It All Meant More
Sometime, in the medium-to-distant future, Liverpool Football Club must grapple with a difficult decision.
When it comes time to install in front of Anfield the statue of Jürgen Norbert Klopp – or maybe one of several, as there is not one moment frozen in time that can capture the animated magic, the rapture and the rage, the humor and the hubris that’s radiated from the Reds’ touchline since fall of 2015 – where do you put it in relation to Bill Shankly’s?
Do you stick it in shoulder to shoulder, or do you build in proportion? That is: Do you build it bigger?
It may still feel obscene to engage in legacy talk, a little more than 24 hours after we all woke up to the news that Klopp is leaving the club in May. People are processing. Some of us are in legitimate mourning.
“We just beat Fulham, we’re going into a final – what’s going on?” said one scouser. Another one dared to go further. “It feels like a member of the family died, to be honest.”
That open display of raw emotion risks ridicule. (Klopp is not our dad, he’s someone else’s.) Liverpool fans are made fun of, sometimes rightly and in good humor, for an inflated sense of self-importance. Just because this is Liverpool, why does it – or should it – mean more, more than following Wrexham, or the New York Mets, or your Sunday league side?
That is the thing. Lately, over the past decade, under Jürgen Klopp, it did mean more. It meant more because it felt that way.
This blog post isn’t about how hard it was to love a calculating cold fish like Brendan Rodgers (to whom the Kop was comparing to Shankly a decade and an epoch ago, in case you forgot or weren’t here yet) or how frustrating and mercurial Rafa Benitez could be.
This blog post is about the fan experience with Jürgen Klopp. And with Jürgen Klopp, following Liverpool felt unlike anything else. You know that if you felt it, and I know many of us did.
Yes, it felt that way because we won everything. Winning everything, after more than ten years of winning nothing, does mean more than the decadence of winning everything every year. I have followed Liverpool for only 22 or so years, and so I don’t know what it feels like to be winning everything again, near on 40 years after the fact. I suspect that — dusting off the old nostalgia pieces, relevant again; watching an old grand-relative’s eyes light up with a sparkle of youth — also means more.
But we also won it in a fashion that is a departure from the norm. Yes, Liverpool FC won with resources and with analytics, but we also won with the feels.
The feels are the point with Jürgen Klopp, maybe to a fault. Fabio Carvahlo disappeared from the club because of the feels. The feels are why we, on occasion, were too rigid with the 4-3-3, too slow to move on from Jordan Henderson. But the feels are also why Bobby Firmino could not bear to leave the pitch last spring and sat in the stands like a fan this winter with Fabinho. It is why Darwin Nunez is compared to a raging firework. It’s all the same reason, because the man who is the Liverpool manager is the original northwestern English football Catherine wheel.
You can’t use analytics or billions of dollars or pounds or riyals to create fist bumps and bear hugs and songs, in the same way you can’t (not yet and I hope not ever) use AI to create art. But such a dynamic arrangement must run out of energy eventually unless it is continuously replenished. And emotional people are not machines. You can’t feel much if you are too tired to feel anything beyond exhaustion.
Klopp was tired in the “super-difficult year” last year; we all saw it. (That “super-difficult” is being legitimate competitors throughout most of the year, beating City at home and missing a Champions League spot by a hair shows you how high the bar’s been raised.) Then when Klopp sat down to planning the 2024-2025 preseason – a task that confronted him in November 2023, with the rigged advent calendar of the holiday fixture list looming over his head – he realized he was gassed, a sports car getting down to the fumes.
He didn’t need to do this, you know. He didn’t need to be honest and give it to us straight, before someone leaked it or before it became too obvious to everyone but himself. But that would not be him.
He leaves a club transformed. It is no exaggeration to say that Jürgen Klopp rebuilt the culture of Liverpool FC.
Earlier this week, another, better writer mentioned the theory of a “guiding fiction,” the legend upon which you build. With Klopp, there was no fiction. There was a guiding legend in action, built right before your eyes.
With Klopp, following Liverpool was winning, but it was also about a city, an underdog city that has had the shit kicked out of it and got up off the canvas grinning, spitting in your eye and wondering if that were all you got then. It was about a mindset, about speaking your mind about things like Brexit and BLM and LGBT rights – and saying the right things, if you are trying to tell the Tories, in a polite boardroom-friendly way, to get fucked.
Saying that in an era when FIFA is willing to hand over the keys to a kingdom that bans rainbow flags and would consider jailing me for this blog does mean something. Klopp saying that meant more than us saying it.
Let us not be deceived. Liverpool Football Club is owned by American billionaires. There are many very important questions to honestly ask about that arrangement.
But LFC is also owned by American billionaires in an age of state capitalism, and in an age when those states making transformative investments in football are nasty places, run by nasty people.
(I have heard some of our own people sniff and scoff at statements like this, but if we are going to fly rainbow flags and take knees, we must also condemn and abhor states that openly engage in modern-day slavery and criminalize same-sex relationships.)
Under Jürgen Klopp, those ideas and those political projects were proven to be vulnerable. They were even on occasion defeated. Don’t you see? Under Jürgen Klopp, the good guys in the room won.
With Klopp, watching a soccer club – consuming a marketable product, if we must be clear-eyed about what we are doing – did mean little more. It was about a city, a mindset, or just trying to be a good and decent human – and that sometimes, the result on the pitch didn’t matter as much as the rest of it.
That was why Klopp barked at the fans trying to slap his palm when a team from a city teeming with COVID made its ludicrously dangerous visit to Anfield on March 11, 2020.
“I think Klopp is our version of Shankly and Paisley,” another fan told Beanyman Sports while standing in front of a sun-dappled and empty Anfield. (On an earthshaking day, one on which one of his moorings snapped and he felt adrift, he went to church.)
“He changed the club from the ground up. He’s given me some of the best nights of me life,” said another, before Klopp received the ultimate Scouse compliment:
“He’s one of us.”
He is one of us as well here in Brooklyn. We could see someone like him packed into the Monro on a sweaty Saturday morning, sharing a beery hug and a smile in the sun or commiserating in the rain and snow.
And we still have him for another four months, you know.
