Jürgen Klopp's Liverpool, 10 Years On: All Belief, No Doubt

It's 10 years since Jürgen Klopp was appointed as manager of Liverpool. To celebrate, an excerpt from a book I started on the German's tenure.

When Jürgen Klopp announced he was leaving Liverpool, the world was shocked. And stunned. With hindsight, it looks like one of the best decisions he ever made. Imagine carrying the weight of responsibility for the success of the Reds. I get tired thinking about it, never mind doing the job for almost nine years.

After the dust settled on his resignation, I had the idea of writing a book about his Liverpool tenure. Real life, personal and professional, soon pushed that idea to the back of the cupboard. Other, better writers inevitably got there first too.

But I made a start, drafting a couple of sections. The idea was to have a chapter on each season, with one half a general look at something related to that campaign, the other an analysis of a key match from it. But not a look at a 4-0 win over Barcelona or a 7-0 thumping of Manchester United, rather a more forgotten game which proved to be important in a different way. These chapters would be interspersed with others on other aspects of Klopp’s Liverpool; the collegiate approach behind the scenes, his spikey relationship with referees, and so on.

Chances are the book will never happen; the moment has certainly passed, for one thing. As such, the 10th anniversary of Klopp’s appointment seems the perfect time to share what I had in mind for the first half of chapter one. The content remains valid, even if the German has now long since gone.

I may yet share what else I wrote at some point. For now, cast your mind back to the October international break in 2015. You’ll find a Liverpool team in need of a new manager and some positive momentum…

Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool: All Belief, No Doubt

“We have to change from doubter to believer. Now.”

Any book on Jürgen Klopp has to contain his famous quips. How could you write about such a charismatic, engaging personality without referring to some of his most memorable soundbites? Some managers make you wonder how they ever inspire anybody when you hear them mumbling along in interviews. Not Klopp.

The above line was the final answer he gave when speaking to Liverpool’s official channels after the club had appointed him to be their 20^th manager on October 8, 2015. Klopp had been asked to round off the chat with his message to Reds’ supporters. They were the most important nine words he uttered in his nine seasons in England.

Most corners of the media instead opted to focus on something the then 48-year-old said in his first public press conference. “José Mourinho, when he came to England for the first time, described himself as ‘a special one’,” noted one of the journalists present. Klopp responded with a smirk, before being asked how he would describe himself.

“I don’t want to describe myself,” he said, then fired back a question of his own. “Does anyone in this room think I can do wonders,” Klopp pondered. “No? So let me work. I’m a totally normal guy, I’m the normal one, maybe, if you want this.” Want this everyone did; the phrase ‘The Normal One’ provided a headline for the media, a tagline for club merchandising.

With hindsight, it was said at a turning point in Mourinho’s career. The day Klopp joined Liverpool occurred five months after Chelsea had won the Premier League with Mourinho at the helm. Glory can soon fade, though. The Blues’ title defence started appallingly, with Chelsea 16^th in the table when Klopp led out the Reds for his debut. Liverpool’s first league win under their new manager was a 3-1 victory at Stamford Bridge, with Mourinho dismissed by Chelsea (for a second time) less than two months later. The closest the self-appointed special one has subsequently got to a league title occurred when finishing second with Manchester United in 2017/18, 19 points adrift of the champions.

That season also marked the last campaign to date in which a Mourinho team earned more points than their Klopp counterpart. It seems almost quaint now that the press was so in thrall to the former when the latter arrived at Liverpool; if it was perfectly understandable in the climate of the time, worrying about who was special and who was normal seems absurd considering what each man has achieved since. Klopp made clear immediately that he had no interest in applying some catchy yet meaningless title to himself, which is why his ‘doubter to believer’ line proved far more integral to his success with the Reds.

Belief and faith are hugely important to him, so it’s no surprise he immediately referred to these ideas. Klopp’s outlook on football has been shaped by knowing it is utterly meaningless in the wider scheme; Arrigo Sacchi, one of Klopp’s heroes, is believed to have coined the phrase that “football is the most important of the least important things in life,” and the Liverpool manager has used the line himself. Even more telling is another quote he once gave in interview: “There is nothing so important to me that I could not bear to lose it. And that’s why I find there is no reason to fear.” With that perspective, who cares if you didn’t win that match the other night? Jürgen doesn’t, again erasing doubt.

There were two other references to the principle of belief in his first club interview which summed up the mindset divide that initially separated the German from the Liverpool fanbase.

“I’m here because I believe in the potential of the team,” he said, not that he could publicly offer any other view. Klopp would have struggled to find many Kopites who shared that opinion with real enthusiasm. The preceding season had been very disappointing, 2015/16 had not started any better, and many of the issues lay at the door of the enforced squad rebuild which occurred in 2014.

Luis Suárez departed for Barcelona that summer after delivering one of the greatest individual campaigns the Premier League has ever seen. His total of 31 goals and 12 assists in 33 appearances was eye catching enough. Only five men have made more goal contributions in a single top flight campaign since 1992 (with four of them playing more minutes, the same number benefitting from penalties). The quality of so many of the strikes only made his efforts even more memorable. With a nod to a famous line in Moneyball, Liverpool attempted to recreate Suárez in the aggregate when he moved to Barcelona.

The signings appeared logical enough. Rickie Lambert was the only non-Liverpool player who hit double figures for goals and assists in the 2013/14 Premier League without being Wayne Rooney. His Southampton teammate Adam Lallana was among the top scoring midfielders in the division while Mario Balotelli enjoyed the highest scoring season of his career to that point with Milan in Serie A.

Yet none of them delivered many goals for the Reds in 2014/15. It left Liverpool to endure a rare campaign in which none of its players scored 10 league goals, just the second season for which this was the case since the club rejoined the top flight in 1962. The only man who would reach that mark in 2015/16 was not the player who manager Brendan Rodgers would have envisioned when the season got underway either.

The Liverpool boss had put his faith in Christian Benteke, a £32.5m signing from Aston Villa. Where he was a powerful presence in the box, the background brains at Liverpool had pushed harder for nimble feet and fast thinking. They obtained this combination by purchasing Hoffenheim’s Roberto Firmino for a fee potentially rising to £29m. There was, however, a significant problem. Rodgers appeared to have no idea how to get the best out of the Brazilian who would go on to become his successor’s most used player. Firmino failed to score or assist in his seven Liverpool appearances before the club hierarchy took the decision to make a managerial change.

It was therefore clear why the Reds’ fanbase held less belief in the squad than Klopp when he arrived. Supporters had seen the team wither since their 2013/14 title charge, becoming a side that lost 3-0 to West Ham and needed penalties to struggle past League Two Carlisle United in the League Cup. Both matches were at Anfield for bad measure, helping to explain why the pressure on Rodgers reached breaking point.

A heavy defeat on the road is one thing, but the bulk of your paying punters are found at home. Disappointing them on a regular basis puts a manager in deep trouble. Klopp rarely had such issues in the league, only losing by more than one goal at home behind closed doors. His side were almost always in games to the final whistle at Anfield, a state of affairs that felt unimaginable in October 2015.

Rodgers’ replacement was all-too-aware that belief in the Reds had ebbed away. “At the moment, all of the LFC family is a little bit too nervous, a little bit too pessimistic, too often in doubt,” Klopp said in that first interview. “They all celebrate the game, it’s a great atmosphere in the stadium, but they don’t believe at the moment.”

Nail head, meet hammer. The new manager had the crowd’s number before he’d even stepped out in front of them. It also didn’t take long for Klopp to subtly criticise fans who left Anfield early when a game didn’t go their side’s way. But who could blame supporters for their concerns, either short term or in the sense of Liverpool’s waning standing in the football pecking order? Apathy was in the air, waiting to engulf the club. The Reds hadn’t won the league for a quarter of a century when Klopp joined, seemingly locked in a relative boom/bust cycle which often flipped in lightning-fast time.

Anyone who had followed Liverpool since they were last champions of England should have known what to expect in 2014/15. The club had developed a frustrating habit of collapsing in the season following their close-but-no-cigar title challenges, often falling away to the point that the manager had to leave.

Gerard Houllier was the first man to lead the club to silver medal on the Premier League podium, seeing his side finish seven points behind Arsenal in 2001/02. Top of the league in November of the following season, Liverpool then went on an 11-game winless run before stumbling home in fifth. Rafael Benitez got 86 points out of his Reds team in 2008/09 then finished seventh the year after, before Brendan Rodgers became the first Liverpool manager to take a Premier League title race to the final day of a campaign in 2014.

But his iteration of the Reds could only finish sixth the next season. They signed off with a humiliating 6-1 loss at Stoke City, Steven Gerrard’s remarkable Liverpool career ending in ignominy. When Klopp mentioned doubters, he was referring both to fans in 2015/16 specifically but also their experiences across the previous 25 years. Faith in the present-day side had long since evaporated with good reason. Kopites had also had their fingers burned so often in the past that it was natural for many supporters to wonder if Liverpool would ever be champions of England again. The Reds felt unlikely to reach the same financial footing as Chelsea or the Manchester clubs in the transfer market, with history suggesting they would have to be content with one title challenge per manager at best. Doubt can take many forms and provide quite the burden.

Some belief was restored by Klopp’s Liverpool almost immediately, growing further in the first part-season of his tenure. Across his 52 games in 2015/16, the Reds reached two cup finals and recorded memorable wins over Chelsea, Manchesters City and United, Everton and Klopp’s former club, Borussia Dortmund. There was a 5-4 victory at Norwich in which the manager broke his glasses celebrating the injury time winner, then a 6-0 triumph at Villa Park, the club’s joint-second biggest away win in the Premier League.

It was naturally not plain sailing throughout, the campaign carrying an air of ‘two steps forward, one step back.’ Defeats at Anfield would become exceedingly rare in later years, but Klopp suffered two before January was out, with a 3-0 loss at Watford and the throwing away of a 2-0 lead at Southampton other low points. Nobody ever said it was going to be easy.

“Who wants to be the best team in the world today? We want to be the best team tomorrow or another day. That’s all.” Few in autumn 2015 would’ve imagined the Reds would’ve got there soon, if at all, when listening to Klopp’s first club interview. The German proved to be a man of his word, though. Changing doubters to believers at every level of the club was his greatest, most important achievement.