Jurgen Klopp will be leaving Liverpool at the end of the season.
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00:00 *ding*
00:00 Okay, so first and foremost, Jurgen Klopp is not being sacked by Liverpool.
00:05 He's not losing his job. In that sense, he has decided that it is time for him to step away from that role.
00:11 And why is that?
00:11 Well, in the video he has given to the official Liverpool FC YouTube channel, he says that basically,
00:17 he's tired.
00:19 And not tired of Liverpool or even necessarily tired of football, just...
00:23 Tired. The guy is 56 and he's never really had anything resembling a single break from the game since he was a kid.
00:31 Mike, genuinely, Klopp was a lower league German footballer, played his entire professional career at Mainz '05,
00:37 and took over the manager's role there while he was still on the playing staff.
00:41 It was February 2001, the club were without a manager, so we retired from the game as a player to immediately take up the role as a manager.
00:49 He was there for like seven or eight years, he got them their first promotion in literally decades,
00:54 and despite the fact they were the smallest club in that division, both like financially, structurally, everything,
00:59 they were fairly comfortable for a while.
01:01 Eventually, that lack of investment did tell and they were relegated back to the second division,
01:05 but Klopp stayed to try and get them back up, and when he failed to do that, he took the Dortmund job.
01:10 And again, he was there for seven or eight years, everybody knows how successful that period of his career was.
01:15 He's got like two Bundesliga titles, he was a runner-up in the Champions League,
01:19 he really made Dortmund a mainstay of top-level European football.
01:23 But then, in April 2015, he announced he would be leaving Dortmund at the end of the season,
01:28 which he did, and he enjoyed a very short sabbatical before, in October, he was appointed the Liverpool manager.
01:34 And you don't need me to tell you, in these past eight or nine years, he's won the Premier League, the FA Cup, the Carabao, the Champions League,
01:40 he's won the lot with Liverpool, and that brings us right up to date.
01:44 And that, my friends, is what this is all about, because in that entire story that starts with him as a fresh-faced teenager in Germany,
01:53 and ends literally today with him announcing he's leaving Liverpool at the age of 56,
01:58 the biggest break he's had from football in that entire time has been the scant four months between taking the Dortmund job and taking the Liverpool job.
02:07 Or, to put that another way, the guy has not had a break since 1987, and now he wants one.
02:15 And I mean... fair?
02:18 But it still does beg the question, why now? Why this season?
02:21 Jurgen Klopp very recently signed a contract extension with Liverpool that takes him up to 2026.
02:27 Why not just see the contract out?
02:29 Well, and to be fair, this is a really honest admission from Klopp in the interview he's put out about it.
02:35 There's kind of an awareness from him that in any normal job, he would have just been sacked last season.
02:41 He literally says in the interview that there were points last season where he thought this decision was about to be taken out of his hands,
02:47 and perhaps maybe it should have been.
02:49 It has kind of been forgotten a bit, because they finished so strongly and got in the fifth, and they've been brilliant this season,
02:55 but there were parts of last season, specifically around the turn of the year, where Liverpool were in a bad way.
03:02 From the start of 2023, they went on a really bad run, conceding three against Brentford, conceding three against Brighton,
03:09 conceding three against Wolves, and were languishing in 10th in the league.
03:14 They were out of the FA Cup, they were out of the Carabao Cup, they got embarrassed over two legs by Real Madrid.
03:20 They were having a total stinker.
03:22 But in amongst all this, they did win the Merseyside derby quite well, and they beat Man United 7-0, which certainly wasn't going to hurt,
03:27 but there was still talk at the time that maybe Klopp had taken this group as far as he could.
03:33 It seemed fairly obvious that so many of the stars that had got them to where they'd been were entering a period of physical decline.
03:39 Now, they needed a complete overhaul of the playing staff and possibly of the structure and the direction,
03:45 and maybe Klopp wasn't the right guy to do that.
03:47 Now, the first part of that has been answered emphatically this season.
03:51 They've moved on, your Jordan Hendersons and your Fabinhos and whatnot,
03:54 and they've replaced them with Dominic Sboslai and players coming through the academy like Curtis Jones.
03:59 That rebuild is well underway and looks to be going massively in the right direction.
04:03 And because Klopp had started that off, there was kind of the assumption that,
04:06 "Okay, he's going to have a brand new version of Liverpool that'll probably take him up to the end of his contract in 2026,
04:12 and then they'll go again."
04:14 Thing is, there's still obviously more work to do.
04:17 Mo Salah is 31 and continues to attract interest from mega money teams around the world.
04:22 Virgil van Dijk is 32 and has come back from what could have been a potentially career-ending injury
04:28 and has had to adapt his game accordingly.
04:30 There's still quite a big chunk of this rebuild to do, and it's probably the most important bit.
04:36 And if any part of that is going to happen this summer,
04:39 then you want a manager in charge who is thinking about the next five, six, seven years.
04:44 And if that isn't going to be Klopp, then there's no point in him staying around till 2026.
04:49 It is best if he moves on now.
04:51 And you have to just give him enormous credit for this, because he's already done the hard part of this.
04:55 He's moved on that first chunk of players, brought in a brand new crop,
04:58 developed some of the academy lads, and implemented a really cutting-edge system that suits all of them.
05:03 And obviously, only time's going to tell with this, but it does look on the face of it like he has laid the foundations
05:08 for his successor and the long-term future of this side way better than the likes of Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wenger did.
05:16 Unlike those two, though, Klopp hasn't definitely said that he's 100% no takesy-backsies,
05:21 fully retiring after this.
05:23 But if there is one crumb of comfort possibly for Liverpool fans, what he has said is that if he discovers
05:30 that he misses the game too much and he finds he has to get back into it somewhere down the line,
05:35 he could never, ever manage another club in England except Liverpool.
05:41 Which, I mean, technically, on that wording doesn't rule out the possibility that he come back to Liverpool one day, does it?
05:47 I've watched way too many Marvel films, haven't I?
05:50 So, the last question, of course, is who replaces him?
05:54 Everybody and their dog is going to be saying Xavi Alonso because of the job he's doing at Leverkusen,
05:59 and yeah, he would seem to me to be the most natural fit for this position.
06:04 And there is that rumour as well, he's got some weird clause in his contract that says if the Liverpool job comes up, he can just go.
06:11 Other than that, Roberto Deserbi has been linked in the past.
06:14 Pep Lindes is obviously highly thought of enough within the club that he could potentially take over.
06:19 Then you've got Nagelsmann, maybe, Enrique, Steven Gerrard.
06:23 But yes, that's that. Jurgen Klopp is leaving Liverpool and he does so undoubtedly,
06:28 it's the most successful manager in the Premier League era.
06:31 That is just, that's not a video I expected to have to do in the next few years, let alone today.
06:38 We will, of course, have more about this in the coming weeks.
06:41 We'll do a full breakdown of who might be a good replacement.
06:43 We'll probably look at how Xavi Alonso's got Leverkusen playing.
06:45 So if you want to see any of that, please do subscribe to us here on 442.
06:49 You won't miss a single video and that'll make you happy.
06:52 You can get me on Twitter @AdamClearyClery.
06:55 It's going to be a weird day and 442 socials are, of course, in the corner of the video.
06:58 Out of respect for what Liverpool fans must be feeling, I will not now pull the magazine across with Alex Ferguson on the cover
07:05 and hype that up to you, but you can still find it in all good news agents and the crap ones too.
07:09 In the meantime, I'm going for a lie down, I think, for a bit.
07:13 Because what else can you do?
07:16 Traitors tonight as well, so emotional roller coaster.
07:19 Anyway, bye. Stay safe.