Jurgen Klopp's management

With full benefit of hindsight, Klopp's pissing off everyone at Liverpool meant the club didn't have a sporting director in 2023, which is the reason we have so many key expiring contracts now

I’m writing this midway through what has so far been a spectacular 2024-25 season for Liverpool, comfortably top of both the league and the champions league.

I’ve been thinking of Jurgen Klopp’s management. There is one very interesting feature of his management style - Robert Lewandowski apart, it is almost impossible to find an ex-Klopp player who has done well for his next club.

Wijnaldum flopped at PSG
Mane flopped at Bayern
Götze flopped at Bayern
Sahin flopped at Real Madrid
Kagawa flopped at Manyoo

I’m not even counting fellows who went to Saudi, or other “lesser” leagues.

I used to idolise this aspect of Klopp’s management - his style and his team’s style were so unique that players adapted so well for it that they were effectively “unsellable”.

It’s almost as if Real Madrid were aware of this statistic (that Klopp players don’t do well for their next clubs), and so waited until Trent Alexander Arnold wasn’t a Klopp player any more before they made their bid for him.

Which is what brings me to the “real topic” of today’s post. Recently this picture (from the 2023 transfer window) has been making the rounds of a lot of Liverpool-related social media (on Reddit and Instagram):

The 2023 midfield cohort: Mac Allister, Szoboszlai, Endo and Gravenberch

The general discourse is (i’m paraphrasing based on various sources)

Liverpool had a terrible 2022-23 season, hampered by their then aging midfield. Klopp could have quit then since he was burnt out. But he stayed on for another year so he could rebuild and leave the team in a better place before going. And now Arne Slot is reaping the benefits of that.

I fully appreciate the complete midfield overhaul done in 2023. The old midfield was completely broken, and thanks to Saudi Arabia’s generosity (£40M for Fabinho, £14M for Henderson, … ), Liverpool was able to cash out and get a new completely efficient midfield (though it took a year and a manager change for Gravenberch to really shine).

However, in my opinion, this came at a cost.

Klopp getting absolute power at Liverpool in 2023 is one of the reasons Salah, VVD and TAA are going to soon be out of a contract

The thing with Klopp is that the longer he stayed at Liverpool, it seems like he fought with more and more people. The good thing is that until “the club had won everything at least once”, things were fairly good (apart from his assistant Zlatko Buvac suddenly packing in 2018).

Legendary sporting director Michael Edwards (well, I always have a soft spot for ex-analytics guys in management jobs) left in 2022. His successor Julian Ward announced he was going a few months later. Head of analytics Ian Graham also left around then. There was a period of time when Liverpool didn’t have a good senior club doctor - everyone who was hired would clash with Klopp’s fitness guy (Andreas Kornmeyer, I think).

And the club went for a year or so without even a good sporting director - the guy who oversees the “business side” of the club. The 2023 midfield rehaul I spoke about - it was led by a temporary sporting director Jorg Schmadtke, brought in by Klopp only to execute on the transfers in the window. He did his job as far as the window was concerned, buying and selling efficiently as the club got an entirely new midfield.

However, transfers are not the only job of the sporting director - there is also the maintenance of the existing players. And that is where Liverpool came up badly short. Mohamed Salah, Virgil Van Dijk (VVD) and Trent Alexander-Arnold (TAA) are all now down to the last six months of their contracts, and from today can potentially sign a pre-agreement with any club in the EU (and outside England).

Ideally, if you think of it, you need to renew contracts at least a year before they are due to expire. Given the money involved in top level sporting contracts and the complexities, the negotiations take another year. This means that you need to start working on contracts at least two years before they are due to expire.

Two years before these three absolutely critical contracts were due to expire, Liverpool had nobody who could negotiate those contracts! And if Klopp has left any negative legacy at Liverpool, it is this - that he ended up pissing off everyone meant that the club was short-staffed in critical areas, the effect of which might be top players leaving on a free (media commentary nowadays is that Salah and VVD will sign new contracts and stay, while TAA will pack. That said, the bargaining power is massively in favour of the players now).

It is interesting that the moment Klopp said (last January) that he was going to leave, all the fellows he had pissed off started to come back. Michael Edwards was the first. Julian Ward followed. There are more, I think (now lost track). The reason for their exits was clear!

In my last job, where I developed a reputation for being a bit abrasive, I used to idolise Klopp’s management style - that he had built a team so unique that people he sold wouldn’t do too well elsewhere (this I adopted as a mantra to “reduce attrition”), that he was so committed to his philosophy of gegenpressing, that he was so popular among most fans, etc. etc.

Now, with full benefit of hindsight, with TAA likely to go to Madrid and Salah and VVD not any closer to signing new contracts, I’m not so sure. There are surely costs to that style.