mourinho’s Real in the 2013 semi-finals, many a Liverpool fan will treasure thoughts of 2009’s 4-0 evisceration: those of a certain vintage will remember Alan Kennedy galloping in to score the only goal of the 1981 final. A superpower summit tends to deliver. “You have to cherish these moments,” Klopp said. “That’s Liverpool-Real Madrid, we all dreamt of that, it will never change and it will be a special game. It is the Champions League, one of the biggest games in the world; at least one of the biggest games I ever heard about.”
It was a fixture that Real president Florentino Perez cited as grounds for a Super League. Instead, it has tended to be an advertisement for the Champions League; Perez claimed it had a rarity but, if a regularity has given it an epic status, so have the stakes. These are not league games.
It has been a final. Now it may contain a finalist. “In the last few years one of us was always kind of in the final, that’s how it feels at least, and usually if you want to get to the final you have to kick us out or them,” Klopp said. Real have been in five finals in the last decade, winning each. Klopp has been in four more, three with Liverpool.
If Ancelotti is the European Cup’s most successful manager ever, Klopp is the most frequent finalist in the last 10 years. Now, with Liverpool eighth in the Premier League, the risk is that this is his last Champions League tie for at least 19 months. And yet Liverpool feel reinvigorated. Wins over Everton and Newcastle have altered the impression that this is a formality for Real. “Four weeks ago it would have been different but life is all about timing and maybe we found our feet right in time for this game,” Klopp said.
Real have already acquired the Club World Cup trophy this month but there is the feeling form matters less to them than pedigree in the Champions League. Theirs is unrivalled. “Some of their players have won the competition five times so they probably think they own it,” said Klopp. “And they are probably right.”
