Klopp: My Liverpool Romance

by Anthony Quinn Faber 208pp £12.99 The Week Bookshop £9.99

The Liverpool-born novelist Anthony Quinn has been a fan of the city’s football club (well, one of them) since making his first trip to Anfield aged eight, said Blake Morrison in The Guardian. His “highly enjoyable” new book is partly an account of that devotion, and partly a “love letter” to the club’s current manager. When Jürgen Klopp (pictured) arrived at Liverpool in 2015, the Reds hadn’t won the League since 1990 – much to the chagrin of their fans. Since then, his incremental improvements have worked magic. In 2019, Liverpool won the Champions League (and finished second in the domestic race), and this year finally triumphed in the League. However, as Quinn elegantly shows, he hasn’t just brought success to Anfield, “but fun, wit, passion, humanity, tactical brilliance and a remarkable set of teeth”.

Without ever quite becoming a biography, this book “fleshes out” its subject, said Hannah Jane Parkinson in The Observer. After growing up in the Black Forest, Klopp became a “diligent if only goodish footballer”, before finding his vocation as a manager, first at Mainz, then at Borussia Dortmund (which he guided to two Bundesliga wins). His approach is unusual in combining “tactical nous” – most famously, his philosophy of gegenpressing, or counter-pressing – with a strong commitment to pastoral care: he is renowned for his extravagant bear hugs. And he can be very funny: asked once to “put his finger” on why his team had lost, he replied, “I only have ten fingers.” Quinn “pleasurably” slots vignettes from his own life into the narrative – such as his Merseyside boyhood – and most of the time he’s a charming companion, despite a weakness for bad puns (“All you need is Lovren,” for instance). This book works for a simple reason: he is “a delightful writer writing about a delightful subject”.