82 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
It’s the front three of Salah, Firmino and Sadio
Mané, though, that will define this era of Liverpool
football. Klopp, who coached against Firmino with
Dortmund and who nearly purchased Mané for his
old German club, swears he predicted their remark-
able chemistry. “I could see it coming,” he says.
Still, it has taken some of his best management
skills to make it work. Take a much played-up
incident earlier this season, against Burnley, when
Mané blew up at Salah for taking a difficult shot
instead of passing to his open teammate. Klopp,
says Wijnaldum, is “always trying to solve prob-
lems because he can understand why people are
angry.” In the days after the game that meant
bringing Salah and Mané into the manager’s of-
fice—separately, not together, Klopp emphasizes—
for heart-to-hearts.
“In the world of football, it looks so big; it’s
like, Oh, my god, how can you do it?” Klopp says
of the mini-altercation. “But I just spoke to them.”
Before the Champions League final last spring,
journalist Raphael Honigstein (who wrote the
Klopp biography Bring the Noise) visited Liver-
pool’s camp in Marbella, Spain. “The mood was
so relaxed; there was none of the usual sort of
paranoia,” says Honigstein. “It was like a holiday.
Klopp and his staff every night had this long table,
and you could hear them laughing and having an
amazing time. And I think that mood has carried
over into this season.... They are supremely con-
fident that they are going to be successful, and I
think that breeds its own sort of reality. They go
down a goal or two, and things don’t change.”
All of this, says Gordon, can leave one thinking
Klopp is 100% charisma and emotion, leaving his
intelligence and attention to detail overlooked. This
is the manager, after all, who hired a specialist
throw-in coach, a rarity in soccer; who installed
a cutting-edge head of nutrition in charge of team
meals; who revolutionized Liverpool’s use of data
and video technology, including analyzing in-game
patterns to share with players at halftime. At a time
when some of the world’s top managers from a
decade ago—José Mourinho, Arsène Wenger, Carlo
Ancelotti—have failed to evolve, Klopp has updated
his approach. At Liverpool, that has meant more
than just unleashing the chaos of his high press.
Klopp’s Reds now exert control over games too.
“He’s a polymathematical guy,” says Gordon,
with whom Klopp is prone to chatter about the
Fenway Group’s commercial dealings, for ex-
ample. “I spent 30 years as an investor speak-
ing to some of the best CEOs in the world, and
Jürgen is right up there with them. If he wasn’t
managing a football club, he could be managing
a Fortune 500 company.”
IN DECEMBER,
when Liverpool announced it was extending
Klopp’s contract for two more years, until 2024,
Reds fans rejoiced, not least because many had
assumed Klopp would move on to coach the na-
tional team of Germany, which is hosting Euro
- Liverpool is a working-class city, but it has
bucked the national trend in the U.K., voting for
Labour and against Brexit. In many ways Klopp’s
extension—coming one day after conservatives
had swept to victory in national elections—was
seen by many supporters as a momentary balm
in a bad-news week.
Much like Rapinoe, Klopp has used football’s
platform to call for social change. He is an un-
abashed lefty, and it’s by design that he has man-
aged clubs, Liverpool and Dortmund, whose fan
bases’ politics largely match his own. Each sings the
global standard “You’ll Never Walk Alone” instead
of any national anthem before games.
Perhaps the greatest testament to Klopp’s cha-
risma is the fact that, even in tribal England, where
fans tend to turn the most successful opposing
coaches into villains, he’s viewed mostly positively.
He remains a grinning unifier even as he destroys
his foes, even as he wades into the politics of an
increasingly polarized world.
Liverpool’s most revered manager of all time, Bill
Shankly, was renowned for saying, “Football is not
a matter of life and death. It’s much more important
than that.” Klopp would never agree. Popular but
not a populist, he sees no easy answers in the world
today. “I’m aware of a lot of problems we have,”
he says, “and like every person with half a brain,
I’m interested in solving them. But I really think
we have to solve them together. So don’t separate
yourself from the rest of the world.”
“Populists”—and here he fingers Trump and U.K.
prime minister Boris Johnson—“have historically
proven they were never the right solution. They’re
telling people the things they think we want to
hear.... As long as we work on our problems to-
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POOLING TEETH
His expressions
may be varied, but
Klopp’s emotions are
almost exclusively
positive these days.
The coach’s three
LFC trophies top the
club’s total haul in
the nine years before
he arrived.
JÜRGEN
KLOPP
