Getting rid of Klopp would be brainless, and do more than anything to turn the top flight into a City monopoly
IT WAS one point last season, if you remember. That was how narrow the gap was. That was the margin by which Liverpool lost the title to a Manchester City team which is owned by one of the richest states in the world, which buys the best players in the world, which heads a worldwide network of subservient sister clubs and which has one of the greatest managers in the history of the sport.
Liverpool pushed them that close. Oh and Liverpool got to the Champions League final, too. For the third time in five years. And they won the FA Cup and the League Cup. They were two wins away from the Quadruple. And then, in the summer, they lost one of their most important players, Sadio Mane, who wanted to join Bayern Munich and whose wish was granted.
And now, because they have had an indifferent start to this Premier League season, which is all of eight games old for them, because they have even lost a couple of matches and fallen well behind Arsenal, who top the table, some people are saying — apparently with a straight face — that if Liverpool lose to City at Anfield today, Jurgen Klopp should fear for his job.
Getting rid of Klopp would be as brainless and as pointless and as self-defeating as splattering tomato soup on a beautiful work of art. And I’m not just talking about what the German boss has created at Anfield in the seven years he has been in charge. To lose him from English football, not just Liverpool, would be an act of vandalism that would damage the Premier League grievously at a time when it needs him most.
MANAGERS of Watford and Chancellors of the Exchequer may measure their tenure in weeks nowadays but Liverpool are run better than that. Their owners, FSG, may be more prudent with their cash than some fans would wish but, aside from their ill-judged dalliances with Project Big Picture and the European Super League, their husbandry of the club has been sound. The owners know, surely, that Klopp shields them from criticism. They know, surely, it would be insane even to think of losing him.
The job that Klopp has done at Liverpool, at a time when City’s Abu Dhabi-funded sportswashing project is hitting its stride and accelerating away from the rest of the field, has prevented English football becoming dominated by one club in the way that the Bundesliga has been monopolised by Bayern Munich, the Austrian Bundesliga by Red Bull Salzburg and the Bulgarian league by Ludogorets.
City have won four of the last five English titles and are hot favourites to make it five out of six this season. The only obstacle to their domination in those years has been Liverpool, who do not even make the European top 10 in transfer net spending, a list headed by Manchester United and City. Only Liverpool, led by Klopp, have stood in the way of City turning the Premier League into an annual procession.
Klopp has hardly been starved of cash at Anfield. You only have to point to the big-money signings of Virgil van Dijk and Darwin Nunez for evidence of that. But he has had nowhere near the resources that Pep Guardiola has enjoyed at City, nor the money at the disposal of a series of United and Chelsea managers. It is just that he has used the money he has been given better than all of them.
But the battle to stay in touch with City, now gilded with Erling Haaland as their spearhead, gets harder and harder. ‘Nobody can compete with Man City,’ Klopp said on Friday. ‘You have the best team in the world and you put in the best striker on the market, no matter what he cost. We can’t act like them at Liverpool. It is not possible.’
Klopp is germane to everything Liverpool have achieved in the past five years. He is the heart and soul of the modern Liverpool. His players are fiercely loyal to him and inspired by him. If they have been ‘mentality monsters’ over the past five seasons, it is because he has made them that way. Without him, they would not have been within shouting distance of City, let alone beating them to the title.
The people who say disapprovingly that Klopp has only one Premier League title to show for his time in charge miss the point and they miss it spectacularly. The fact that he broke City’s monopoly once by winning the league in 2019-20 — and came desperately close to breaking it twice more — is a stunning achievement given the might of the oil money at City’s disposal.
Liverpool’s resilience has been astonishing, too. They have rebounded from setback after setback. They lost the league by a point in 2018-19 after another titanic battle with City and won the Champions League a few weeks later. Then they won the Premier League the season after that. Now, after the disappointments of last season, they face another challenge to their tenacity.
CITY are so good and so relentless that those who say the title is already out of Liverpool’s reach this season are probably right. A 13-point deficit to Guardiola’s side is too much to make up, even at this early stage. But to suggest that Liverpool have entered some sort of terminal decline and that Klopp will be powerless to stop it is insulting to the manager and to his players.
Yes, Liverpool are in a difficult moment. Mane’s loss, injuries to Thiago, Andrew Robertson and Jordan Henderson, the loss of form of Trent Alexander-Arnold and Fabinho and teething problems with Nunez have all contributed to the sense of a team struggling.
But this season is still in its infancy and, whatever today’s result, Klopp’s side are too good to wallow in mid-table for long. A club in crisis? I don’t think so. Barcelona are a club in crisis. Klopp’s spells at Mainz and Borussia Dortmund may have ended after seven years but if this blip at Liverpool represents an itch, all he needs is time and support to scratch it.