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Shankly was the trailblazer, Paisley was the trophy king… so where does Klopp sit in Liverpool’s storied pantheon?

Jurgen Klopp is set to manage his last ever Liverpool game against Wolves today
The pages of the Liverpool Echo did not convey the sense of a city alive with optimism in the early days of October 2015. There were potholes to be filled on the Dock Road, a new set of economic data showing the place to be one of the ten poorest in the UK, and Steven Gerrard had just described in a new autobiography how manager Brendan Rodgers asked him to entice world class players to Anfield by sending them texts.

And then Jurgen Klopp arrived – speaking and carrying himself with a self-assurance which transcended football. He chided supporters for leaving early during a home defeat to Crystal Palace. He said he didn’t need superstars to join his squad: ‘I’m not a dream man. I don’t want to have Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi. I want these guys.’ And he proselytized in a way Liverpool had not seen in a football manager for over 40 years.

It was after a 4-1 win at Manchester City, then still waiting for Pep Guardiola, that the new Liverpool manager tackled the subject of fear.

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‘If you are stuck in a forest and it’s dark and you are afraid and someone tells you not to be, then it doesn’t work,’ he said that night. ‘It’s your own mind. Only you can affect that. We need the confidence in ourselves but we cannot switch the lamp on and off. Tonight, it’s very good, but we have to work.’

Jurgen Klopp is set to manage his final Liverpool game after nine incredible years at the club
Jurgen Klopp is set to manage his final Liverpool game after nine incredible years at the club
Klopp has taken Liverpool to unimaginable heights, winning eight trophies in total on the way
Klopp has taken Liverpool to unimaginable heights, winning eight trophies in total on the way
He has transformed the city of Liverpool, carrying himself in a way which transcended football
He has transformed the city of Liverpool, carrying himself in a way which transcended football

Words like that have seemed to speak to a city – its red half, at least – and were not the only reason why France Football came to describe Klopp as ‘Heritier de Shankly’ (‘Heir to Shankly’). He, like Bill Shankly, brought a common touch, a collectivist, sometimes socialist, philosophy and above all an understanding of what made this great, diverse, energetic, outspoken, sometimes downtrodden city tick. That an outsider – a German – should have become such a presence for Liverpool conforms with the embrace the maritime city has always extended to those from different lands.

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Klopp was not quite the ‘working class hero’ that France Football also proclaimed him to be. Raphael Honigstein’s fine biography, Bring the Noise, integral to what is now a huge Klopp literature, charts the German’s very middle-class upbringing. He was 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.

But Klopp still became a leader of Liverpool – his powers of communication, laced with intellect, surpassing Shankly’s in many ways, though he will leave fewer unforgettable quotations for the city’s future T-shirt makers. He has managed at Liverpool through the divisive, difficult years of Brexit and Covid, striking a note of fundamental kindness and humanity, when each has seemed in terribly short supply – bringing the leadership to address challenges way beyond the game. The need to ‘protect each other’ in the pandemic’s dreadful early days; the need to ‘ignore the lies’ and vaccinate; the need to keep football in perspective. Shankly’s players will tell you he made them feel like gods but even the World Health Organisation expressed its appreciation of the way Klopp inspired and led.

The city Shankly stepped into when brought to Anfield in 1959 presented fewer of the same human challenges and its self-confidence was still very much intact, years before Margaret Thatcher’s detested policy of ‘managed decline.’ As Shankly arrived, the Cammell Laird shipyard was booming, the Triumph, Ford and Vauxhall plants had just been built and The Beatles were on the way. ‘It was a far more positive economic picture than many appreciate,’ says football historian Gavin Buckland.

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