Klopp’s success on field is worth even more than his salary pledge
To borrow from John Lennon, another Liverpool legend, a lot of jewellery was rattled at Fifa’s Best Awards when Jurgen Klopp donated one per cent of his salary to the Common Goal charity – on a night when Megan Rapinoe made some angry blokes even angrier by calling for everyone to be treated fairly.
Galas are not the easiest places to sell idealism. While the camera works its way round the audience of celebs, the purpose is to celebrate glamour and aspiration through voyeurism, not promote plastic pitches for children in Africa. As the world’s favourite game, though, football is expected to be a force for good while carving up what Common Goal estimates to be a $50billion revenue cake.
The next morning, The Players’ Tribune published an illuminating interview with Klopp (right) that explained his gesture from the previous night, when he told his fellow gong-chasers: “We are all in the very good side of life.” What he said in the interview went beyond wealth redistribution and expressed football’s extraordinary ability to affect people’s lives without fractions of multi-million pound salaries being diverted to good causes.
Klopp talked about working your way up from gruelling jobs and unpromising starts. His own was toiling in a warehouse that stored films in large metal canisters when he was 20 and a young father trying to learn football and work his way through university. He says he recognises in the backgrounds of many of his Liverpool players the same urge to ascend mountains without the equipment of privilege.
For Liverpool fans, this backstory – this world-view – carries echoes of Bill Shankly, who built for himself a role greater than mere football manager. At the top in today’s football industry there is probably a nag of guilt among the more reflective beneficiaries about how far vast wealth has removed them from society. Klopp knows he has enough on his plate to defend his Champions League title and chase down a first English championship win for 30 years. If he thought giving one per cent of his income to youth football programmes in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Cambodia, India, Colombia and beyond was enough to buy him sainthood, he might be accused of tinkering on the margins, or even tokenism, but his generosity comes with a legacy that is more about football than money.
“We should not forget what it was like when we had real problems,” Klopp writes in the Players’ Tribune piece. “This bubble we live in is not the real world. I am sorry, but anything that happens on a football pitch is not a real problem. There should be a bigger purpose to this game than revenue and trophies, no?” In a game where lower league clubs are left out in the rain to die and grass-roots facilities rot, there is, indeed, more to it than turnover and trophies. Yet anyone who watches Klopp driving on his players like a man possessed will know how much he values winning – and the raw drama of playing – which is where football bestows a gift that cannot be measured in monetary terms.
The night Liverpool beat Barcelona 4-0 to reach the Champions League final was arguably a greater carnival of the senses than the final itself, where they defeated Spurs, which was no funeral either. Klopp was alive to the reactions of the supporters and the city: the connection it gave them to something life-affirming and beautifully theatrical. In the same interview, he says: “If you could’ve put all the emotions, all the excitement, all the love in the air that day and bottled it up, the world would be a better place.”
The “emotions” of those big Champions League nights are still in his head, he says. Liverpool supporters know, therefore, that their manager is living the same life as them; going to bed with the same feelings, waking to the same burning love for football. With that connection, no money changes hands, no salary sacrifices are made. Please do not mistake me. Money should be shared in football. The ultra-privileged should use their power for the common good, which is all Rapinoe was really saying in her denunciation of racial