He goes with our blessings…swiftly now…
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I don’t have an axe to grind with Pep Ljinders, but if he gets this move it might be good all round. He can spread his wings and try being a number one again.
Klopp can hire a new number two to help him.
I’ve said it a few times recently, but one of the keys to Alex Ferguson’s success was a top notch number two… that he changed regularly. They came in, freshened the coaching up, brought a new perspective, a new voice for the players to listen to and respond to, but they never outstayed their welcome. They always moved on, or were moved on.
Kidd, MClaren, Queiroz, Phelan, etc. Quite a lot of them.
Klopp is the kingpin. He is part way through remaking his next great side. And as he does, the remaining old guard is letting him down by falling short of reasonable expectations, while off the pitch, ownership issues are unresolved.
I think a new number two will be good all round. Someone who can professionally refresh Klopp, and the squad, might be just the tonic.
And we should get Mitchell as DOF and hopefully have clarity on ownership, one way or the other.
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That would be less than Chelsea.
I think the belief is and perhaps it’s true that the players may see this this week and think we were outdone not because we couldn’t compete but the rules were so bent that it was impossible.
Michail Antonio on Klopp: “He could finish 16th and still have the job, in my eyes.
“For what he’s achieved for Liverpool over the last six years nobody should even be thinking about sacking the man.”
[Footballers Football Podcast]
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I’d be happy if Klopp signed a new 10 year contract.
Not that I’m suggesting that will happen.
He’s not above criticism at all, but I can’t imagine a better fit for us, even with all the problems this season.
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My pragmatic view of this is that he seems to be a manager who can always do well and adapt to the situation with the tools at his disposal, even with clubs of limited means like Dortmund or Mainz. Of course, it helps that we have had a good funnel for talent here as well, but as long as we can maintain our recruiting standards, I think we’ll always be able to at least compete with the rest, even if we might not be as utterly dominant as we could otherwise be.
Barring owners like H&G or the Glazers, as long as the structure around him is able to maximise (ethically) its revenue-earning capacity and spend that money wisely, I think we’ll always have success with him at the helm.
Forget all the billions, I don’t think you can buy magic like that, even though the Glazers definitely have tried.
I do feel he will see it up to 60 and then walk if nothing drastic happens and as bad as this season is it’s a season, not yet a trend.
I think seeing it up to 60 allows him to rebuild and benefit from a year or 2. He may leave if he was achieve the league again in that time but I don’t know, Klopp likes projects and I do think he will retire at 60 so I think the last contract was a suggestion.
I do think freshness in the back room staff would be good.
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Thought he said somewhere recently that he thinks he has the energy for another 10 years…
Up to him but I do think he will stick to what he said to his wife.
Question is what other projects are there. Perhaps something in Italy elsewhere he is facing the Bayern situation and I never bought him wanting to go there.
Maybe a DOF but I don’t see it.
Does Klopp have his hands in this? Of course.
Is he the only one? Of course he’s not.
16th or whatever (well, as long as we’re not relegated!), okay, but it depends how many seasons like that and in which context also.
I’m all for giving him and us the chance to make things right this summer, from having a better pre-season, a few ins and outs, improving the medical department, finding Ward’s replacement, getting new investors (if not owners) in.
Some of these things don’t need to happen necessarily this summer, but most of them really do.
But there has to be a line drawn somewhere (maybe next season or the following one), in my book nobody can get blind faith at Liverpool no matter how bad it is and how long it lasts, not even Klopp I’m sorry.
Everything has an end, no matter how it may look like we’re a match made in heaven on paper. I don’t want the club to look at it too emotionally, they simply cannot afford to.
That’s not to say that I expect rash decisions. Yes, Klopp has earned some credit, but not blindly unlimited, that’s for sure. Nobody can get that if you ask me.
I know it might look like everything after Klopp could be a bit sad, but there is life after everyone.
The problem is if next season is the same then you have a point but was last season like this? Not even the season we dropped off we were like this.
People love that last Dortmund season it’s nothing like any season Klopp has had here.
He has enough far more than enough to be given the opportunity to make up for this season. There is no team bar finance doping Man City in that league who would have had the last 8 years we’ve had.
Not a single one
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Even next season, if it’s similar to this one, I would need more context. We’ll see when we get there.
I’m saying that I’m still willing to give him and the club (because we have work to do in different areas) the chance this summer to correct their mistakes and prepare a much better next season.
But I’m never for giving blind unlimited total faith, he’s not a saint, nobody is.
If shit continues to happen, and unfortunately often managers go when there are other aspects of a football club also not working well, then that point might arrive before his contract ends.
It’s a sensitive topic, we have the most loved manager since maybe Shanks, we haven’t had such success in a few years for more than 3 decades and most of us haven’t seen what the process of building a new successful/winning side under the same manager looks like.
And then you add how emotional we are, how we see ourselves, everything is branded special, special this, special that, etc. It’s wonderful and I’m proud of it, but it’s a double-edged sword also.
I’m sure the club itself will be very careful and not rush into wild decisions when it’s crisis time, like it is now and who knows what else can go wrong until the end of the season. Especially when they’re in the delicate process of finding either new investors or new owners. To have someone like Klopp in charge is still very important.
But they must be more objective than we are and not lose sight of reality in this whole emotion.
For now, save what can be saved from this season and work this summer on our mistakes; coaching staff, players, directors, medical department. Everyone.
I certainly wouldn’t tolerate 2-3 seasons like this one.
So the eyes will be on them next season, they will have a free summer and time to prepare everything.
You know what? I’d find it funny to see the Championship from the inside for once. We’d give this competition incredible exposure, it would allow our young players to grow under Klopp’s watch, and I think it would be incredible fun for us fans to meet and beat other teams, with other playing styles. Then, we’d come back up to the PL, ready to attack the title like in Shankly’s times.
Only half-joking… 
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Let’s get those 12 pts eh.
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46 games in the championship,
plus midweek champs league games,
it would be a gruelling season!
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Jürgen Klopp saw Liverpool’s decline coming. If anyone can fix things, he can
The club’s struggles come from a cocktail of smaller issues but the German has been aware of the need to rebuild ever since the end of last season
, Football Correspondent
Saturday February 11 2023, 6.00pm GMT, The Sunday Times
In the trade we call them “win-lose scenarios” — those feature articles, prepared in advance, that papers can slot into the coverage should a big result go a certain way. I’ve still got the “Liverpool win piece” I had ready to be used in the event of them beating Real Madrid in last year’s Champions League final.
“Make no mistake, Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool are a great football side,” I wrote that May evening in Paris, noting how their run of three European Cup finals in five seasons had equalled Manchester United’s at Sir Alex Ferguson’s peak, and that they had been a hair’s breadth from winning the Premier League, too, and completing an immortal quadruple. I quoted Pep Guardiola who, a few days before, had said: “I’ve never seen a team like Liverpool in my life.”
That is where Liverpool were a mere eight months ago and only Thibaut Courtois having the game of his career stopped them beating Real and going down as one of the all-time great sides. Now? With the same manager, same backroom staff and almost the same players, they limp into a Merseyside derby with only one more win than when Roy Hodgson was relieved of his duties 20 league games into the miserable 2010-11 season.
Klopp and Henderson after defeat in the Champions League final last year, when only a career-best display from Courtois prevented this Liverpool squad adding a second European title, after their 2019 success
RICHARD PELHAM
The almost all-time side are now “passive” and “lack confidence” and gave a performance in defeat away to Wolverhampton Wanderers last week for which “there are no words”. This is not the verdict of a critic, but of a baffled, beleaguered Klopp himself.
So what has happened? Let’s start back in Paris. Involved that night were Jordan Henderson, who was about to turn 32, Mohamed Salah who was about to hit 30, Thiago Alcântara, 31, Virgil van Dijk, now 31, Roberto Firmino, now 31, Joel Matip, now 31, and an unused substitute was James Milner, now 131. Or something. The workload of most of those players had been incredible, not only in the 63-game season the club had just played, but over the three or four-year cycle of the team’s genesis.
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Take Salah, who since joining in 2017 has played in 96 per cent of all the league and Champions League matches (262 out of 273) contested by his club. The Egyptian has played 23,347 minutes for Liverpool. For perspective, that’s well over 9,000 minutes more club football than Erling Haaland has played in his career.
Henderson ended 2021-22 with more club appearances (57) than any player in Europe’s big five leagues and amid all the talk of Liverpool’s Quadruple chase, few paid attention to Klopp on the final day of the league season, when Manchester City shaded the title race. “We’ll build a team again and we will go again,” he said at the time.
Salah has played in 96 per cent of league and Champions League matches (262 out of 273) contested by Liverpool since signing from Roma, against whom he is celebrating a goal in 2018, above
PA/PRESS ASSOCIATION
Klopp knew there and then — before Paris — that a rebuild was needed. He talked in pre-season about “fresh blood” and wanted transfers to provide the infusion. Liverpool went “all-in,” a source said, for Aurélien Tchouaméni but were again pipped by Real, who signed the defensive midfielder from Monaco. Liverpool instead signed the striker Darwin Núñez, for a club record £85.3 million from Benfica.
In reality, a new striker (with Sadio Mané departing) and midfield reinforcements were needed but Klopp has always respected, and worked with, the “self-sustaining model” of Liverpool’s owner, Fenway Sports Group (FSG), and was especially hot on Núñez . When he did the analysis on Benfica before meeting them in the Champions League quarter-finals last season, he is said to have exclaimed, “wow, this guy is perfect” and Núñez followed up with superb performances in the tie.
Liverpool had also failed to score across 330 minutes in their three finals (they won the FA Cup and EFL Cup on penalties) and Klopp’s counterpressing starts with the work of the front three, which were further reasons to prioritise signing a striker. A mantra of the Klopp regime is “training is our transfer” (it’s a chapter title in his No 2, Pep Lijnders’, book Intensity) but the summer brought a truncated pre-season (with Liverpool back in action on July 30, in the Community Shield) and a tour to Asia.
It contrasted with 2021, where Klopp had time and space to re-energise his players in his favourite pre-season destination of Évian. That summer was so happy that, on returning from France, Klopp and Lijnders got Liverpool’s head of nutrition, Mona Nemmer, to organise barbecues on the terrace at the club’s AXA Training Centre and the head of first-team operations, Ray Haughan to put table tennis tables in its hallway, to keep the Évian vibe going.
It’s clear from Intensity that the mood was ebullient. In contrast, a contact who encountered Liverpool staff at The Titanic Hotel, the club’s base before home matches, three games into this season was struck by how tired they already seemed.
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Liverpool won only two of their first seven league games. This put them 11 points off the top and seven in arrears of City. Having finished second to City with 97 points (2018-19) and 92 points (2021-22) experience told Klopp’s players that already the title was all but gone and, for a group with such high self-expectations, it seems this was hard. For years, they have run through brick walls for Klopp — but is fourth spot something you run through walls for when you’re used to chasing trophies?
One observer likened it to 2009 when, having so nearly been champions under Rafa Benítez, Liverpool lost a key player in the summer (for Mané read Xabi Alonso) then started the new season badly, quickly ruining what had been big title hopes. It was “like all the air went out of the balloon” — a dismal campaign ensued. Similar happened after Brendan Rodgers’ side’s 2013-14 title tilt.
Running through walls is also hard to do from the physio’s table. While all teams have had the World Cup, and injuries, to deal with, these factors have hit Liverpool unusually hard. Out for significant periods before the Premier League paused were Luis Díaz, Diogo Jota, Thiago, Ibrahima Konaté, Matip and Naby Keita. Since, there have been issues with Firmino and Van Dijk, while Henderson and Fabinho have seemed respectively physically and mentally drained. Klopp has tried different formations to mitigate absences and reboot his team: traditional 4-4-2, 4-2-3-1, 4-1-4-1, 4-4-2 with a diamond.
None has brought particular joy, and, for a coaching team for whom “training is a transfer”, the most alarming thing about the recent defeats by Wolves and Brighton & Hove Albion (twice) is that they came after Klopp and Lijnders had a full week to work with the players.
It was a question touching on this that made Klopp snap at a respected Liverpool correspondent after the Wolves defeat and, on Friday, happier and calmer, he tried to explain to journalists that “it’s not always easy” to do press conferences when the team is in a trough and people are looking for new explanations for the same old mistakes. He is indignant about some of the recent Liverpool coverage, notably articles suggesting friction within his staff and that Andreas Kornmayer, his head of fitness and conditioning, is hard to work with.
Klopp is protective of the people around him and feels it is unacceptable — without on-record accusations that can be answered publicly — to call out backroom employees who have no platform to answer back. Lijnders has been criticised too but he, Kornmayer and others were there while Liverpool were winning titles and Champions Leagues and pushing for a Quadruple, so why are they suddenly a problem now?
What is inescapable is that this is a period of behind-the-scenes instability and churn. In the past 18 months, Liverpool have lost the club doctor Jim Moxon, key analyst Mark Leyland and — biggest of all — Michael Edwards, the Midas-touch sporting director who worked hand-in-glove with Klopp and the FSG president, Mike Gordon, to build the golden era.
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Julian Ward, Edwards’ successor, is stepping down at the end of the season, as is the director of research Ian Graham, the Cambridge physics PhD who built Liverpool’s renowned data science department. However the club are close to plugging that gap: it is understood that a leading data specialist, already working at a high level in football, is lined up as Graham’s replacement.
Klopp with Edwards, left, and Gordon
JOHN POWELL/GETTY IMAGES
By far the biggest loss is that of Gordon who, it was announced in November, has stepped back from a hands-on role running the club. Gordon is a special individual, someone of deep intellect but also with great people and listening skills. His relationship with Klopp is close and the dynamic between Edwards and Klopp — two strong-minded characters, who didn’t always agree — for a long time worked because of Gordon’s knack for bringing people together.
Billy Hogan, whose responsibilities increased when Gordon reduced his, has a good relationship with Klopp but the dynamic is different: Hogan is Liverpool’s chief executive, whereas Gordon was part of the ownership. There is instability in that regard, too, with FSG inviting offers for Liverpool in November, and still exploring new investment.
Having lost five and won three of ten games since the World Cup — a bleak run, during which Leicester City’s Wout Faes has been Liverpool’s top league scorer — Klopp is determined to draw a line. After Wolves he said: “It’s clear [last season’s 63 games] has influenced the first part of the season, but how long do we want to suffer off that?” Boosted by receiving indications that he will be backed to significantly improve his squad, the hope is to finish strongly and in the summer be finally in a position to “build a team again and go again”.
To further improve his mood, Jota is in contention for the Everton game having been out since October with calf issues. Firmino and Van Dijk are also close to returns and Díaz, running again after a knee injury, could be available next month.
Díaz, Jota and Firmino do not only add to Liverpool’s cutting edge but are important to their pressing. A theme of Intensity is how Klopp and Lijnders see the game in collective terms. Defence starts with the attack, just as attacking starts with defence, and if Liverpool have been jaw-droppingly easy to play through at times, it’s not only down to midfield or back four.
Jota, who has been so influential up front for Liverpool since his move from Wolves, is in contention to return against Everton on Monday
JOHN POWELL/GETTY IMAGES
For the rebuild to work, Klopp needs to find new chemistry at the top of the pitch, having lacked it since the underrated Mané departed. The bet on Núñez needs to come good and Cody Gakpo, a £44 million arrival from PSV Eindhoven, must show his slow start is due to coming into a malfunctioning team, rather than personal shortcomings. Crucially, Gakpo and Núñez are 23 and point to a policy shift towards younger signings.
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That is overdue. Jamie Carragher criticised Klopp for showing too much loyalty towards his old guard, including Henderson, rewarded with a four-year deal in 2021. Carragher has said Liverpool remind him of Arsenal late in Arsène Wenger’s reign: a team once unplayable because of its pace and physicality that had morphed into a softly-softly technical side.
Watching Liverpool recently, there seems truth in this, but the fact that the dynamic Jude Bellingham is his principal target suggests Klopp sees it too. What has happened to the almost-Quadruple winners? There is not one big problem with Liverpool, more a cocktail of many smaller ones.
Walk on . . . through a perfect storm — but, surely, if anyone can do it, it’s still Klopp.
Today’s sport
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Liverpool to back Jürgen Klopp for summer rebuild
Saturday February 11 2023, 10.00pm GMT, The Sunday Times
Klopp has no intention of walking away from Liverpool and is prepared to revamp his team in the summer
ANDREW KEARNS/CAMERASPORT VIA GETTY IMAGES
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Liverpool are ready to fight back after a dismal season by funding Jürgen Klopp to rebuild his squad in the summer and by hiring a new head of research — a key position in the club’s recruitment operations.
Liverpool are close to naming a successor to Dr Ian Graham, who built the renowned data science department, and whose work informed a number of the club’s transfer coups since he joined the club in 2012. These included the signing of Mohamed Salah from Roma for £34 million, Sadio Mané from Southampton for £36 million and Andy Robertson for £8 million from Hull.
● Klopp saw Liverpool’s decline coming. If anyone can fix things, he can
Graham’s number-crunching also helped to steer Liverpool towards the hiring of Klopp himself, in 2015, after analysis suggested Klopp’s final season at Borussia Dortmund — where Dortmund spent time at the bottom of the Bundesliga and finished seventh — was anomalous, given underlying performance indicators.
The figure poised to replace Graham is thought to be working in the game and regarded as a leading operator in the football data field. Graham, a Cambridge University physicist, is working a notice period until May.
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Despite misguided speculation to the contrary, Klopp has no intention of walking away from Liverpool — and, indeed, is said to be filled with a renewed energy and desire to revamp his team and “go again”. He has been buoyed by indications he will be given significant resources to overhaul his playing personnel.
With a number of leading players now in their thirties or approaching 30, and the Premier League being led by its youngest team — Arsenal — there is an acknowledgement that younger, fresh blood is needed. The Borussia Dortmund midfield phenomenon, Jude Bellingham, 19 is among Liverpool’s principal targets. They face competition from Manchester City, Manchester United, Real Madrid and Chelsea for the England star, who is valued at about €150 million (£131 million) by his club. Liverpool are also strongly linked with Wolves’ Matheus Nunes, who would cost about €50 million (£44 million).
Funding a transfer overhaul would also represent a statement of commitment from Liverpool’s owners, Fenway Sports Group (FSG), who in November signalled they were open to offers for the club. FSG’s position is that they are continuing to explore new investment.
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