Klopp's Liverpool · Part 1 of 21
The Inheritance
The last public act of Brendan Rodgers as Liverpool manager was to explain why the job would take time.
It was Sunday 4 October 2015, a little after a 1–1 draw at Goodison Park. Danny Ings had headed Liverpool in front from a James Milner corner shortly before half-time, and Romelu Lukaku had equalised almost at once after an Emre Can clearance struck Martin Škrtel and fell to him. It was not much of a derby. Afterwards Rodgers spoke about a squad that had lost quality and needed rebuilding, and told Sky Sports that the work would take time "whether that is me or someone else in the job". Asked whether the owners had ever set him a target of the top four, he said nobody at the club had asked that of him since the day he arrived.
Within the hour he had been sacked. The call came from Mike Gordon, president of Fenway Sports Group, the American company that owned the club; according to the BBC, the chief executive Ian Ayre also went to see him at home. The decision had been made before kick-off. FSG, the BBC reported that evening, had not wanted to disturb preparations for the derby by announcing it. The club's statement, issued in the names of John W Henry, Tom Werner and Gordon, thanked Rodgers for his contribution and promised an appointment made in a "decisive and timely manner".
On the table alone, it was not a crisis. Liverpool were tenth, with 12 points from eight league games, three points off fourth and six behind the leaders, Manchester City. The case against Rodgers was the direction of travel. Contemporary reports counted 20 points from the last 17 league matches, going back to the previous March, and a single win inside 90 minutes in the last nine games in all competitions. Three days earlier Anfield had booed the team off after a 1–1 draw with FC Sion in the Europa League.
Not everyone agreed with the decision. Garry Monk, who had played under Rodgers at Swansea, called it very harsh. Graeme Souness said he was stunned, given how much money Rodgers had just been allowed to spend. At least one newspaper analysis that night argued that he had been cut loose too soon. Only four months earlier FSG had reviewed his position and chosen to keep him. What had changed was not so much the evidence as the owners' patience with it, and, as would become clear, the availability of someone else.
To understand both, you have to go back eighteen months, to the season that made Rodgers and the summer that began to unmake him.
Rodgers had arrived from Swansea in the summer of 2012 and finished seventh in his first season. The second was the closest Liverpool had come to the league title since 1990. From February to late April 2014 they won eleven league matches in a row, playing at a speed and with a recklessness that the Premier League had rarely seen. They finished with 26 wins, 84 points and 101 goals, a record for the club in the top flight. Luis Suárez scored 31 league goals, none of them penalties, despite missing the opening weeks through suspension. Daniel Sturridge scored 21. Raheem Sterling, still only 19, became one of the most dangerous wide forwards in the country, and Steven Gerrard, moved back into a deep midfield role, controlled games from in front of the defence.
It ended in two matches. On 27 April Chelsea came to Anfield and won 2–0; Gerrard slipped on the halfway line just before half-time and Demba Ba ran clear to score. On 5 May Liverpool led Crystal Palace 3–0 at Selhurst Park with eleven minutes left, pressed for more goals to close City's superior goal difference, and drew 3–3. City won their remaining games and the title by two points, with 86.
The near miss was real, but so was what lay underneath it. Liverpool conceded 50 league goals, more than any other side in the top five, and much of what they did well depended on two forwards in exceptional form. That would matter more than anyone could see at the time.
Within weeks the most important of them was gone. On 24 June, at the World Cup, Suárez bit Italy's Giorgio Chiellini; Fifa banned him from all football for four months. In July he joined Barcelona for a fee widely reported as £75m, although some accounts give a lower figure. Liverpool spent the proceeds and more. Nine players arrived for a total of around £117m: Adam Lallana from Southampton for £25m, his team-mate Dejan Lovren for £20m, Lazar Marković from Benfica for about £20m, Alberto Moreno from Sevilla for £12m, Emre Can from Bayer Leverkusen for £10m, Divock Origi from Lille for £10m (immediately loaned back for the season), Rickie Lambert from Southampton for £4m, Javier Manquillo on loan from Atlético Madrid and, at the end of August, Mario Balotelli from Milan for £16m.
The verdict now is that it was a poor summer. The verdict then was less settled. During that summer Bleacher Report suggested it might prove the most successful window in Liverpool's history. The signings were mostly young, several were proven in the Premier League, and they were bought to give depth to a squad returning to the Champions League for the first time since 2009–10. What they did not include was anyone remotely like the player who had left, and Balotelli, the closest attempt, arrived as a late gamble rather than a plan.
The signings were made through what the club called its transfer committee, a group that included Rodgers alongside executives and recruitment staff, among them Michael Edwards, then director of technical performance. Its purpose, as generally understood, was to spread decisions on signings beyond the manager. In practice it meant that, whenever a signing failed, nobody outside the building could be sure who had wanted him. That ambiguity would follow Rodgers for the next year.
The season that followed was a slow unravelling, interrupted by one convincing recovery.
Sturridge injured a thigh in England training in early September 2014, then a calf as he neared his return, and missed five months. He made 12 league appearances all season before hip surgery in May. Without Suárez and with Sturridge rarely fit, a side that had scored 101 league goals managed 52.
The Champions League lasted six matches. Liverpool beat Ludogorets of Bulgaria with a stoppage-time Gerrard penalty, lost in Basel, were beaten 3–0 at Anfield and 1–0 at the Bernabéu by Real Madrid, drew 2–2 away to Ludogorets and then needed to beat Basel at home on 9 December. They drew 1–1, Gerrard scoring a late free-kick after Marković had been sent off, and finished third in the group. Five days later they lost 3–0 at Old Trafford.
What followed showed what Rodgers could still do. He settled on a back three, with Can stepping out from defence and Sterling often used through the middle, and Liverpool went 13 league matches unbeaten from mid-December to mid-March. On 2 January Gerrard announced that he would leave at the end of the season to play in the United States, but the team kept winning. By March they were the form side in the division and close enough to Manchester United to think of fourth place.
On 22 March United came to Anfield. Liverpool were a goal down at half-time, Rodgers sent Gerrard on as a substitute, and 38 seconds later he was sent off for stamping on Ander Herrera. United won 2–1. A fortnight later Arsenal won 4–1 at the Emirates. The unbeaten run had not been an illusion, but it had ended against the two sides Liverpool were trying to catch.
The cup competitions offered three chances at a trophy and closed all three. Beşiktaş knocked Liverpool out of the Europa League on penalties in Istanbul in February, Lovren missing the decisive kick. Chelsea won the League Cup semi-final in January with an extra-time header from Branislav Ivanović at Stamford Bridge. On 19 April Liverpool, clear favourites, lost the FA Cup semi-final 2–1 to Aston Villa at Wembley. The final would have fallen on Gerrard's 35th birthday.
Meanwhile the club's best young player was making his own position public. On 1 April Sterling gave the BBC an interview that Liverpool had not sanctioned, confirming that he had turned down a contract reported to be worth £100,000 a week and insisting that his decision was not about money. The club were reported to be furious. From then on, Sterling's departure was a question of when and for how much.
The season ended at Stoke on 24 May, Gerrard's last game for Liverpool. They were 5–0 down at half-time and lost 6–1, their heaviest league defeat since 1963. Gerrard scored the consolation. Liverpool finished sixth with 62 points, 22 fewer than the season before, and a goal difference of four. Rodgers called the performance embarrassing and apologised.
FSG kept him. After an end-of-season review with Gordon and Werner, the casualties were the assistant manager Colin Pascoe, who had worked with Rodgers since Swansea, and the first-team coach Mike Marsh. Rodgers later said the decision had been his. In their place came Sean O'Driscoll, a coach he had long admired, from the England under-19s; Gary McAllister, the former Liverpool midfielder, as first-team coach; and Pepijn Lijnders, promoted from the academy. The message, as the Liverpool Echo put it at the time, was that a change of manager was not required. The changes were made around the manager instead.
The squad changed too. On 14 July Sterling joined Manchester City for £44m, potentially rising to £49m, the highest fee ever paid for an English player. Gerrard went to LA Galaxy, Glen Johnson left at the end of his contract, Lambert was sold to West Bromwich Albion and Balotelli was loaned back to Milan. Liverpool bought Christian Benteke from Aston Villa for £32.5m, Roberto Firmino from Hoffenheim for £29m and Nathaniel Clyne from Southampton for £12.5m, signed Danny Ings from Burnley and Joe Gomez from Charlton, and took James Milner and the goalkeeper Ádám Bogdán on free transfers.
It was, by most later judgements, a better window than the one before. At the time it still looked like a set of answers to different questions. Benteke was a penalty-box forward of a type Rodgers' passing teams had rarely used, and Firmino was described in some coverage as a committee signing rather than a manager's one. One of the post-sacking analyses reported that Rodgers had wanted Swansea's Ashley Williams and been refused because of his age.
The new season began with two 1–0 wins and a goalless draw at Arsenal, seven points without conceding, but the performances were unconvincing and the next run settled the matter. West Ham won 3–0 at Anfield on 29 August, their first win there since 1963. United won 3–1 at Old Trafford. Norwich, Bordeaux, Carlisle in the League Cup and Sion all left with draws, Liverpool going through against Carlisle only on penalties. Henderson, the new captain, was out with a foot injury; Benteke was in and out; Sturridge was only just back from hip surgery. The 3–2 win over Villa on 26 September was the only victory in that spell.
Measured against money, the record was hard to defend. Over two summers Liverpool had spent roughly £200m on new players, offset by the sales of Suárez and Sterling, and had a sixth-place finish and a tenth-place start to show for it. Measured against expectation, it was more complicated. Rodgers had overachieved in 2013–14 by almost any standard, had lost his two best attackers through circumstances he could not control, and had been handed a recruitment structure in which his authority was shared. Both readings were available in October 2015, and both were made.
What tipped FSG was the chance to hire someone they considered better.
Jürgen Klopp had been out of work since the summer. In seven years at Borussia Dortmund he had taken a club that had come close to insolvency in 2005 and made it champions of Germany in 2011 and again in 2012, when Dortmund also won the German Cup. In 2013 his side reached the Champions League final at Wembley and lost 2–1 to Bayern Munich. His teams pressed relentlessly, attacked quickly after winning the ball and played with an intensity that became his public identity.
His last season had been his worst. Dortmund were bottom of the Bundesliga in February 2015. On 15 April, with the side tenth and recovering, Klopp announced that he would leave at the end of the season, saying he was no longer the right coach for the club. Dortmund finished seventh and lost the German Cup final to Wolfsburg. At the press conference he said he was not planning a sabbatical. He took one anyway.
The approach came quickly once Liverpool decided to move. In later accounts, Gordon called Klopp, and the two sides met in New York on or around 1 October, three days before the derby at Goodison, in the offices of the law firm Shearman & Sterling. The Liverpool Echo later reported that the meeting lasted close to six hours. Henry has since described Gordon's call telling him the meeting was on as one of the most exciting he received in his time at the club. Gordon, asked later why Klopp, said that analytically Dortmund under him had "stacked up very well relative to expected performance".
That sentence says a good deal about what FSG thought they were buying. Their model at Liverpool, as at the Boston Red Sox, rested on the idea that money is best spent where data shows the market is mispricing value. Klopp's Dortmund had finished above Bayern, a club with far greater resources, two seasons running. To owners who could not outspend the richest clubs in England, a coach who made teams perform above their budget was the point. He also brought something the committee structure could not supply: a public authority, and a style that supporters could recognise and believe in.
He was not the only name. Reports at the time said FSG had also spoken to Carlo Ancelotti; Ancelotti said a few weeks later that he had not spoken to them. Within days of the sacking, the British press was treating Klopp's appointment as a matter of when.
It came on Thursday 8 October. That morning the club confirmed that O'Driscoll, the head of performance Glen Driscoll and the head of opposition analysis Chris Davies had left their roles, and that McAllister would leave the first-team staff for an ambassadorial position. Klopp would bring his own assistants from Dortmund, Željko Buvač and Peter Krawietz. That evening he flew into Liverpool John Lennon Airport and signed a three-year contract at a city-centre hotel, reported to be worth between £4m and £5m a year. He was 48.
The press conference at Anfield the next morning lasted 26 minutes. Klopp sat between Werner and Ayre. Behind the stadium, the steel frame of the new Main Stand was still under construction.
He was asked, inevitably, whether he was a "special one" in the manner of José Mourinho's arrival at Chelsea in 2004. He said he was a normal guy from the Black Forest and offered "the Normal One" as his alternative. It was the line that made the headlines, but it was not the most important thing he said.
The question most journalists had come to ask was about the transfer committee, the structure that had complicated every judgement of Rodgers. Klopp dismissed it. According to the Daily Mirror's account, he said it had not been a problem "for 10 seconds", and that it was enough for him to have the first and the last word on signings, with everything in between open for discussion. In one answer he accepted the owners' system and made clear who would sit at the top of it.
He talked about the club's history as something to build on rather than to carry; the 25-year wait for a league title was a long time, he said, but history was only the base. And he made a prediction. If they were sitting there again in four years, he said, he was fairly sure Liverpool would have won a title. This Is Anfield noted that he may have meant "trophy", and that something may have been lost in translation. Either way, it was a precise and unusual promise for a new manager to make on his first morning.
His message to supporters was the one that would outlast all the others. People who wanted to help Liverpool, he said, had to change from doubters to believers.
The reaction was close to rapturous. The Liverpool Echo's front page read "Klopp Mania". In the Telegraph, Paul Hayward called it the most dramatic managerial arrival since Mourinho's first spell at Chelsea. John Arne Riise, a European Cup winner in 2005, wrote that he had never seen a better press conference from a new manager.
It is worth being clear about what had and had not happened. Liverpool had not acquired a new team. Klopp inherited Simon Mignolet in goal; a defence built from Clyne, Moreno, Škrtel, Lovren, Mamadou Sakho and the 18-year-old Gomez; a midfield of Henderson, Can, Lucas Leiva, Milner, Joe Allen and Lallana; and in attack Philippe Coutinho, Firmino, Benteke, Sturridge, Ings and Origi. Most had been signed during Rodgers' time, many of them through the committee, and none had yet played for Klopp. The club's two most decisive players of the previous decade, Suárez and Gerrard, had gone, and so had Sterling. What the owners had bought was not a squad but a method, and a man they believed could get more from the players than their price suggested.
Klopp's own assessment was generous. The squad, he told reporters, had fast players, strong players and good defenders, and everything was there. Whether that was true was the question his predecessor had not been able to answer.