Klopp's Liverpool legacy: Trophies, tactics and joy

Alex Keble looks at the legacy Jurgen Klopp will leave on the Premier League.

Joy of football

“There are moments when the grand spectacle of it all convinces you to put aside any regrets, even if you concede at the last minute,” Maurizio Sarri said, looking back on a 1-1 draw with Liverpool in which his Chelsea had indeed conceded a late Daniel Sturridge equaliser in September 2018.

“That was an extraordinary show. Just 10 minutes earlier, I saw [Jurgen] Klopp looking at me with the game going on. I asked, ‘Why are you smiling?’ He replied, ‘Aren’t you having fun?’

“I said, ‘so much,’ and he added, ‘me too.' He was losing at the time. Even after the equaliser, remembering that moment, we hugged like two old friends. I’m sure he would’ve done the same even if Liverpool hadn’t equalised. The Premier League has this joy of football.”

The “joy of football” hasn’t always been present but Klopp has brought it back to the fore during his time in the Premier League.

That is his primary legacy.

It isn’t winning the Premier League, Champions League, FA Cup, and EFL Cup, though he is the only Liverpool manager to have done it. It isn’t taking an ailing club and reinstating them at the top of the world game, though doing so is among the greatest achievements in Premier League history.

It is the sense of fun that he brought, both in tactics and personality. It’s his take on football as the journey, not the destination.

In a sport so often reduced to trophy hordes and win percentages, Klopp at Liverpool has often been a point of difference. And when people say Klopp just "got" Liverpool, just "got" the fans, this is what they mean.

One of the enduring images of Klopp’s time at Anfield will be a video of him after the 2018 Champions League final defeat to Real Madrid, a time, you would think, of quiet reflection.

Instead Klopp is arm in arm with Liverpool supporters singing and dancing - enjoying himself – and promising in the lyrics to keep cool and win the trophy next year. Which, of course, he did.

But Klopp was also a tactical innovator, forever changing the Premier League alongside his great rival Pep Guardiola. Here, too, joy was at the heart of his approach.

This is the story of Klopp’s time in England and the legacy he leaves, told in the three eras of his Liverpool team.

Klopp radically changed tactical landscape

“I believe in a playing philosophy that is very emotional, very fast and very strong. My teams must play at full throttle and take it to the limit every single game.

“It is important to have a playing philosophy that reflects your own mentality, reflects the club and gives you a clear direction to follow. Tactical, of course. But tactical with a big heart.”

That was the mission brief, laid out in Klopp’s first interview as Liverpool manager.

Modern football is so deeply influenced by the German philosophy - by the gegenpressing, heavy-metal approach – that it’s easy to forget how radical Klopp’s vision was back in 2015.

Leicester City’s miracle in 2015/16, in the middle of which Klopp was appointed, was in part an expression of the Premier League’s weakness; its disorderly, baggy tactical features.

The year after that, Antonio Conte breezed to victory at Chelsea with reactive tactics already out of fashion in Europe but a breath of fresh air in England. This country had a long way to go.

Fast-forward seven years and the Premier League is inarguably the most tactically advanced division in the world, where football is played at an extraordinary pace and where the counter-press and the transition are king.

It is, in other words, a full-throttle division of full-throttle pressing and vertically inclined attacking surges. More than anyone else, that is Klopp’s doing.

Still, the first incarnation at Liverpool was erratic. They didn’t win anything in Klopp’s first three-and-a-half years at the club, but - in a period that covered defeats in the UEFA Champions League and Europa League finals - the groundwork was laid.

Liverpool were chaotic and furious, pressing in a way English football had never seen before but was self-evidently the future of the sport following Germany’s 2014 World Cup win and Klopp’s success at Borussia Dortmund.

“No playmaker in the world can be as good as a good counter-pressing situation,” was the famous Klopp line, but in that first phase we also witnessed the other side of the coin: full-throttle football had an all-or-nothing mentality, and Liverpool too often left the back door open.

Klopp and Guardiola pushed each other to new heights

In Raphael Honigstein's book Klopp: Bring the Noise, former Dortmund defender Neven Subotic described how the intricacies of Klopp’s high-risk tactics meant that everything had to click or the whole system would fall apart.

“The first year was normal football," Subotic said. "The second year, it got spicier. The third year: Boom! We reached a new level because all 25 players now truly got it.”

It happened at Liverpool, too, coinciding with the signings of Alisson, Fabinho, and Virgil van Dijk, a new defensive spine that counterbalanced the team’s wilder instincts.

But there was more to it than that. Klopp tempered his football and adjusted slightly to a slower possession game, taking traits from Guardiola just as Guardiola borrowed some urgency and counter-pressing from Klopp.

Klopp versus Guardiola is the Premier League’s most iconic rivalry, more so even than the peak of Sir Alex Ferguson versus Arsene Wenger, not just for the extraordinary tactical progress each inspired in the other but for the breathtaking head-to-heads we have witnessed over the last eight years.

Liverpool versus Manchester City is always a frantic game, either claustrophobic but taut with potential or all-out carnage, thanks to the counter-pressing and the rapid transitions that pulled Guardiola in.

But it wasn’t just tactically that these two managers spurred each other on. Each kept raising the bar for the other, the pinnacle coming in 2018/19 when Man City and Liverpool, ending with 98 and 97 points respectively, both won all of their final nine matches of the run-in.

Liverpool became a ruthless winning machine in three seasons (also amassing 99 points in 2019/20 and 92 points in 2021/22) thanks to Klopp fusing his position-swapping, furious attacking football with the more measured domination of Guardiola’s City.

It is stunning bad luck to win just one Premier League title from those three outstanding years, and in any other era Klopp would have dominated the English game for half a decade. They nearly did regardless.

Had Aston Villa not thrown away a 2-0 lead in the final 15 minutes of the 2021/22 season Klopp would have two league titles.

More agonising still was John Stones’ goalline clearance in January 2019, when the ball fell 1.12cm short of a Liverpool goal in a 2-1 Man City win, a moment that ultimately contributed to denying Klopp’s team the 2018/19 league title – as well as a centurion and invincible season rolled into one. 

But the fact that Guardiola’s City somehow amassed more points in two of those three seasons is a testament to how the two managers raised each other’s game. Neither would be the same without the other.

“I will sleep better [when Klopp goes],” Guardiola said on Friday. “I felt when I heard it that a part of Man City … we will lose something. We cannot define our period here without him … without Liverpool. Impossible.

“They have been our biggest rivals. And personally he [Klopp] has been the best rival I ever had in my life.”

Liverpool 2.0 can end on a high

As that famous team aged and gradually departed, during the long days of last season the end felt nigh.

But the speed with which Klopp has built "Liverpool 2.0", as he dubs it, has defied all expectations – and has made the announcement of his departure all the more shocking.

Indeed, his final Liverpool season could yet be his best, not only because there is an opportunity to win four trophies but because succeeding with this team - mid-transition and a tactical left turn – would be something else.

Darwin Nunez’s erratic energy, a constantly shape-shifting midfield, and Trent Alexander-Arnold in a right-back-midfield-playmaker multi-role for which we don’t yet have a name: Klopp’s final Liverpool team is almost a Klopp caricature.

They’ve arced back to the carnage of the early years, fizzing and crackling with a manic glint in their eye, yet somehow they are winning relentlessly.

And so Liverpool, five points clear at the top of the Premier League table, have the chance to add a final legacy point to the Klopp story of tactical revolution, of ending that 30-year wait for a league title, and of the iconic Guardiola rivalry.

But to suggest that "Liverpool 2.0" triumphing in May would erase the memory of (or at least make up for) all those nearly moments - from the first Champions League final loss in Kyiv, to the hopelessly unlucky defeat in Paris in 2022, to the two 90+ point silver-medal seasons - is to miss the point of Klopp entirely.

Klopp’s greatest legacy has been to teach us that football isn’t about the winning or the losing, not really.

It is about how you get there and who you got there with. It is about joy: joy of the sort that can be found in a frenzied Sarri-ball second half at Stamford Bridge as much as it can at a trophy lift in May.

“Of course, we would like more wins, more points and to be on track to win everything we compete for,” Klopp wrote in a Christmas message to fans in 2017, two years into the job, still trophyless, with Liverpool 20 points off the top and three points above seventh-placed Burnley.

“I know this is important for our supporters. But I think in football, as in life, you can make a choice to be joyful and enjoy great moments and great times together.”

Liverpool supporters know to enjoy these moments; know to cherish this rarefied air. The next four months will be a celebration no matter how it ends.