Jürgen Klopp’s week was a long goodbye. On Tuesday, Klopp, the future former manager of Liverpool, was at Anfield, the stadium that sings his name and has thrilled his team for nine years, bidding farewell to hundreds of members of the club’s staff. On Thursday, he and his players shared a final barbecue at Liverpool’s training center on the outskirts of the city.
In the meantime, there have been countless jerseys to sign – “I don’t know how many, but everyone has one now,” he said – and countless hands to shake. There remains the specter of Sunday, where he will lead Liverpool one last time. He is then expected to address the crowd at Anfield. “The most intense week of my life,” he said. “It’s a lot.”
The most moving moments happened in private. Klopp was inundated with emails, messages and letters from fans in such volume that he was unable to read them all, let alone respond to them. Each contains the “stories of what it meant to them,” he said. They moved him so much that, when the club’s internal television channel asked him to read a handful of them, he hesitated. “I would have burst into tears,” he said.
Klopp doesn’t pretend to understand, not completely, why Liverpool fans – the “people” at the club, as he calls them – feel such depth about him. His instinct is to downplay it. “I know if you are Liverpool manager people love you,” he said. “Until you disappoint them.” And we have never really disappointed them.
That’s an understatement. In Klopp’s decade at Anfield, he won (almost) every major trophy available. Under his leadership, Liverpool were crowned European and then world champions. A year later, in 2020, he led the club to the Premier League title. It was the club’s first English championship in an extremely long 30 years.
There were other honors too, in the form of three domestic cups and a series of near-misses as Liverpool – once a faded giant – were restored to the top tier of European football’s great powers.
Even that, however, doesn’t fully explain the extent to which Liverpool, both as a fanbase and as a venue, have fallen in love with Klopp. There are bars and hotels named after him. And his face – the dazzling white smile, the beard now more salt than pepper – shines on a half-dozen murals spread across the city.
The first of them, in the Baltic Triangle, was erected in 2018, painted by French street artist Akse on the wall of a motorcycle garage. Negotiations were surprisingly easy, given that John Jameson, the building’s owner, is a die-hard fan of Everton, Liverpool’s fierce rivals.
“He thought it would be good for business,” said his son, also John Jameson. The idea, according to the son, was that even the Liverpool publicity “was good publicity”.
Other murals soon followed, some commissioned by the club itself, others by supporters groups and others – more recently – as more blatant advertisements.
Liverpool can sometimes seem like a city of football-themed murals. Several others are dedicated to current or former players. “It starts to feel a bit like an insult if you don’t have one,” said Shaun O’Donnell, co-founder of BOSS Nights, a live music brand aimed at Liverpool fans.
No topic is more popular than Klopp, however. BOSS named another of his early murals, just around the corner from Anfield, as a play on the double meaning of the word in Liverpool: both ‘responsible’ and ‘brilliant’.
O’Donnell was aware that he did not want to appear to be “jumping on the bandwagon” by creating another mural. For Klopp, however, he was willing to make an exception. “We owe him everything,” he said. “Everything we have been able to do is thanks to Jürgen.”
Initially, BOSS Nights were small-scale events: a few dozen friends, familiar from long car trips after Liverpool, would gather in bars in the Baltic Quarter to listen to live music. The arrival of Klopp, the electric shock he sent through the club, transformed it into something else.
In 2019, the year Klopp led Liverpool to the Champions League title, BOSS staged a show at a fan park in Madrid, where the final took place. He attracted tens of thousands of fans. Jamie Webster, who began performing at O’Donnell’s shows, now has over 50 million streams on Spotify. His interpretation of “Go! Go! Go“, the most memorable fan chant of the Klopp era, has been played 16.5 million times.
“This wouldn’t have happened to any manager,” O’Donnell said. “Maybe it’s his charisma, but there’s something about him. The atmosphere on the ground has gone up a notch. It makes you want to contribute. We feel like they need us as much as we need them.
O’Donnell frequently receives calls from pubs and bars around Anfield asking if he can recommend a singer or guitarist for a show before matches. “This didn’t happen before,” he said. “Live music and football never really existed here. Asking someone to do Liverpool songs wouldn’t necessarily be cool. It became cool thanks to him.
It’s part of what Neil Atkinson, co-founder of The Anfield Wrap, the leading outlet in Liverpool’s thriving fan media scene, describes as a “new alliance of what we want our team to be”.
Klopp always demanded “unconditional support” from his team, Atkinson said. Early in his tenure, Klopp regularly turned to the fans closest to him at Anfield and demanded they make more noise. He has more than once denounced those who leave early to avoid traffic. “In return, it creates the ambiance for everyone to enjoy it however they want,” Atkinson said.
This inclusiveness has been an important part of Klopp’s appeal. In an open letter to Klopp, Alison McGovern – a local Labor MP and Anfield season ticket holder – thanked him not only for “showing publicly that women, gay people, all women, are part of our club”, but also to be able to put football in its correct context.
“When Covid hit, you yelled at fans who lent for a high five,” she wrote. “You told people what they should do: get tested, get vaccinated. » His description of football as not being a matter of life and death was important, she added. “It’s there for fun. It should be a pleasure in family life, never a strength or justification for abuse.
She found even the manner in which Klopp was leaving – he announced in January that he would leave at the end of the season, admitting he was “running out of energy” – welcome. “Making it clear that you view honesty and candor as the right response to these feelings of tiredness and burnout helps everyone understand that our heroes are all the better for being real humans,” she said. -she writes.
This ability to keep football in perspective is perhaps the best explanation for Klopp’s enduring and growing popularity. What matters, he repeated again this week, is the journey and not the destination. This sincere belief has helped him retain fans’ trust, even during lean times.
“The most enjoyable year I had supporting Liverpool was 2018,” Atkinson said. “Seeing the team develop. See what it could become.
“We didn’t win anything and it doesn’t matter,” he said. “This is Klopp’s biggest gift.”
Klopp is not looking forward to Sunday and his final goodbyes. He’s not even sure he’s in the right emotional state to address his team before the game. “Saying goodbye is never nice,” he said. “But if you said goodbye without feeling sad or hurt, it would mean that your time together wasn’t good.”
For the supporters or for the city, it will be even more difficult. When the contract for Klopp’s original mural, outside the motorcycle garage, expired a few years ago, the owners asked artist Akse if he would like to paint on it. He refused.
Instead, he has come in occasionally over the years to tinker with it. “Sometimes Everton fans come and vandalize it,” youngster John Jameson said. “You see the graffiti when you walk in Monday morning. »
He doesn’t think there’s any reason to do anything other than maintain this position now. “We receive at least one busload of tourists every day,” he said. “It’s like it’s on a tour: first stop the Cavern Club, then stop the Klopp mural.” Nine years after Klopp’s arrival at Liverpool, his image has become an indelible part of the city’s iconography. “It looks like he’s staying,” Jameson said.
