In arguably the highlight of his farewell speech to Anfield and Liverpool fans all over the world last Sunday, manager Jurgen Klopp turned his thoughts to Feyenoord coach Arne Slot, who will be his successor at the club.
“You welcome the new manager like you welcomed me,” Klopp told the fans. “Change is good. If you go into it with the right attitude, then everything will be fine.”
Then, rather amusingly, he reappropriated one of his own chants (to the tune of Live is Life by Opus) in honour of the Dutchman. “Arne Slot, NA NA NA NA NA!” he shouted in tune. The supporters took it on instantly.
It was vintage Klopp to the end – colourful, hilarious and magnanimous – and another highlight in a YouTube compilation of the man’s greatest hits.
There are numerous such clips online – some even 40 minutes long – comprising snippets of his post-match conference antics and soundbites over the years at Merseyside.
Like the time he got excited over a translator’s “erotic voice”. Or the time he was baffled by a thick Birmingham accent – “Sorry, what!?”. Or my personal favourite: the time he misheard “brain fog” to be something else and asked rather petulantly why others can swear but he can’t.
All this, in addition to a compilation of the epic Liverpool matches he presided over that drove Anfield into a frenzy. The Europa League semi-final comeback against Dortmund in 2016, Divock Origi’s stoppage-time winner against Everton, thrashing Manchester United 7-0. And not least of all the astonishing comeback at home to Barcelona in the Champions League semi-final in 2019.
Liverpool fans will be watching those clips for years to come now that the man has left Anfield after nine memorable years.
Watching the farewell event, I had hoped that, in the words of football columnist Oliver Kay, Klopp would pull a move from the Wolf Of Wall Street, pick up the microphone and yell, “I’m not leaving! The show goes on!”
But he is leaving. The show is over. Anfield will move on, but oh how we will miss the charismatic German, fist pumps and bear hugs et al.
A friend – a non-footballing person, I should point out – chimed in while the camera panned to sobbing fans in the Kop during Klopp’s guard of honour on the pitch: “ You know, he only won one league title in his nine years. Isn’t all this a bit much?”
In rare moment of restraint, I paused and considered his words before reacting.
If Klopp had won four more games over his nine-year spell at Liverpool, he would be leaving with three Premier Leagues and three Champions Leagues rather than one of each.
Had Liverpool beaten Real Madrid in their two Champions League final encounters in 2018 and 2022, those additional European Cups would have been added to Anfield’s trophy room.
And twice the Reds missed out on Premier League honours to Manchester City by an agonising point – even after finishing on one occasion with a whopping tally of 97.
So was the Klopp era more a story of great success or what might have been?
It took a few seconds before I perished the thought.
“You can keep your trophies and stats,” I shot back.
Analysts and armchair experts can debate all they want about “legacy” and whether Klopp measures up to the great managers in the history of the game. But what Klopp means to Liverpool fans is personal; it transcends stats and comparisons to others.
“Trophies and medals, they get put away somewhere in the clubhouse and you forget when exactly it was and who won which trophy when,” he said in 2015.
“What’s important is the moment itself, the memory of being there at the game, that you were part of it.”
I’m glad to have been a part of the full throttle “heavy-metal” footballing ride that was Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool.
And I’ll be bookmarking all those YouTube videos of him for the years to come.
