When FC Liverpool ascended to the European throne on 1 June, Jürgen Klopp should have been dancing on the cabin tables as if unleashed. Celebrating with his players, letting the pig out, finally channeling the pressure of a whole season into a roaring party. Actually.
“The moment we won the Champions League, we didn’t celebrate together in the dressing room,” Klopp looked back at the 2-0 win over Tottenham in Madrid in an exclusive interview with SOCCERSCORE and Goal, saying: “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. But I was just too exhausted.”
Only later, according to the 52-year-old German, did he see the pictures of his players’ victory celebrations on TV. “I only heard all that a few yards away in the coach’s cabin. I was completely finished – and yet: “When I was sitting there, I was really happy for the boys.”
One of the most important components on the Reds’ way to Europe’s crown was team spirit. According to Klopp, the latter had developed from setbacks such as the final bankruptcy against Real Madrid a year earlier.
“In every relationship, every friendship, every relationship with a work colleague or whatever, it’s always crucial what it’s like when things don’t go so well. And these moments have welded us ever closer together,” Klopp stressed. “We lost the final, even three finals. And the boys could still look each other in the eye.”
Klopp is particularly impressed by the development the team have undergone since taking office in Liverpool in October 2015: “When I came here, I said nobody likes this team, not even the team itself,” he said laughing. “That was reality, but today it’s completely different. It’s about development, about time, about the patience you have with the boys.”
Mentality was always one of the magic words in Klopp’s cosmos. A mentality without which it would never have been possible to catch up in the semi-finals against FC Barcelona. Klopp also explains his approach here with the collective idea: “How long can I hold on to the edge of a mountain with one finger if I only want to save my own life with it? I don’t know, maybe ten seconds? But if I had my little son with me, I could probably hang there for three days. At least in my imagination. I would do it for him, not for myself.”
The more you realize, Klopp explains what you do for other people, the easier it is to overcome boundaries. “And my boys have this talent,” he explains. “They would hang on the edge of the mountain for four years for each other, no question.” An attitude that the former BVB coach deliberately inoculates: “If a player has no footballing talent, I can’t turn him into a great player. But the mentality, I think, is something that all people have within themselves.”
The topic of development potential also played a major role in the transfers that Liverpool made under Klopp: “We only had two newcomers where we thought: ‘Okay, they have to be an absolute bull’s eye’. That was Ali (Alisson Becker, ed.) and Virg (Virgil van Dijk, ed.).” For Giorginio Wijnaldum, for example, who came from Newcastle in 2016, or Andy Robertson, who was taken from Hull in 2017, things were different: “They had just relegated and came to Liverpool. They were easy for us to get, but no obvious transfers for the public. We had to work with these players, with all of them.”
On 1 June at the Wanda Metropolitano in Madrid, both Wijnaldum and Robertson were in Liverpool’s starting eleven. And were later also in the middle, with the victory frenzy in the cabin, the Klopp missed. “I don’t want to do the same things anymore as I did in my youth, I don’t want to be in the middle of everything anymore,” he says. So he took a short break. Probably the greatest moment of his coaching career so far.
