How Jurgen has taken the Anfield philosophy to heart
12.30PM, BT SPORT
JURGEN KLOPP summed up not only his philosophy but his reasons for continuing in one of the most stressful roles in sport: “We do things differently here and I love that.” Many had assumed he would walk away in 2024 after eight years as manager of Liverpool because of the insane demands of such a highprofile job.
Yet for Klopp, there is one overriding reason to stay. “The culture is set by the people and that is easy to love,” he said. “There are other clubs out there who do it in a different way, but here the culture is set up by the people – not by different owners, different coaches, different players. It’s much nicer, I love it, that we are so close together. “Here it’s a must. If we are here, then we had better enjoy it and that is very easy for me. If that is not us, then we have to adapt to that, not the other way around.” This is a manager who turned down Manchester United after travelling to speak to their executives, because they appeared “too corporate”.
He knows Liverpool’s owners, Fenway Sports Group, are far from saints. But among all the world’s biggest clubs, Liverpool are the one who do not have bottomless resources.
And he is proud of it, which explains why he is prepared to stay even longer as he plots to challenge those clubs on the pitch.
They visit Newcastle today knowing that, within a couple of years, the Saudi Arabiaowned club could have spent more than Klopp has in all his time at Anfield.
He said: “You can’t guarantee success, but we want to offer emotion and that’s possible with the people who support us. We want to deliver excitement.
“We want to deliver an idea that you really can buy into and understand and you don’t think, ‘They are there and we are here and we aren’t really connected’.
“We want to be together with our people – apologies to all the people who always try to stop me on the street because that doesn’t work – we want to really be connected and want to be special as well as a club.”
That special feeling has persuaded him to stay for four more
years, along with assistants Peter Krawietz and Pep Lijnders, and he says he enjoys doing it without the unlimited spending of clubs such as Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester City and Newcastle. He said: “We have to [enjoy it]! We have to be more economical because there are no endless resources, and that is fine. “Sometimes money was the reason we didn’t get a player. I know from the outside it is always, ‘Sign him, sign him, sign him’ but we were always a bit different, we tried it the other way signing players.
“So we have to think so much about transfers.Will the player fit, will they help us, can we help the player to make the next step and will the player help us to take the next step? “Sometimes it does not work out and sometimes it does and then the player can have an impact and that is what we tried to do and will continue to try to do.”