Jurgen Klopp and The Beauty of Trying
A personal reflection on the imminently departing Liverpool manager
Jurgen Klopp, the manager of Liverpool Football Club who recently announced that he is leaving his post at the end of this season, has fake teeth and a surgically enhanced head of hair. Ask him and he will gladly tell you. He is not embarrassed in the slightest by these concessions to vanity; there were some things about his appearance that he wanted to change, and he acquired the resources to change them, so he indulged in some radical self-care. They look great, by the way, his hair and teeth. Really top-class work. You can see for yourself in the video where he announces his impending departure, which is filled with exactly the sort of candor and self-awareness that you would expect from a man who unselfconsciously discusses his cosmetic surgery with global football journalists.
This announcement came as a surprise to just about everyone paying attention to world football, and especially to Liverpool fans (like myself), who I think it’s fair to say would have unanimously welcomed a lifetime appointment for our beloved German skipper. Liverpool has been one of the best teams in the world during his tenure; he has delivered more sustained success to the club than anyone since the dizzying heights of Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley’s dominance in the 1960s and 70s. By almost any metric of managerial performance, he has overachieved both at Liverpool and during his previous stints at Mainz and Borussia Dortmund in German professional football. His reputation as one of the best coaches of the 21st century is secure even if he never stalks another competitive sideline.
But what sets Klopp apart from the other successful coaches of his era is an outlook on life that consistently extends beyond the realm of football. It is clear that he loves the sport with an intensity that has become too much to bear after more than two decades of managing football cliubs, but throughout that time he has never viewed football as the only thing, or even something that matters very much at all aside from the joy that it brings to people who watch it. He has even said so explicitly:
The most important job of football is entertaining people… We don’t save lives, we don’t plant anything, create anything, do surgery. We only play football, so why can’t we entertain?
Despite how sensible this opinion seems, it is an extremely strange thing for any coach, in any sport, to say out loud. Imagine, for instance, an American college football coach telling a journalist in a press conference that “entertaining people” was the most important aspect of their job1. Even among the cultured gentleman of elite European football management, Klopp’s attitude is unusual - and it seems to be a genuine expression of his feelings about the role that sports play in our lives and about what really matters when the game is over and everyone has to leave the stadium.
I became a fan of Liverpool Football Club in late August of 2009 due to a professional mandate backed by the full power of the American federal government. Having recently arrived in Uganda to begin training for what would be two years working under the auspices of the United States Peace Corps, I was instructed by our local advisors to select a European football team to support, preferably a successful team from the English Premier League. Ugandans are wildly enthusiastic about football and about the Premier League specifically, and the working theory was that we might be more effective in our community outreach if we could break the ice by finding some sports-related common ground with our host country national partners.
I was not totally unfamiliar with the landscape of European club football, which is to say that I was savvy enough to know that I could not in good conscience support Manchester United, who were at the time still obnoxiously dominant (in England) and most visibly represented by the (already) contemptible figure of Cristiano Ronaldo. When I was instructed to make my football allegiance official, United were incidentally the most popular club in Uganda by a wide margin: of the various football-related adornments on the country’s enormous fleet of minibus taxis, I would estimate a good 60% were related to the team or its players2 - an unfortunate blemish on the otherwise rich and rewarding experience of traveling through Uganda, an experience I recommend to any and all readers.
For a natural contrarian and hopeless romantic like myself, Liverpool was the natural choice: first and foremost, they were United’s biggest historical rival, but also a club with a compelling narrative, historical dominance having given way to a kind of perennial underdog status punctuated by occasional improbable triumphs; there was something to grab onto there, and a return to the full glory of yesteryear to hope for along the way. Liverpool, importantly, also had Stephen Gerrard, a local lad who had become one of the best players in the world and the irrepressible driving force behind nearly all of Liverpool’s most improbable Premier League era successes.
Choosing to support a sports team as a way of facilitating your efforts at government-funded international development isn’t a particularly inspiring story of fandom, but over the years I have nonetheless become deeply, unreasonably invested in Liverpool’s competitive success. During the lean years before the club’s recent resurgence3, I fell in love with hard-nosed cult heroes like Dirk Kuyt and Martin Skrtel; I watched in amazed bewilderment as Luis Suarez ascended to the highest possible plane of footballing brilliance; I sunk into a bottomless pit of despair after the Reds’ 2014 title charge ended in the cruelest way possible with The Slip and Crystanbul.
A decade after I made my fateful choice, many years after leaving Uganda, I flew back over the ocean and made my way to the north of England. There, in the backroom of a pub near Liverpool’s Anfield stadium, I handed 400 British Pounds to a twitchy old barkeep in exchange for two priceless tickets that would allow me and my (very accommodating) fiancée to sit in the Kop. A few hours later, we watched in a state of rapture as Mo Salah got his head on a lofted cross from Trent Alexander-Arnold, sending the ball across the face of the goal, where it bounced off the hands of Tottenham goalkeeper Hugo Lloris, caromed against defender Toby Alderweireld, and rolled into the net to secure a vitally important 2-1 victory for Liverpool. For the next few minutes, it felt like the entire stadium was levitating. I will never forget it.
Nothing fundamental about the world changed that day; we all left the stadium afterwards and went back to our normal, occasionally grueling lives. But we had shared a moment with each other, with the players on the pitch, with millions of other people around the world, that had somehow left an indelible mark on all of us. We had been thoroughly, joyously entertained.
These sorts of moments - the explosion of collective euphoria I felt part of that day - are what make being a sports fan worth it. Life is hard, and sports - at their best - make it a little bit easier. Klopp understood this reality better than most coaches, and he built his teams to deliver those moments of ecstasy with as much frequency as possible.
In this regard, his masterpiece will always be Liverpool’s almost-impossible comeback against Lionel Messi’s Barcelona team in the 2019 semi-finals of the Champion’s League. Down 3-0 against one of the most successful clubs in football history, led by the greatest football player who has ever lived, Liverpool somehow scored four goals in the return leg to win the tie and advance to the Champion’s League final (where they defeated Tottenham to win their sixth European Cup). More than a tactical victory, the Barcelona comeback was a triumph of will, a perfect encapsulation of the fighting spirit that Klopp instilled in his squads.
While the result ensured that this match would hold a deservedly exalted place in Liverpool’s storied history, the most seminal moment of Klopp’s tenure might have actually taken place in an otherwise unremarkable press conference a few days before the match. Asked about how he planned to motivate his players after a disheartening loss in first leg of the tie, he said this:
We want to celebrate the Champions League campaign, either with a proper finish or another goal. That is the plan: just try. If we can do it, wonderful. If not, then fail in the most beautiful way.
Klopp was not trying to be a philosopher here - he has rarely attempted to be anything more than a football coach - but in answering a throwaway question about his motivational strategy, he revealed a profound truth about humans: all that we can do is to make an attempt, to dedicate ourselves fully to the challenge of existence. It is possible - hell, it’s almost guaranteed for some of us - that we will never get where we really want to go. But we can - and should - find purpose and beauty and meaning in trying to get there nonetheless. Success is invariably fleeting - another season always arrives with a clean slate and a new set of targets - but embracing the profound value of the struggle itself is something much more durable.
This is the same insight that seems to have been the impetus behind Klopp’s surprising decision to depart the world of professional football. At 56 years old, he could easily have managed for another decade, accruing accolades and further burnishing his reputation - but to what end? Football, for Klopp, is a worthwhile endeavor only to the extent that it makes people happy; when he sensed his own joyous dedication to the struggle waning, sensed that he would soon no longer be able to commit himself fully to the project of Liverpool Football Club, the decision was as good as made. It was always going to be like this - one can scarcely imagine Jurgen Klopp following the tragicomic trajectory of late-career Jose Mourinho, for instance.
He will be impossible to replace, not only because of his almost unparalleled success on the pitch, but also because he was able to become much more than a football coach despite never apparently intending to do so. He famously referred to himself as “a totally normal guy,” but in many ways he seems to be a genuinely rare breed - someone able to achieve a mind-boggling level of fame and professional success and to do so seemingly without losing his sense of compassion or perspective. He loved the game of football deeply - perhaps too deeply at times - but he never loved it more than he seemed to love the people it brought together. From where I sit: a genuinely good man, and one whose presence made all of us a little better off. He will be missed.
Lane Kiffin is probably the only coach who might conceivably say something like this, but only as part of some elaborately ironic response to perceived criticism of his play-calling.
From my hazy memory, the distribution of football-related paraphernalia on Ugandan minibuses from 2009-2011 were as follows: 60% Manchester United, 15% Arsenal, 10% Barcelona, 5% Real Madrid, and 5% Chelsea, with the remaining 5% allocated randomly to teams like Liverpool, Tottenham, West Ham, Aston Villa, and Newcastle.
As any longer-tenured Liverpool fan will recognize, 2009 was a particularly bad year to join the bandwagon - Liverpool’s hapless American owners would soon drive the club to the brink of administration, which is apparently what British people call it when a club runs out of money. It would take years - and the timely intervention of substantially more competent Americans - for the club to recover, and it was not until Klopp’s arrival in 2015 that Liverpool began to enjoy any sort of meaningful success whatsoever.
Absolutely incredible. Thanks for sharing! YNWA
Love this!