The Social One: Why Jurgen Klopp was a Perfect Fit for Liverpool

By Marios Mantzos

The Social One sets out why Jurgen Klopp and Liverpool Football Club are a match made in heaven. In 2015, a romantic German who had once dreamed of becoming a doctor found a pulse in the city of Liverpool and set about leading an intubated club back to the top of the English and European game. Klopp is not just the reformer of Liverpool FC, but a true leader and authentic father figure who has created the most beautiful working environment in modern football, based on his faith in the principles of teamwork and a love for his fellow human being. In the stronghold of socialism, Klopp, a man who says he would never vote for the right, spoke to the heart of the city, became an honorary Scouser and - in the eyes of many - the reincarnation of the legendary Liverpool leader Bill Shankly. Deep and engrossing, this detailed portrait of Klopp is not just a football book but a study of leadership and motivation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Feb 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781801505253

Book preview

Introduction

SPEAKING ABOUT sports and football in terms of politics involves a significant risk. In a bloodthirsty society, words such as socialism can easily put a wrong label on a book, since, as you can easily comprehend through discussing with people and interpreting their way of thinking, there are only a handful of people out there who can treat notions as symbols rather than as indications of a certain philosophy of life. Besides, the writer’s political views lack any importance whatsoever.

Nowadays, football has turned into a powerful global industry, in which natural persons and legal entities invest money recklessly, to maximise their profits, in a show of bigotry and financial looting that entices the protagonists of the sport, the footballers, who see absurd amounts of money being deposited in their bank accounts week by week. At the altar of money, many times of black money, our unfortunate football becomes the golden fleece and turns into cynical business.

It is true that the capitalist function of modern football bears no resemblance to the vision of the 19th-century English working class. In practice, however, on the pitch, is it that far from it? Eleven people work together harmoniously, playing with and for each other, aiming to achieve a common goal, with the active participation of thousands of people from the stands. They will reap the joy of victory together, they will celebrate it together, they will suffer and feel the bitterness of defeat together. The quote ‘team comes first’ sounds so clichéd that we rarely get into the process of thinking and realising it. But, indeed, in football, the ultimate team sport, the team comes first. It is true that football is a sport in which the best team does not always win. But this is the magic of football; it gives players of every level the opportunity to contribute to a team, to become an equal member of an organised plan and to achieve a common goal with their team-mates. If a political term can summarise this and match the essence of football that is obviously socialism.

If you’ve got useful players and you get them all to do the little things that they can do well and you marry them all together, it’s a form of socialism without politics, of course. They’re all helping each other.

Bill Shankly, the man to whom these words belong, is a timeless symbol of the socialist approach to football, distancing himself as much as necessary from politics. And his legacy seems to be the answer to the eternal question ‘why Liverpool?’ that is posed by those who fail to realise what can really charm a man born in the 90s to a team that missed league glory for 30 whole years.

The Scot was not just a manager who took Liverpool from the Second Division and made them world-class champions. He was the one who spoke as much as anyone to the soul of the city, to the heart of the working class, the man who ‘made people happy’, as written on his imposing statue outside Anfield. Since the mid-1960s, Liverpool’s red football team has acquired a clear identity and formed a fan community, inextricably linked to the city’s left-wing political approach, in a country that has always had a conservative drive.

Bill Shankly said goodbye to Liverpool in 1974 with three league championships, two FA Cups and one UEFA Cup, paving the way for assistant Bob Paisley, then Joe Fagan and Kenny Dalglish, who won a total of ten league titles and six European trophies until 1990. After that, the greatest team in England and Europe in the 70s and 80s went through a long period of drought that no one could have imagined would last three whole decades. Winning the UEFA Cup in 2001 with a golden own goal against Alavés and the legendary Champions League four years later with the unprecedented comeback against AC Milan in Istanbul, together with three FA Cup and an equal number of League Cup trophies were the only cracks of happiness in Liverpool until 2019 and 2020, the year of the big return to the European and British throne, respectively.

Thirty whole years for a league title. Why so many? Why had no one done it since Dalglish? Why did teams such as Blackburn Rovers and Leicester City stare at the Premier League trophy in their museum while Liverpool waited? Why should Federico Macheda score the goal of his life in 2009? Why should Steven Gerrard slip in 2014? Curse? Fate? Destiny?

Arranging facts, data and situations in a logical order, the harmony with which they relate, even if they have nothing to do with each other, spontaneously leads you to the eternal, secret belief that in life everything has an explanation and happens for a reason. Although it sounds like a purely religious point of view, everyone interprets it in their own way and judges accordingly. This book deals with a person who has deeply adopted this Aristotelian approach that ‘everything in life happens for a good reason. One day we will find out why.’ It is this person who has watered Liverpool with the coveted nectar of success.

Jürgen Klopp is not just a football coach or the saviour who finally managed to bring the Premier League trophy to Merseyside. He is the one who makes you believe for the first time and say freely, without a sense of sacrilege, that Liverpool, about 40 years later, found the closest they could to Bill Shankly. Clearly different, much more modern, but so common.

Liverpool not only regained their lost love with trophies but became the most mainstream football club in the world, coming out of obscurity and abandoning the loser label that followed them for years. It is not so much their performances on the pitch; it is not the fired-up offensive line; it is not purely football. It is the way. The honest, romantic but modern way in which Jürgen Klopp chose to manage Liverpool and make them more than just a champion team.

The German introduced a great, unique method of operating an organisation that deals with equal seriousness and attention the starting line-up and the concerns of the restaurant chef of the training ground. Liverpool FC is the ultimate work environment that could be taught in seminars on how a business should operate and especially how vital the role of leader is, to which most companies never pay the required attention, ignoring the appropriate criteria. In the age of image and influencers, Jürgen Klopp, a man who has no clue about social media, is the best one to teach what a leader and inspirer of a group means.

Liverpool may in fact be a business in the hands of American speculators, but the way the team operates under the guidance of a clearly left-wing man looks closer than ever in the post-Shankly era to the true socialist roots of the club. The £66m for Alisson Becker, the £75m for Virgil van Dijk or the £85m after add-ons for Darwin Nunez justifiably contradict the historical background that Liverpool want to defend, but the way the team operates inside the dressing room, where the moral right of intervention of the owners, Fenway Sports Group (FSG), stops and Klopp’s absolute control begins, proves that the heart of the Reds remains socialist – everyone works for each other.

Jürgen may not be the greatest football genius on the planet. But he is the top human resources manager in modern sports history, who leaves a huge legacy for the model of future manager.

After Bill Shankly, the manager is the most important person in Liverpool and people want to trust him. I’m here for these people.

Jürgen Klopp

I

From Doubters To Believers

‘From day one, he made everyone believe that this would be a very special journey.’

Steven Gerrard

THE 225TH Merseyside derby on 4 October 2015 is in progress and Liverpool are leading at Goodison Park thanks to a Danny Ings header four minutes before half-time. We are in stoppage time of the first half as Gerard Deulofeu crosses the ball into the Liverpool penalty area. Emre Can makes a poor clearance, the ball deflects off Martin Škrtel, and Romelu Lukaku takes the present and gives Simon Mignolet no chance, equalising for Everton. Liverpool lose their lead within a matter of minutes through a sloppy goal, highly representative of their miserable situation.

Nothing changed before the final whistle of Martin Atkinson sounded like the swansong for Brendan Rodgers on the Liverpool bench. The man who had come closer than anyone to exorcising the curse of winning Liverpool’s first league title since 1990 in 2014. Unfortunately, the Northern Irishman saw Steven Gerrard slip to allow Demba Ba to start the beginning of the end, which the Reds confirmed with a monumental suicide eight nights later at Selhurst Park, losing a three-goal lead against Crystal Palace within just nine minutes.

Liverpool had not since looked like the unstoppable team of 2014, as they said goodbye to their goal machine, Luis Suárez, who left a huge and unfilled gap on his way to Barcelona, one that Rickie Lambert and Mario Balotelli were called upon to fill. The following season Liverpool finished sixth, eliminated in the two domestic cup semi-finals by Chelsea and Aston Villa, knocked out of the Champions League at the group stages and saying goodbye in the Europa League round of 32 after a penalty shoot-out defeat by Beşiktaş. Rodgers’ vision, after he had assured that the club would take more and more steps towards winning titles, not only did not materialise but was not even approached. The hugs between the players, the high-fives, the chest touches and the warm celebrations were lost in the misery to which Liverpool returned.

In that moment it was clear that the club was suffering from the lack of a long-term plan, with the journey of 2013/14 blindsiding many people. The challenge for the title was something that Liverpool had not objectively planned. They did it because it just happened to work out for them. However, it seemed impossible, especially as Suárez had gone, to be able to follow suit. Liverpool lacked foundations and did not show the slightest prospect that they could challenge for titles. Raheem Sterling had already realised that and, no matter how much he annoyed and hurt the fans by heading to Manchester City in summer of 2015, everyone knew that profession-wise it was a reasonable decision.

Counting 25 years without a title at that time and with darkness on the horizon, Liverpool had turned into a unique phenomenon, the likes of which you could not meet in any league in the world. No matter how much you searched, even in the least commercial leagues on the planet, it is impossible to find a club with such a reputation and fame that did not win its domestic championship title for such a long time. And even though some big trophies such as the Champions League of 2005 and the UEFA Cup of 2001 arrived occasionally, the contact with the Premier League title remained only at the levels of sporadic flirtation, culminating in 2009 and 2014 where the Reds came really close.

The memories from the celebrations at Anfield in May 1990 with Kenny Dalglish at the helm did not in the least indicate that a three-decade drought was beginning on that sunny day. Liverpool were living with Hillsborough’s wounds from a year earlier and the impact of the unjust loss of what was then 96 people on the club’s soul was reflected in May 1989, when they lost the league title to Arsenal in the very last match and with the very last kick of the season. With a three-point lead over the Gunners, they just needed to avoid defeat by two goals or more. In the 91st minute, however, Michael Thomas made it 2-0 and Liverpool lost the title on goal difference in a heartbreaking way.

King Kenny’s team reorganised, returned and won the championship in 1990 but Hillsborough’s wounds never went away. Dalglish resigned in February 1991 and history draws a red line. Graeme Souness, Roy Evans, Gérard Houllier, Rafa Benitez, Roy Hodgson, Kenny Dalglish (again) and Brendan Rodgers tried, but no one made it. The 18 championship victories up to 1990 remained at 18 and the English title record-holders saw Manchester United dominating in the 1990s and 2000s, even surpassing them.

With Liverpool in tenth place in October 2015, seemingly without a specific plan, Brendan Rodgers proved not to be the legend who would bring the Reds back to the English throne. The Americans of FSG, who saved the club from the nightmare of the Hicks-Gillett ownership five years previously, were ready to give the hot seat of Liverpool to a new person. And this person would not have been a usual choice. The American owners, who were beginning to become acquainted with football, had to listen to the people of the city and look for the one that would best fit Bill Shankly’s holy trinity: the players, the manager and the fans.

From Kenny Dalglish onwards, the blind trust and positive aura of Liverpool supporters for the manager had been missing. For those fans, the man sitting on the bench is much more important than the players. People are investing in him, the club does not change managers recklessly and it is no coincidence that, by saying goodbye to Rodgers, Liverpool were looking for just the 21st manager in their entire history. Liverpool’s nature needed something more substantial, because this club is destined to see football in a different way and to always remain attached to its own romantic mentality, being allergic to the cynicism of the money flowing into the market and the star players. Real Madrid, Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) and many more abuse the capitalist model of modern football, throwing money away and breaking the Financial Fair Play rules. In Liverpool, a city that has never embraced capitalism as the prevailing ideology, the possibility of acting in a dynastic way and buying the best out there would hurt their pride, even if it seemed like a recipe for success, the myth of which would be demolished by the legendary armada of Claudio Ranieri a few months later. But Liverpool did not wait for the miracle of Leicester City to realise that romance does still exist. In Liverpool, romance never died. It adapted to the new reality but did not die. And in the face of the manager, people eagerly expected to see someone who would fit them and make them believe.

A lot of names were said to be in the race for the leadership of Liverpool, days before the announcement of Rodgers’ departure. The United States national team manager and German legend, Jürgen Klinsmann, had little chance, even if the Americans of FSG would have loved it. Frank de Boer had an interesting project with youngsters in Ajax but was considered inexperienced. Ronald Koeman and Walter Mazzarri were also on the list but any interest in these gentlemen was maintained at the literary level, at a time when in practice FSG were already in talks with two specific men. Besides, the process of looking for a manager did not start on 4 October but had been running for a long time. Therefore, there was enough time to evaluate the options.

Just a year after their duel in the quarter-finals of the Champions League, Jürgen Klopp and Carlo Ancelotti were standing at the starting line, this time for a job at Liverpool. The German coach was in the fourth month of his vacation after seven years of hard work and great success at Borussia Dortmund, having recently rejected the opportunity to take over the national team of Mexico, while the Italian legend had already turned down an offer to return to AC Milan in the summer in order to enjoy a break from football and fully recover from a neck operation.

Liverpool’s interest in Klopp came as no surprise, not only because of his availability but mainly because it was not the first time. His door had been knocked on by the Reds in the spring of 2012, when Kenny Dalglish departed. However, it remained closed, as Klopp’s agent made it clear that he was committed to Dortmund. And there was no reason for him to leave, as he was leading BVB to their second consecutive league title and the first double in their history.