Revealed: Secrets of the Jurgen Klopp revolution at Liverpool
jonathan northcroft, football correspondent
Forget Salah, Mane and Firmino — Liverpool’s ‘fab three’ are Klopp and two FSG executives, Mike Gordon and Michael Edwards
Jurgen Klopp met Liverpool on Lexington Avenue; a coach on sabbatical, a club on a holiday from being elite. The surroundings (law offices) were serious and so were the stakes. Yet attire was informal. Neither Klopp nor Mike Gordon, the president of Fenway Sports Group, wore a suit. Klopp and Gordon had talked by phone, finding “terrific” rapport, but now came the crunch: this was October 1, 2015, less than five months into what Klopp envisaged as a year-long break after leaving Borussia Dortmund. Would he give up that for the red-hot hot-seat of Liverpool?
“One week before, I was in full holiday. Absolutely full holiday. The plan was I’d start in November, doing a few things to improve my knowledge: going to different clubs, different countries, but until the middle of October... nothing. But then I had to start, like this — let’s go!” Klopp recalls.
Having finally met his man and convinced him, with co-owners John Henry and Tom Werner also wowed in the New York meeting, Gordon reflected on Klopp:
He is not the best person for the job.
He is the perfect person for the job.
Perfect fit: Liverpool knew Jurgen Klopp was the ideal manager to replace Brendan Rodgers and take them to the next levelNICK POTTS
THE perfect person for Liverpool is sitting on a table at Melwood, long legs dangling, wide grin seeming to spread across the room. “Eighth of October, is it? Any presents?” he laughs, reflecting on tomorrow’s third anniversary of his appointment. And on the journey: a Champions League final, two other finals, consecutive top-four finishes and then the start to this season, Liverpool’s best in 126 years.
And on the challenge at hand — overhauling Manchester City, who visit Anfield today still ahead on goal difference despite Liverpool’s historic start. City have, according to Klopp, “the best manager in the world” and they remind him of Michael Stich, the most technically flawless German tennis player he ever saw. But maybe Liverpool can be Boris Becker, Klopp grins. Becker, the passionate force of nature, achieved more than Stich.
Klopp is conscious that it is time to achieve, that his reign has brought adulation but no trophies. “I am happy so far that the direction [of forward travel] is always obvious. And it’s obvious as well that we didn’t win anything. Apart from probably a few supporters because of the way the boys played, and probably sympathy from a few places where we were not that well liked before. That’s all good but a lot to come.
“It would be so easy,” he says, thinking what he wants to win in the next three years, “to name all these different competitions but they are so difficult and would it make [winning] any more likely if I said it today?
“But it’s all clear. It’s about development. I don’t think that you really can plan a title. Not even City last year. Even though they were pretty close and then when their manager took over it was clear they would be successful.
“We are really desperate to win something, and the best would be the league, but we don’t know when that will happen. So we should have the best time of our lives until it happens. That means we have to enjoy. We have to work hard. We have to create as many special moments for our supporters as possible. Bring through local players, if it’s possible — even strengthen this bond between the fans and the club.
“In a time when there is always more money involved, people think maybe there’ll be more distance between the fanbase and the players, the manager. So, in the outstanding moments, show this togetherness in an exceptional way.”
When Klopp talks like that it is easy to love him yet also see him in caricature: Mr Off-the-Cuff, the messiah in jeans who turned up at his first press conference spouting that he would turn doubters to believers. “So, he’s bringing passion to the... English?” Arsène Wenger said archly. But, just as gegenpressing actually takes rigorous, ingenious training ground work, so the past three years were built on fine strategy.
A “fab three” powers Liverpool and it is not Salah-Firmino-Mane. It is Klopp, Gordon and sporting director Michael Edwards, whose shared way of thinking in detail, without orthodoxy, leads to decisions such as going for Mo Salah despite his failure at Chelsea, or breaking world records for Virgil van Dijk and Alisson, or reckoning a relegated cut-price Scotland left-back, Andy Robertson, would solve a problem position.
Across from Klopp’s office at Melwood is that of Edwards. Both doors stay open, each dropping in the other when they are not chatting on WhatsApp. Edwards apprises Gordon daily by phone. Gordon, a cerebral voice down the line from Massachusetts, loves an aphorism and one is “speaking your mind at Liverpool isn’t ‘allowed’ — it’s mandatory”.
Edwards is sparky, confident, his office bright. He is nothing like the geek in a green visor, goggling at a laptop in a darkened room, that Gordon jokes is the image of a Liverpool recruitment guy, thanks to FSG’s associations with “Moneyball”. Edwards, in fact, was a player, once in Peterborough’s reserves. He became an analyst and flourished at Harry Redknapp’s Portsmouth after striking a connection with Joe Jordan. He worked with players but never talked to them about stats, believing — having worked for Prozone — that much traditional football data is fatuous. He was then head of performance analysis at Tottenham.
Gordon, a Boston asset-manager drawn into FSG, took over the daily running of Liverpool in summer 2012. His outside-the-box appointment was Ian Graham, a Cambridge physics graduate whose football research firm was producing revolutionary data for Spurs that inspired several Daniel Levy transfer coups. Graham was a Liverpool fan and frustrated that Levy would not fund him to perfect his model. Edwards knew he could get him. They had worked closely and Edwards was a convert — provided the data would be used alongside traditional tools. Gordon looks back on the signings in January 2013 of Daniel Sturridge for £12m from Chelsea, and Philippe Coutinho for £8.5m from Inter Milan, as the point when he knew a corner had been turned. Despite the brilliant 2013-14 season, however, an obstacle was Brendan Rodgers — because the then manager did not believe in the model.
Step forward Klopp. That the German fitted Liverpool was no coincidence. Graham’s data drilled into how Klopp had failed to outperform expectations in only two of 14 previous seasons in German management. Gordon ‘got’ his personality and it was mutual, as Klopp reflects: “It was just a feeling that [Liverpool] was for me, and I think from the first talk I had with Mike Gordon I had the feeling ‘this will happen’.”
But then there was Edwards’ work. He will not interview on-the-record, and he is peeved that there are now one or two photos of him on Google: for years he could go incognito to spy on targets. These included managers, into whose recruitment Liverpool pour as much research as when they sign players. That sounds commonsense but Southampton are the only Premier League rival to scout coaches similarly. Maurizio Sarri’s impact at Chelsea is no surprise to Edwards, who has monitored and admired the Italian since his 2012-15 stint at Empoli.
Edwards’ team compiled a 60-page dossier on Klopp. He spoke to journalists, players, colleagues. A rival option was dismissed after Edwards spent five days in the same hotel observing the candidate: how he was with people, his planning of training. At one point he sat anonymously nearby and listened to Klopp on the phone.
The key signings of the Klopp era have been made via meticulous research, combining Graham’s data with the scouting reports. Edwards challenges the orthodoxy of clubs watching a player once, then sending a scout back a few weeks later to see them again. Liverpool watch in blocks of 15-20 games to get a true picture of consistency and performance. There is emphasis on how players train, and every January scouts go around the world to watch European clubs at their winter break camps. Edwards himself stood by the side of a pitch in Marbella watching Salah practise with Basel.
When Chelsea gazumped Liverpool for Salah in January 2014 there was desolation, but when Salah re-emerged, at Fiorentina then Roma, Liverpool could marry that evidence with all their glowing research on him as a youngster. They knew Chelsea would not want him, Spurs could not afford him and that he was not one for the Manchester clubs. They saw him as a natural Arsenal signing and were amazed that Arsenal’s Italian scout had thought Salah “wasteful”.
They expected the Egyptian to score 18-20 goals per season, world-class for a wide attacker, and were happy to be proved wrong in 2017-18 when he scored more than 40. All signings require strong Klopp-Edwards-Gordon agreement — which Gordon was very happy to give even though Van Dijk (£70m plus £4m add-ons) and Alisson (£56m plus £9m add-ons) were world record fees. Van Dijk was so far and away the outstanding one of 30 centre-backs scrutinised, and centre-backs are so costly, that his fee was deemed to be a bargain.
Back in the Champions League after missing out in 2015-16, Liverpool can afford to target the best. Plenty want to play for Klopp and will choose Liverpool over their rivals, like Van Dijk, Alisson and Salah, who had options at Atletico Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain. Last week’s bench at Chelsea featured Sturridge, Xherdan Shaqiri, Naby Keita and Fabinho. The subs for Klopp’s first game in 2015 included Joao Teixeira, Jerome Sinclair, Connor Randall and Jordon Ibe. Some overhaul. Klopp has not forgotten the preparation for that match. “I had seven players. The rest were on international duty. [When they returned] we had three days to prepare for Tottenham. It got worse because Joe Gomez came back injured and in his first session Danny Ings did his ACL [anterior cruciate ligament]. You find a line-up, find a system,” recalls Klopp. “I think it was 4-2-3-1 and Tottenham was a difficult place to go but in a way a good place because they play football, and that gave us a chance to try already high pressure.
“It was the longest analyse [sic] I probably had in my life. I watched more games of Tottenham than I did of Liverpool in that week. You want a good start and for us it [0-0] was a good start.”
Something to get used to was the elevated position of the manager in England. “I came from a very small club [Mainz] where I played for 11 years then was manager. Everyone treated me like a friend. Then I went to Dortmund and after the pre-season we were friends. The players were young, even younger than my sons, so I was for them a pretty old friend — but that’s how it was.
“I realised pretty early the relationship in England between nearly all members of staff and players to the manager is completely different to what I was used to. The first thing they said was ‘how do you want to have that, that, that?’ And I said ‘well how did you do it before?’ They said ‘that’s not important, what do you want’? It’s like they hand you a blank bit of paper and you write down all your rules.
“But it’s commonsense: if I want to be in the stadium at 1.15 before a 3pm game I have no clue how far the stadium is, I have no clue when the bus starts! So it took a while before people knew who I am and how I am.”
Edwards and Gordon agree that while success is never guaranteed, the conditions are finally there. The squad is the “most complete” in eight years of FSG ownership. Klopp’s view? “We are in an absolutely OK moment. It’s weird, because after you lose a game [as Liverpool did at Napoli in midweek] everything always feels completely different, people even feel the weather is worse than it is. But we are in a good moment.
“If I had said on the first day this is my club then I would be lying. Today it is 100% true, and that is a big development. I feel 100% responsible for pretty much everything here and that’s how it is.”
jonathan northcroft, football correspondent
Forget Salah, Mane and Firmino — Liverpool’s ‘fab three’ are Klopp and two FSG executives, Mike Gordon and Michael Edwards
Jurgen Klopp met Liverpool on Lexington Avenue; a coach on sabbatical, a club on a holiday from being elite. The surroundings (law offices) were serious and so were the stakes. Yet attire was informal. Neither Klopp nor Mike Gordon, the president of Fenway Sports Group, wore a suit. Klopp and Gordon had talked by phone, finding “terrific” rapport, but now came the crunch: this was October 1, 2015, less than five months into what Klopp envisaged as a year-long break after leaving Borussia Dortmund. Would he give up that for the red-hot hot-seat of Liverpool?
“One week before, I was in full holiday. Absolutely full holiday. The plan was I’d start in November, doing a few things to improve my knowledge: going to different clubs, different countries, but until the middle of October... nothing. But then I had to start, like this — let’s go!” Klopp recalls.
Having finally met his man and convinced him, with co-owners John Henry and Tom Werner also wowed in the New York meeting, Gordon reflected on Klopp:
He is not the best person for the job.
He is the perfect person for the job.
Perfect fit: Liverpool knew Jurgen Klopp was the ideal manager to replace Brendan Rodgers and take them to the next levelNICK POTTS
THE perfect person for Liverpool is sitting on a table at Melwood, long legs dangling, wide grin seeming to spread across the room. “Eighth of October, is it? Any presents?” he laughs, reflecting on tomorrow’s third anniversary of his appointment. And on the journey: a Champions League final, two other finals, consecutive top-four finishes and then the start to this season, Liverpool’s best in 126 years.
And on the challenge at hand — overhauling Manchester City, who visit Anfield today still ahead on goal difference despite Liverpool’s historic start. City have, according to Klopp, “the best manager in the world” and they remind him of Michael Stich, the most technically flawless German tennis player he ever saw. But maybe Liverpool can be Boris Becker, Klopp grins. Becker, the passionate force of nature, achieved more than Stich.
Klopp is conscious that it is time to achieve, that his reign has brought adulation but no trophies. “I am happy so far that the direction [of forward travel] is always obvious. And it’s obvious as well that we didn’t win anything. Apart from probably a few supporters because of the way the boys played, and probably sympathy from a few places where we were not that well liked before. That’s all good but a lot to come.
“It would be so easy,” he says, thinking what he wants to win in the next three years, “to name all these different competitions but they are so difficult and would it make [winning] any more likely if I said it today?
“But it’s all clear. It’s about development. I don’t think that you really can plan a title. Not even City last year. Even though they were pretty close and then when their manager took over it was clear they would be successful.
“We are really desperate to win something, and the best would be the league, but we don’t know when that will happen. So we should have the best time of our lives until it happens. That means we have to enjoy. We have to work hard. We have to create as many special moments for our supporters as possible. Bring through local players, if it’s possible — even strengthen this bond between the fans and the club.
“In a time when there is always more money involved, people think maybe there’ll be more distance between the fanbase and the players, the manager. So, in the outstanding moments, show this togetherness in an exceptional way.”
When Klopp talks like that it is easy to love him yet also see him in caricature: Mr Off-the-Cuff, the messiah in jeans who turned up at his first press conference spouting that he would turn doubters to believers. “So, he’s bringing passion to the... English?” Arsène Wenger said archly. But, just as gegenpressing actually takes rigorous, ingenious training ground work, so the past three years were built on fine strategy.
A “fab three” powers Liverpool and it is not Salah-Firmino-Mane. It is Klopp, Gordon and sporting director Michael Edwards, whose shared way of thinking in detail, without orthodoxy, leads to decisions such as going for Mo Salah despite his failure at Chelsea, or breaking world records for Virgil van Dijk and Alisson, or reckoning a relegated cut-price Scotland left-back, Andy Robertson, would solve a problem position.
Across from Klopp’s office at Melwood is that of Edwards. Both doors stay open, each dropping in the other when they are not chatting on WhatsApp. Edwards apprises Gordon daily by phone. Gordon, a cerebral voice down the line from Massachusetts, loves an aphorism and one is “speaking your mind at Liverpool isn’t ‘allowed’ — it’s mandatory”.
Edwards is sparky, confident, his office bright. He is nothing like the geek in a green visor, goggling at a laptop in a darkened room, that Gordon jokes is the image of a Liverpool recruitment guy, thanks to FSG’s associations with “Moneyball”. Edwards, in fact, was a player, once in Peterborough’s reserves. He became an analyst and flourished at Harry Redknapp’s Portsmouth after striking a connection with Joe Jordan. He worked with players but never talked to them about stats, believing — having worked for Prozone — that much traditional football data is fatuous. He was then head of performance analysis at Tottenham.
Gordon, a Boston asset-manager drawn into FSG, took over the daily running of Liverpool in summer 2012. His outside-the-box appointment was Ian Graham, a Cambridge physics graduate whose football research firm was producing revolutionary data for Spurs that inspired several Daniel Levy transfer coups. Graham was a Liverpool fan and frustrated that Levy would not fund him to perfect his model. Edwards knew he could get him. They had worked closely and Edwards was a convert — provided the data would be used alongside traditional tools. Gordon looks back on the signings in January 2013 of Daniel Sturridge for £12m from Chelsea, and Philippe Coutinho for £8.5m from Inter Milan, as the point when he knew a corner had been turned. Despite the brilliant 2013-14 season, however, an obstacle was Brendan Rodgers — because the then manager did not believe in the model.
Step forward Klopp. That the German fitted Liverpool was no coincidence. Graham’s data drilled into how Klopp had failed to outperform expectations in only two of 14 previous seasons in German management. Gordon ‘got’ his personality and it was mutual, as Klopp reflects: “It was just a feeling that [Liverpool] was for me, and I think from the first talk I had with Mike Gordon I had the feeling ‘this will happen’.”
But then there was Edwards’ work. He will not interview on-the-record, and he is peeved that there are now one or two photos of him on Google: for years he could go incognito to spy on targets. These included managers, into whose recruitment Liverpool pour as much research as when they sign players. That sounds commonsense but Southampton are the only Premier League rival to scout coaches similarly. Maurizio Sarri’s impact at Chelsea is no surprise to Edwards, who has monitored and admired the Italian since his 2012-15 stint at Empoli.
Edwards’ team compiled a 60-page dossier on Klopp. He spoke to journalists, players, colleagues. A rival option was dismissed after Edwards spent five days in the same hotel observing the candidate: how he was with people, his planning of training. At one point he sat anonymously nearby and listened to Klopp on the phone.
The key signings of the Klopp era have been made via meticulous research, combining Graham’s data with the scouting reports. Edwards challenges the orthodoxy of clubs watching a player once, then sending a scout back a few weeks later to see them again. Liverpool watch in blocks of 15-20 games to get a true picture of consistency and performance. There is emphasis on how players train, and every January scouts go around the world to watch European clubs at their winter break camps. Edwards himself stood by the side of a pitch in Marbella watching Salah practise with Basel.
When Chelsea gazumped Liverpool for Salah in January 2014 there was desolation, but when Salah re-emerged, at Fiorentina then Roma, Liverpool could marry that evidence with all their glowing research on him as a youngster. They knew Chelsea would not want him, Spurs could not afford him and that he was not one for the Manchester clubs. They saw him as a natural Arsenal signing and were amazed that Arsenal’s Italian scout had thought Salah “wasteful”.
They expected the Egyptian to score 18-20 goals per season, world-class for a wide attacker, and were happy to be proved wrong in 2017-18 when he scored more than 40. All signings require strong Klopp-Edwards-Gordon agreement — which Gordon was very happy to give even though Van Dijk (£70m plus £4m add-ons) and Alisson (£56m plus £9m add-ons) were world record fees. Van Dijk was so far and away the outstanding one of 30 centre-backs scrutinised, and centre-backs are so costly, that his fee was deemed to be a bargain.
Back in the Champions League after missing out in 2015-16, Liverpool can afford to target the best. Plenty want to play for Klopp and will choose Liverpool over their rivals, like Van Dijk, Alisson and Salah, who had options at Atletico Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain. Last week’s bench at Chelsea featured Sturridge, Xherdan Shaqiri, Naby Keita and Fabinho. The subs for Klopp’s first game in 2015 included Joao Teixeira, Jerome Sinclair, Connor Randall and Jordon Ibe. Some overhaul. Klopp has not forgotten the preparation for that match. “I had seven players. The rest were on international duty. [When they returned] we had three days to prepare for Tottenham. It got worse because Joe Gomez came back injured and in his first session Danny Ings did his ACL [anterior cruciate ligament]. You find a line-up, find a system,” recalls Klopp. “I think it was 4-2-3-1 and Tottenham was a difficult place to go but in a way a good place because they play football, and that gave us a chance to try already high pressure.
“It was the longest analyse [sic] I probably had in my life. I watched more games of Tottenham than I did of Liverpool in that week. You want a good start and for us it [0-0] was a good start.”
Something to get used to was the elevated position of the manager in England. “I came from a very small club [Mainz] where I played for 11 years then was manager. Everyone treated me like a friend. Then I went to Dortmund and after the pre-season we were friends. The players were young, even younger than my sons, so I was for them a pretty old friend — but that’s how it was.
“I realised pretty early the relationship in England between nearly all members of staff and players to the manager is completely different to what I was used to. The first thing they said was ‘how do you want to have that, that, that?’ And I said ‘well how did you do it before?’ They said ‘that’s not important, what do you want’? It’s like they hand you a blank bit of paper and you write down all your rules.
“But it’s commonsense: if I want to be in the stadium at 1.15 before a 3pm game I have no clue how far the stadium is, I have no clue when the bus starts! So it took a while before people knew who I am and how I am.”
Edwards and Gordon agree that while success is never guaranteed, the conditions are finally there. The squad is the “most complete” in eight years of FSG ownership. Klopp’s view? “We are in an absolutely OK moment. It’s weird, because after you lose a game [as Liverpool did at Napoli in midweek] everything always feels completely different, people even feel the weather is worse than it is. But we are in a good moment.
“If I had said on the first day this is my club then I would be lying. Today it is 100% true, and that is a big development. I feel 100% responsible for pretty much everything here and that’s how it is.”
