Jurgen Klopp spins around inside Anfield’s museum and after beating his chest, inspiring words follow.
He has been doing this since last summer, back when Liverpool installed a hologram of their former manager within a glass case.
Yet look in other corners of the stadium, even on a matchday — bar a banner or two on the Kop — and there is little evidence of Klopp’s association with the club where he ended their 30-year wait to win another English league title.
Home and away, his name is barely sung by supporters, though this isn’t necessarily a measure of how they feel about him. Instead, it reflects how well the season has been going under his successor Arne Slot.
Given Liverpool’s position at the top of both the Premier League and Champions League tables, there hasn’t been much cause to look back in a search for answers.
Meanwhile, Klopp has been out of sight. As soon as he was finished with Liverpool last May, he left the city’s northern suburb of Formby, where he had lived for more than eight years, and he has only been back to Merseyside once since — for a Taylor Swift gig at Anfield the following month.
A clean break and the team’s subsequent success have helped everyone move on. Such a smooth transition seemed unlikely when Klopp shocked the world a year ago this week by announcing he was leaving.
It was another four months until he reached that moment. There are arguments for and against the procession that followed. Was it all too much of a distraction for a team then fighting on four fronts, even if many of the performances weren’t very convincing before Klopp looked longingly into a camera lens and detailed his position?
Ultimately, a campaign that promised much fell apart. By the end, Liverpool’s players seemed tired and Klopp was irritable, clearly in need of a rest. A separation felt like the right decision.
Klopp soaks in Anfield’s adulation following his final game in charge of Liverpool last season (Andrew Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
The nature of the long goodbye meant also there was ample opportunity to bid farewell and, perhaps more importantly for everyone concerned, accept what was happening.
Perhaps it would have been more difficult had Klopp, like Sir Alex Ferguson when he retired as Manchester United manager in summer 2013, waited until the start of May to reveal his plans.
Ferguson stepped down just a few weeks after announcing he would be sailing off into the sunset, doing so having just won United’s most recent Premier League title. “The club is still trying to get over him leaving,” then United forward Wayne Rooney says in a new BBC documentary, Sir Alex.
Rooney remained at Old Trafford for another four seasons as United lurched from one manager to the next, with Ferguson watching it all unfold from a seat in the directors’ box.
Even though he was no longer in charge, Ferguson did not disappear from the day-to-day discourse at United. Each time the team conceded a goal during a televised game, a camera would pan to him. At the final whistle after every defeat, he once again became the focus.
It did not help that Ferguson had played a key role in the recruitment process for his successor, and that a line could easily be drawn back to the start of United’s problems. In the same BBC documentary about his life, David Moyes, who was that successor but manager of Everton at the time, recalls being summoned to his fellow Scot’s Cheshire home where, rather than being offered the job, he got told by Ferguson that he’d been selected to follow him. For Moyes, it did not seem like he had an option.
By comparison, Klopp had no role in sourcing Slot. Instead, having told Liverpool about his intention to move on in the November, the club’s owners at Fenway Sports Group (FSG) were able to quietly begin the process of re-hiring several figures Klopp had seen off over the years, as they set about returning to a structure that had served the club well in tandem with the German before it was dismantled and his own power grew.
Arne Slot, Klopp’s successor, has enjoyed an excellent start to life as Liverpool head coach (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
A new face, sporting director Richard Hughes, chose Slot, but only after advice from the club’s analytics department, led by William Spearman.
Clearly, Slot’s results have been fundamental to the sense of Liverpool moving on. If his team were in mid-table domestically and struggling in Europe on the first anniversary of Klopp’s announcement, the mood would be very different, and the sight of his predecessor appearing in Salzburg earlier this month as an employee of the Red Bull sporting stable would have resulted in noise about bringing him back to Anfield.
Instead, everyone seems comfortable with the new arrangement.
Klopp clearly misses football but, for the time being, does not seem to be missing management. Though, last Wednesday, he suggested it would be a good idea for FSG to resolve Mohamed Salah’s ongoing contract impasse, his comments did not move the dial in the conversation about the Egyptian’s future.
On the same day, Liverpool had a key Premier League fixture away against Nottingham Forest.
Despite the desire among supporters to retain Salah, that the focus did not pivot from the challenge at the City Ground is the surest sign Liverpool have moved on.
GO DEEPER
Doctor Football, the Red Bull cosmos and giving people wings: An audience with Jurgen Klopp
(Top photo: Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)
