Jurgen Klopp could have wound up at Old Trafford if the sales pitch to him from Manchester United had only been a little different.
When United’s executive vice-chairman Woodward approached the German after sacking David Moyes in March 2014 he told him that Old Trafford was ‘like an adult version of Disneyland.’
Klopp cringed at this glossy sales pitch which he found deeply unattractive and ‘unsexy’, according to a new biography of the manager, Bring the Noise. He promptly agreed to another year at Borussia Dortmund.
It was when Klopp met Liverpool’s owners, Fenway Sports Group (FSG), at their lawyers’ offices on New York’s Lexington Avenue the next season, that it became clear how much more of a fit he was with their own club’s philosophy.
Klopp outlined the need to adhere to the spirit of Liverpool’s working class roots – not the cosmetic glitzy, Disneyfied version of the modern football club Woodward was describing.
No manager in the last 44 years has echoed Bill Shankly’s philosophy as much as Jurgen Klopp
An essay in France Football this week proclaimed Klopp as the heir to the iconic Shankly
One image Liverpool’s executives remember Klopp painting at that meeting was of ‘rain, tackles flying in, the noise in the stadium,’ says biographer Raphael Honigstein. Liverpool knew in that moment that this was their man.
And so it has turned out to be. ‘Heritier de Shankly’ (‘Heir to Shankly’) proclaims the headline in a France Football essay about the Liverpool manager this week and never, in the 44 years since the Scotsman stepped away from the Anfield helm, has a manager seemed to echo him and his philosophy quite so much.
Klopp’s common touch, powers of communication and capacity for public humility are what draw a thread back to the creator of the modern Liverpool. He has that same gift from the Gods of drawing together the ‘Holy Trinity’ of players, supporters and coaching staff that Bill Shankly proselytised about.
The two would have certainly differed on one point – tactics, which Shankly considered an abhorrent, new-fangled irrelevance. But whether through a gesture, an act of self-deprecation, a pair of spectacles or an act of the unexpected Klopp, like Shankly, has this way to ‘make the people happy.’
Klopp shares many of Shankly’s traits, including powers of communication and humility
His belief in a welfare state has helped to shape the notion of him as Liverpool’s new ‘working class hero’, as France Football describes him – though that very notion is ridiculous, of course.
Bring the Noise charts the German’s very middle class upbringing as the son of a merchant, Norbert, who was Jurgen’s ‘personal football, tennis and skiing teacher.’
Shankly just counted himself lucky that he worked at the surface of a pit-shaft on the east Ayrshire coalfield – emptying coal trucks – rather than down in its depths.
This gave him immense enthusiasm for the life he came to find. Emlyn Hughes always remembered Shankly stepping outside after the players had arrived for training. ‘Beautiful morning boys,’ he would say. ‘Great to be alive, breathing in God’s air.’
But it is still a work ethic which links the two managers. Liverpool’s players run to the last, just like they did when Shankly put them into his ‘sweatboxes’ to perfect the pass-and-move philosophy which was heaven sent for a socialist city.
There is something deliberate about Klopp’s cultivation of the cameras and – just like Shankly – he makes no pretence about that. ‘Words are your weapon,’ a friend told him when he was weighing up Liverpool’s job offer. Borussia Dortmund put up huge advertising hoardings using his arrival as a reason to renew season tickets.
The b******t meter is always charged up on Merseyside, yet the place has taken him to heart in a way that it did Brendan Rodgers, that other astute PR performer who came so close to delivering the longed for league title with Raheem Sterling, Daniel Sturridge and Luis Suarez in 2014.
France Football suggests that Klopp’s ability to laugh at himself is a key component that Rodgers lacked.
It has been suggested that Brendan Rodgers lacked Klopp’s ability to laugh at himself
Some of those players who have lifted European Cups with Liverpool suggest that Klopp’s playing philosophy is not so different to the one that they knew, either.
‘These days they talk about ‘high pressing as if it’s just a new thing,’ Jimmy Case tells Sportsmail. ‘We were all over that. Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain said earlier this season about Adam Lallana “setting the tone.”
‘Once Lallana goes everybody follows. It was the same with us, except there was no particular person. I’m not stupid enough to run toward a player there and he’s got the ball and he’ll pass it to other players who play it around me, so I get played out.
‘I’m going to wait here until Terry McDermott goes there, Graeme Souness goes there and Phil Neal goes here. So you’re waiting for each other but you do know….’
Klopp’s tactical outlook in Europe actually resembles Shankly’s far more than the more cautious Bob Paisley – and that should give Liverpool pause for thought ahead of Saturday’s final.
Shankly was at the helm during Liverpool’s formative European years and, parading his usual vast optimism where his side were concerned, did not generally go in for pragmatism. His team were sometimes made to look naive by European opposition, though Shankly glossed over it in a way that only he knew.
He said Borussia Dortmund had been ‘frightened men’ after the 1966 European Cup Winners’ Cup final in which they beat Liverpool 2-1 and described Ajax as ‘too defensive’ in the same year after they had taken Liverpool apart, winning 5-1 in Amsterdam.
The 1973 UEFA Cup was the only piece of European silverware Liverpool claimed under Shankly
Paisley, tactically always the shrewder of the two, appreciated that the European challenge required less blood and thunder; a more subtle lend of attack and defence to counteract the more technically proficient opponents. It did not always make for captivating football.
The Daily Mail’s match report for the 1981 final win over Real Madrid in Paris is a stinging indictment of a dull match, ‘It’s a bore,’ states the headline. But Liverpool became serial winners, while Shankly lifted only one piece of European silverware: the 1973 UEFA Cup.
It is the Shankly football that Liverpool’s owners have wanted to wind the clock back to.
‘We liked the type of football he played,’ FSG president Mike Gordon tells Honigstein of the decision to hire him. ‘Both the energy and the emphasis on attacking: high electricity, high-wattage football with an appeal.’
Two years into his tenure, Klopp has not travelled remotely near the distance of Shankly, who turned Liverpool from a labouring second tier side into twice champions, FA Cup winners, then rebuilt again for a third title.
But delivering champagne football to claim the trophy to which Liverpool have been so extraordinarily wedded would propel him right up there, alongside Shankly, in the Anfield pantheon.
Klopp: Bring the Noise, by Raphael Honigstein. Yellow Jersey. £12.99