In June, 2004, José Mourinho, a Portuguese coach who'd previously led teams to European championships in soccer (or "football," as the Europeans call it), became coach of the English Premier League (EPL) team, Chelsea F.C. Soon after, in a press conference, Mourinho made the following comments when asked about his new team:
We have top players and, sorry if I'm arrogant, we have a top manager. Please don't call me arrogant, but I'm European champion and I think I'm a special one.
From this point on, Mourinho was referred to in the English press as "The Special One” (with tongue firmly in cheek).
Eleven years later, in October 2015, Jürgen Klopp, a German coach, took over duties at Liverpool F.C. (LFC), another EPL team, at a time when Mourinho was back coaching Chelsea. In Klopp's first press conference, a reporter said,
José Mourinho, when he came to England for the first time, described himself as "The Special One." How would you describe yourself?
In response, Klopp laughed, shook his head, and said,
I don't want to describe myself. Maybe I'll ask, does anybody in this room think that I can do wonders? No?...I'm a totally normal guy. I'm The Normal One, maybe.
The room erupted in laughter. I was instantly charmed. Since that moment, I've read LFC news multiple times a day, I've devoured their matches and highlights, and my wife has referred to Klopp as my "boyfriend" (I don’t object). Sunday, May 19th, was Klopp's last match as coach at LFC, and, if I’m honest, I'm feeling a little lost.
I’m not alone in my love for Klopp. On the same Sunday Klopp stepped down, football titan Manchester City (Man City) clinched their sixth EPL trophy in seven years, and their fourth in a row, besting Arsenal by two points after an exciting title race. Despite Man City's feat, Klopp’s farewell ceremony nabbed substantially more eyeballs than Man City’s contemporaneous trophy ceremony. In his conversation with sports commentator Roger Bennett about Klopp's retirement, John Oliver, a comedian and life-long LFC fan, had this message for LFC’s new coach, spoken with a deflated sigh: “You’re not my real dad. Don’t act like you are, okay?”
That I was swept up for the last eight-and-a-half years in Klopp-o-mania is remarkable and strange. Though I was a serious athlete as a young man, and I happily watched sports of all kinds, I was never a fan of any particular team. I would cheer for a team in a particular game, but I never followed, hoped for, and supported any one team, season after season. Until Jürgen started coaching LFC.
My LFC fandom wasn’t tribal, the sort one gains growing up in a particular city, catching it from surrounding enthusiasts—parents, uncles, or friends. Both the city where I grew up (Vancouver, British Columbia) and my current home in southern California are thousands of miles from Liverpool.
Even stranger: I've never been one to cling to famous people. In fact, quite the opposite: I usually resist tides of cultural popularity. Infatuation with famous people mostly strikes me as shallow and misplaced. So my attachment to Klopp and LFC has been alien indeed. How did this happen?
The Humble One
Klopp's arresting humility is part of the answer. Though he did play professional football in Germany, he never played in the top division, the Bundesliga, and he routinely recalls himself as a "very average" footballer. He famously claimed to have a "first-division mind" but "fourth-division feet". Non-stereotypically for a German, Klopp is emotional, and he'd sometimes lose his cool with referees (he isn't a saint). But if he was in the wrong or went too far, he would typically apologize for it, a rarity for public figures.
Klopp's handling of his departure encapsulates his humility. Unlike most departing coaches, who, out of self-interest, keep their plans secret until immediately before their departure, in January—the middle of the season—Klopp announced he'd be stepping down and gave a lengthy video statement explaining his decision. The basic reason was that, after almost nine years at LFC, he was tired and felt he could no longer give the required energy to the team. He also said he wanted to try living a normal life before it was too late.
Who does that? At the height of popularity, fame, and success, admit publicly he no longer has what it takes to do the job? Express a desire to shuck the spotlight for ordinary life? In his farewell speech to a full stadium after his last match, he said he was now one of us, an ordinary LFC fan. In his eyes, he was never a special guy, just a normal guy with a special role that was now coming to an end.
The Caring One
Klopp's concern for others also captured me. This too was evident in his reason for leaving: he cared more about the well-being of the club than his image as a world-famous coach. One of his trademarks was fatherly bear-hugs for his players (1) after matches, (2) before they went on the pitch as substitutes, and (3), well, any time really. In his conversation with John Oliver, Roger Bennett called Klopp the "teutonic care bear."
His players returned the love. Prior to Klopp's arrival, Liverpool had been struggling. At the time of his first press conference, the team sat in tenth place out of 20 teams in the EPL. In Klopp's early days, their results remained inconsistent, but they began to win more than they lost, and confidence had begun to creep in.
In January 2016, just months after Klopp's arrival, Adam Lallana, an LFC midfielder, scored a last-minute winner in a wild 5-4 victory over Norwich City, and the goal celebration was epic. Lallana strips off his shirt and sprints toward Klopp on the bench. Klopp waves him in, and the entire team mobs their coach, overflowing with joy, a pack of kids on the playground, breaking Klopp's glasses in the process. As evidenced by the tears shed in and around Klopp's farewell moment (here and here), his players continued to love him throughout his tenure.
Klopp's concern for LFC fans was also extraordinary. A few months ago, Klopp saw a video of a 12-year-old Irish boy named Dáire Gorman, who was born without arms and legs and navigates the world with a wheelchair. Dáire is a huge Liverpool fan. In the video, Dáire had come for the first time to Anfield—LFC's iconic stadium. Before every match at Anfield, the crowd sings the team anthem, "You'll Never Walk Alone." As the song begins, Dáire is overcome with emotion, and he can't sing a word. His father posted the video on social media, and when Klopp saw it, he invited Dáire's family to LFC's training center (all captured on video, of course).
As John Oliver observed, the striking thing about the video at the training center is Klopp's presence with Dáire. When Luis Diaz (Dáire's favorite player) and Darwin Nuñez (an LFC striker) enter the room, Klopp backs off and lets them greet the boy, but it feels like the players are doing a media event. Granted, they're basically boys themselves (ages 27 and 24, respectively), and there may be something of a language barrier (both players are South American), but it's obvious they're doing what they've been told.
The contrast with Klopp couldn't be starker. He engages with Dáire and his family in an easy yet profound, personal way: "I'm a bit older, but I feel so similar to what you feel in that video";"life without emotions? Imagine that, how boring it would be"; "football is not the most important thing in life, but in moments it's pretty important";"you might think this was fantastic for you, but it was just as fantastic for me." Yes, the club made a promo video out of it, but I still came away feeling like Klopp initiated the visit, not as a PR stunt but to meet and encourage a young disabled fan. Examples like this abound.
Jürgen Klopp Brought Me Through
The loss I feel at Klopp's departure also stems from the role he played in a difficult period of my life. In the summer of 2015—a few months before Klopp joined LFC—I had graduated with a PhD in philosophy from UCLA, then one of the top philosophy programs in the world. I spent eight years earning the degree, and six in Master's programs before that, for a total of 14 consecutive years in graduate school, training to be a professor.
In the two years leading up to graduation, as I was finishing my dissertation, I’d applied for 95 academic jobs, and I'd received only one interview—for a three-year postdoc at a university outside Philadelphia. I ended up getting that job, but the salary offer was poor, and I felt I couldn’t uproot my family for a temporary, non-tenure-track position, so I turned it down.
By the time Klopp joined LFC in October 2015, I was back to full-time engineering, a career I'd been trying to escape for years. I applied for another 35 academic jobs that fall, but I got no interviews. My dissertation research was growing stale, so there was no point in attempting another year on the job market. After fifteen years and 130 job applications, my academic dream was dead, and I was in a dark place.
I decided to apply for a new engineering job, a fresh start. Perhaps it was just my current position that didn't fit? After nailing the interview, I sat in my car and cried: I knew they'd offer me the job, and I knew I'd take it. I didn't know what else to do.
The new job was with an engineering consulting company, and it came with the expectation I'd bring in half-a-million dollars in contracts each year. I'd never been good at business development—if you'd asked me in college what I never wanted to do, I would have said, "sales"—so this expectation felt heavy. A couple of months into the job, sitting in front of my computer, I had a panic attack; my symptoms felt like heart trouble, so a colleague drove me to the ER.
Eventually, after some career coaching, I discovered writing, which I began to do on the side, and three difficult years later I shifted to a public-sector job that fit much better. Things felt brighter. But one of the threads that pulled me through those dark three years was my attachment to LFC and Klopp. Jürgen walked me through it, diverting me with victories, modeling from the sidelines and the press table how to deal with loss and pain, moment by moment, heart out.
I'll never forget sitting in my oppressive little office with no windows, listening over lunch to the audio commentary of LFC's Europa League match against Klopp's former Bundesliga team, Borussia Dortmund. Before the match, I bathed in Anfield's thunderous anthem, goosebumps on my arms, the tiny iPhone speaker shaking my soul, reminding me I wasn't, in fact, alone.
The Football
LFC's beautiful football under Klopp also played a part in my attachment. I'd grown up playing the sport, ages seven through 18, and at times I'd played it quite well, so I knew enough to recognize good football when I saw it. And the style of Klopp's teams can be breathtaking.
In the past, he referred to the style as "full-throttle football" and "heavy-metal football." It's fast, high-energy, attack-minded, and marked by as much possession of the ball as possible. It famously incorporates the "gegenpress," a counter-pressing technique whereby a team immediately tries to reclaim the ball when they lose it, rather than dropping back and regrouping.
This football philosophy made LFC successful under Klopp, winning them eight trophies, including the Champion's League (2019), the English Premier League (2020), the FA Cup (2022), and the League Cup (2022, 2024).
Jürgen and Pep
My most-gilded Klopp-era memories are of the mammoth battles (like this beauty) between LFC and Man City. During all but Klopp’s first season at LFC, Man City was coached by Pep Guardiola, who is widely regarded as the best football strategist alive. Klopp has frequently called Guardiola's Man City the "best team in the world." Before they came to the EPL, both coaches led teams in the Bundesliga, so their personal rivalry extends over a period of some eleven years. The teams they coached in the two leagues followed a similar pattern.
In the Bundesliga, Guardiola coached Bayern Munich, the richest, most successful German team of all time, with the most expensive players. When Guardiola arrived in 2013, Bayern had just won "the treble" the season before—that is, Bayern had won all three major trophies available to them: the Bundesliga, the Champions League, and the German Cup (or DFB-Pokal). Guardiola's job was to keep the Porsche purring.
In contrast, Klopp's job was to replace the tranny in the Volkswagen Beetle. While in Germany, Klopp coached the scrappy Mainz 05, which he raised from the German second division to the Bundesliqa, and Borussia Dortmund, a mid-level Bundesliga team that Klopp transformed to a perennial powerhouse. Klopp's German teams were far from the richest. When he joined Dortmund in 2008, the market value of it's players was one-third that of Bayern's. The budgetary constraints of Klopp's teams encouraged development of young players over the purchase of established stars. Even today, 16 years after Klopp's departure, Dortmund remains a team that develops players and sells them to the best teams in the world. Jude Bellingham, Jadon Sancho, and Christian Pulisic are a small sample of this legacy.
When Klopp arrived in Liverpool, his situation was slightly different: LFC was hardly a poor team and has only grown in value since then. Nevertheless, Klopp came at a time when LFC was languishing, and his task was, again, transformation. Through the period he coached, LFC spent much less in the transfer market than Guardiola's Man City, which is owned by Sheikh Mansour, an über-wealthy member of the UAE royal family. Thanks to Mansour's money, Man City is the richest team in football. (Some would say too rich. The EPL has charged the team with 115 violations of its financial “fair-play” rules. If the charges hold up, Man City could lose so many points that they’d risk being relegated to England’s second division, the Championship, entailing a huge drop in revenue and the potential loss of players.) Even in England, Guardiola drove the Rolls Royce while Klopp repaired the MG.
Head-to-head, over the years of their rivalry, Klopp's teams were about even with Guardiola's. In the 29 matches their teams faced each other, Klopp's side won 11, Guardiola's 10, and they tied 8. However, when it comes to trophies, there's no contest: Guardiola's sides have dominated. During Guardiola's years as coach, Man City have flattened EPL opponents with frightening consistency and acquired more English silverware than any other club by far.
The 2023-24 EPL season epitomizes the difference between the two teams. In January, when Klopp announced his intention to step down, LFC were in a position to win four trophies, including the EPL title. By the end of the season they'd won only one—the meager League Cup. Despite high hopes for Jürgen’s grand send-off, LFC ran out of gas and finished a distant third in the EPL. In contrast, though Man City had drafted behind LFC and Arsenal much of the season, their victory still, somehow, felt inevitable. And when the other two stuttered, Man City went up a gear and claimed their fourth EPL title in a row—the first time any team has done so.
Klopp's Parallel Universe
Despite Man City's unparalleled success, they've not been my team. In Guardiola's press conference after winning this year’s record-breaking EPL championship, a reporter posed him the following question:
Six titles in seven years, and given the competition you've faced, do you feel like you've completed English football, and what is there left for you to achieve now, here?
In his charming broken English, the Spaniard admitted to such thoughts himself. After winning the Champions League final in Istanbul the year before—a trophy he never won with Bayern and had not yet won with Man City—it seemed to him there was nothing left to do. But then he thought,
I have a contract, I'm here, I'm still enjoying some of the moments...And after I said, okay, we are here, start winning games, playing good, different players...and start to think about, oh, no one has done four in a row, why I don't try it? And now I'm feeling, it's done. So, what next? So, I don't know right now...Right now, next season, I'm not able to know what will be the motivation to do it, because it is difficult, sometimes, to find it when everything is done. But knowing the players and knowing myself, once we will be there, say, 'why should [we] not win today? Why not?'
Guardiola’s answer was, essentially, that winning football matches and breaking records would eventually motivate him again, despite not feeling it in that end-of-season moment.
I can't help but think Klopp would have rejected the reporter’s premise—the assumption that his reasons for coaching were tied primarily to personal achievement and record-breaking. Klopp's coaching has never been about personal achievement, and only secondarily has it been about his team's achievements.
In February, after LFC won the League Cup, the least-prestigious trophy on offer to English teams, Klopp said, "It is, in my more than 20 years, easily the most special trophy I ever won. It is absolutely exceptional." At that point in the season, LFC's starting lineup was plagued with injuries, so the team he fielded in the League Cup final had eight players under the age of 21, and several who were still teenagers. What made the victory so rich and special was the fact that his crew of young underdogs did it—players Klopp had been developing and cheering on for years. To see them break into the limelight was, for him, more special than his victories in the Bundesliga, his EPL title, and his Champion’s League trophy.
In the end, football, in itself, was just never terribly important for Klopp. As he sometimes put it, “football is the most important of the least important things.” For him, football was primarily about being with, and giving something to, his players, his colleagues, the fans, and the cities in which he coached. Yes, he loved the game and wanted to win. Yes, he was crushed when his teams lost. But, for Klopp, football remained a mere game. He put people before results. His governing aims were human moments, memories, and relationships; football was merely his tool.
Jürgen Conversion
So, why, exactly, did I find Klopp so compelling? People as humble and caring as him are not exactly rare, and there are many such people to whom I'm not devoted. It's not merely his humility and care for others that hooked me.
Rather, what I found so compelling was his ability to remain humble and caring while thriving in the midst of the money-driven, win-at-all-costs, egocentrism of modern sport, in which teams spend their way to trophies, break the rules of fairness, and style themselves as "special ones."
Ultimately, Klopp converted me by showing a way to live true to values I hold dear while still succeeding in a world that holds to opposite values. His approach should be contradictory, sure to fail: humility and care for others seem like handicaps in the unforgiving world of sport. But, in fact, they gave him a hidden power to connect with people and to unlock powers in them, yielding new energy, hope, confidence, and success.
And so it was for me. Though I don't know the man personally, just watching him these past eight-and-a-half years has been a gift, anchoring me deeper in my values, regardless of headwinds, giving me hope those values don't entail finishing last, and all the while confirming that worldly success is but the most important of the least important things.
This is beautiful, Aaron! Loved it.