Now that it feels like it’s almost over, it’s hard not to think back at what made it what it was. Jurgen Klopp’s eight-and-a-half years at Liverpool have left an indelible mark on the Premier League in a way that goes beyond what was, after all, just a single title.
For me, the story has often been told in the faces of the opposition. It may be that, more than any individual game, trophy or goal, that will linger the longest.
Some of the best players in the world have suffered through it. That feeling of being tossed about mercilessly and endlessly in Klopp’s Anfield washing machine. A feeling of helplessness, a sense that the size of the challenge is just too great, the forces pinning you back too irresistible.
With that in mind, I think back to Lionel Messi at Anfield on the night of May 7 2019. With the great man’s Barcelona team 3-0 down in a Champions League semi-final second leg and on the way to one of the most humbling experiences in their history, the greatest player some of us have ever seen stood over a restart looking utterly bereft. Confused, shellshocked, lost. All of that and more.
That is what Klopp’s Liverpool football did to the best that Europe had to offer during that particularly golden period that brought the Anfield club to three Champions League finals in five years.
Manchester City, arguably the best team in the world over this same time span, know the feeling well.
Liverpool did it to Pep Guardiola’s team too. Twice in the space of three months in early 2018, in the Premier League and in Europe, and as recently as last month. That particular game ended 1-1 but how Guardiola and his players survived a classic second half onslaught maybe they don’t even know.
It has, in truth, been unique. Klopp has had his ups and downs over his years in England. No manager is immune to the vicissitudes of form and fortune. But over the course of it all, the German’s team has played a brand of energetic, instinctive, shockwave football that we have rarely – if ever – seen before in this country.
At times it has felt as though it has been as much about attitude and ferocity as it has been about football or tactics.
And this, looking forward, is what makes the challenge facing Klopp’s successor at Anfield so great and so daunting.
It has been suggested since news broke of Liverpool’s efforts to take the Dutch coach Arne Slot out of Feyenoord that the 45-year-old is favoured because he will be able to continue Klopp’s work, that he will be able to lead, coach and direct the team in broadly the same way.
I don’t buy it. Trying to imitate Klopp would be so foolish and naïve that it’s impossible to imagine a coach of any kind of experience even trying it.
Listening to Liverpool defender Trent Alexander-Arnold talk on a Gary Neville podcast this week, it became clear just how much of what has happened on the field under Klopp has been unscripted. Freestyle football if you like.
What has made it so hard to play against at its best has been its chaotic nature. Playing Klopp’s Liverpool has at times been so unpredictable as it make it almost impossible to fathom.
Footballers like order. They like to know where the threat is coming from. At times, it has felt as though Liverpool barely knew themselves, only that it would come, and if you have a personality as strong and as deep as Klopp has then you have a chance to pull all that off.
For years Klopp’s greatest trick was to send players out on to the field that were in so many ways psychological extensions of himself. I find it impossible to believe that Slot, or indeed anybody else, would be able to repeat any of this. Take five or ten per cent of that intensity and energy out of Liverpool’s football and the engine starts to stall.
So Klopp’s replacement will be under some pressure immediately to find a new way and that presents the greatest challenge.
There will be much for him to work with. Young talent continues to be promoted from the club’s academy. Players signed last summer, such as Alexis MacAllister and Dominik Szoboszlai, can be expected to improve further.
Equally, Liverpool will have an issue to address up front if Mo Salah – a year away from the end of his contract – leaves while the question of just who partners Virgil van Dijk at the centre of the back four raised itself again at Goodison this week as Ibrahima Konate struggled against Dominic Calvert-Lewin.
Those are issues of personnel, though. All managers and clubs face those as time rolls by. Slot – if it is to be him – will face questions of identity and philosophy that run much deeper than anything concerning an individual player.
Just how do you take hold of something so personal, bespoke and individual and turn it in to something new, different and at the same time effective? It’s an enormous ask. Players like Alexander-Arnold, for example, have only ever known one way, one path.
At big clubs across England, they have been waiting for Klopp to leave for years. And this is exactly why.