aSo there will be no glorious farewell to Jürgen Klopp. Saturday’s 2-2 draw against West Ham, coupled with wins for Manchester City and Arsenal, means any realistic hope of a second Premier League title is effectively over. Klopp is exhausted, his team is exhausted and the manic emotional energy that gripped the side during the League Cup final and immediately afterwards has disappeared.
Questions will arise about the wisdom of revealing when he announced he was leaving. This has been a truism in English football since Alex Ferguson announced his intention to leave Manchester United in 2001. Do that, even if you are as fearsome a figure as Ferguson, and the danger is that authority will diminish. Something similar appears to have happened with Emma Hayes, who will leave Chelsea Women this summer after a hugely successful 12-year spell in charge of the USWNT. Would Saturday’s row with Mohamed Salah have happened if the Egyptian had thought Klopp would still be his manager next season? (It now seems likely that Salah, who has only a year left on his contract, will also leave in the summer).
The strange thing is that Liverpool have not played particularly badly in recent weeks. As Klopp has pointed out, they had the chances to beat not only West Ham, but also Manchester United in the league and the FA Cup, Crystal Palace and even Atalanta. It’s just that when the wheels come off, they all come off. Chances were missed, defensive mistakes were made and a mind-altering combination of fatigue and fear slowly spread through the side.
Injuries didn’t help. Given the changes in midfield, this was probably always going to be a transitional season; there was no expectation that Fabinho or Jordan Henderson would leave, let alone both, and Wataru Endo, as well as he has performed, was only a stopgap. It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether Darwin Núñez or Luis Díaz has the precision to be a top-level striker. Salah, who has started the season brilliantly, has been desperately out of trouble since damaging his hamstring during the Africa Cup of Nations.
In that context, Liverpool have done exceptionally well to stay in the title race. And yet, recent weeks have seen Klopp end his time at Liverpool with the kind of season that has defined his career. At Mainz, at Borussia Dortmund and at Liverpool he has always fought against all odds. He’s always had at least one much better equipped opponent to wrestle, and yet at the same time he’s narrowly missed the prize remarkably often.
With Liverpool he won the Champions League, but also lost in three European finals. He ended the league title drought, but also finished second twice; this season will likely be his second third-place finish. With Dortmund he won the Bundesliga twice, but finished second twice. He won the Pokal once, but lost twice in the final and also lost in the Champions League final. With Mainz there were two painful near misses for promotion (they took two points from their last three games in 2001–02 and were undone the following year by a goal difference of three goals in the last ten minutes) before it was secured.
It would, of course, be absurd to be too critical, when in so many of these cases it is the very thing that put you in the position in the first place. But it is also a telling mistake that Klopp has stayed close to the line so often: it is one thing to be beaten in the final by Bayern, Real Madrid or City, and another to lose to Eintracht Frankfurt, Wolfsburg or Seville.
There are those for whom his record of one Champions League and one Premier League may seem a bit poor, but context is key. He did that against a much richer club in City, who have one of the best coaches in history. In the two seasons in which Liverpool finished second, they collected 97 and 92 points respectively, a number that would have guaranteed the title even fifteen years ago.
Or say it differently. Who are the five best managers in Premier League history? Would anyone really not want Klopp alongside Ferguson, Arsene Wenger, José Mourinho and Guardiola? He has transformed Liverpool from faded giants to serious contenders. He has taken a form of football that was favored in England forty years ago, rejuvenated it, repackaged it and sold it back to the English. He has produced a side that even neutral players are watching.
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It didn’t end the way Klopp or Liverpool would have liked. Fatigue has won and reality has set in. It has been another season of excitement, of greatness glimpsed but not fully understood. And for Klopp, nothing is more characteristic.
This is an excerpt from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, the Guardian US’s weekly look at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Do you have a question for Jonathan? Email footballwithjw@theguardian.com and he will provide the best answer in a future edition