should never again run up debts that threaten its existence.’
Henry’s words resonate now, but they didn’t throughout Rodgers’ tenure, because there was a dual policy at play, which led to dysfunction on the pitch. Edwards, Fallows and Hunter would get their preferred targets like Emre Can from Bayer Leverkusen and Hoffenheim’s Roberto Firmino, while the manager was able to bring in his own targets with the likes of Joe Allen and Christian Benteke.
The purchase of Allen from Swansea City was another divisive episode. Liverpool were dithering over meeting the £15 million valuation for the Wales international and Rodgers, still early into the job, threatened to resign if the deal didn’t get over the line.
The hierarchy hoped this was a case of the committee finding their feet and learning how to find common ground. That was unfounded. Rodgers’ signing of Benteke from Aston Villa for £32.5 million in July 2015 — his last deal for the club — spotlighted just how fudged the strategy was. Earlier that month, Liverpool were celebrating beating rivals to the £29 million capture of Firmino, believing him to be the club’s long-term No 9. Yet they then spent even more money on a target man that stylistically contrasted with the team in order to appease the manager.
It couldn’t continue. When Rodgers first met FSG over the Liverpool job, he had produced an impressive 180-page dossier titled ‘One Club, One Vision’, but there was no unified approach during his tenure.
Henry was right. Liverpool were ‘close to having the system we need in place’, but it required an elite figure to completely believe in it and to galvanise it. Fortunately, they knew just the man for that.
‘From tomorrow I will be the Liverpool man 24/7.’
Jürgen Klopp
‘We’re hitting for the cycle,’ John W Henry smiled to FSG chairman Tom Werner and its president Mike Gordon. In baseball, the terminology refers to the achievement of one batter recording a single, double and triple hit as well as a home run in the same game. It is uncommon and one of the most difficult feats to accomplish in the sport.
As the trio took in the East Manhattan skyline from a 50-storey skyscraper housing the offices of law firm Shearman & Sterling on Lexington Avenue, they were primed to swing big in a meeting they believed had the power to reshape not just Liverpool FC but the football landscape.
Henry was equating being on the cusp of hiring the perfect manager for the club — an incredibly complex criteria to meet — to hitting for the cycle. No fanbase deifies the main man in the dugout as vociferously as Liverpool’s: through banners, in song and the manner in which they are tattooed to the very soul of the institution. It’s a phenomenon that stretches back to Bill Shankly’s appointment in 1959, with the Scot transforming a club in the Second Division into a ‘bastion of invincibility’ during his 15-year dynasty.
Equally, no fanbase are as demanding of what they want in their leader. At Anfield, the requirements stretch well beyond what a CV reads or being tactically excellent. You need to win, connect with supporters and represent the essence of Liverpool on a cultural, political and spiritual level. In summary, a top manager must also operate as a man of the people while illustrating he is bigger than the job, greater than the expectations and unwavering in his handling of the fiercest criticism.
In New York on 1 October 2015, FSG were confident they were going to hire that very figure. A magnetic individual who had the proven capacity to galvanise, rejuvenate and deliver sustainable success to a club, while also having a lasting impact on the place and its populace.
‘It’s the right guy at the right time,’ Gordon noted. But the owners had selected the wrong choice of day for their first face-to-face interaction with Jürgen Klopp. The meeting coincided with the annual gathering of the United Nations general assembly, which gridlocked New York. The German’s journey from JFK Airport to Lexington Avenue took six hours in snaking traffic, and while it was unwelcome, it didn’t diminish his ‘highest enthusiasm’ for the opportunity to outline his vision for Liverpool.
Long before Klopp stepped into the building, the job was his. It was not an interview, rather a confirmation of what FSG already knew about the two-time Bundesliga winner courtesy of a call, a Skype conversation, and crucially, a detailed 60-page dossier on his way of working. Compiled by Liverpool’s esteemed head of research, Ian Graham, and Michael Edwards, who was technical director at the time, it evaluated everything from the manager’s training sessions, reaction to setbacks, achievements in relation to his resources as well as his interaction with staff and players through first-hand testimony from his former clubs Mainz and Borussia Dortmund. The more Liverpool drilled into Klopp’s methodology, the greater their conviction was that he could unify the core areas of the club and elevate it.
Beyond the comprehensive document, FSG knew he was their guy because they had previously pursued him twice. Each time they sought a manager, he stood out and tallied with their long-term thinking. Towards the end of 2010, as Roy Hodgson was scraping through a painful spell at Liverpool’s helm that would eventually span only 31 games in charge, the group used a third party to ascertain whether Klopp would consider leaving Dortmund to move to Anfield. It was no surprise the answer was negative, given he was successfully re-establishing BVB as a Bundesliga and European force while they played irresistible, high-pressing football.
A year later, another tentative approach was made when club legend Kenny Dalglish, Hodgson’s replacement, was released from his second stint at Liverpool. ‘I have been made aware of interest in England, and it is an honour to be linked with big clubs in the Premier League,’ Klopp said, before emphasising, ‘I love it here [at Dortmund] and have no intention of changing clubs.’
Naturally, Liverpool were not the only English team trying to secure the elite manager, who had halted, at least temporarily, Bayern Munich’s monopoly on being Germany’s best. Winning back-to-back Bundesliga titles and bulldozing opponents in the Champions League, where Dortmund reached the final in 2013, meant that interest in Klopp ballooned — especially 30 miles away in Manchester. While Dalglish’s successor as Liverpool manager, Brendan Rodgers, was overseeing poetry in motion on Merseyside in early 2014 with a Luis Suarez-powered offensive line taking the club close to the title, David Moyes was horribly floundering at Manchester United. Sir Alex Ferguson’s successor was well out of his depth and urgent action was necessary to remedy the club’s demise. Their executive vice-chairman, Ed Woodward, scheduled a chat with Klopp in Germany to sell him on making the switch to Old Trafford.
The BVB trainer hugely admired Ferguson’s achievements and the manner he went about establishing United as a global juggernaut, which is largely why he agreed to the encounter. Woodward’s pitch, however, was the antithesis of what would appeal to Klopp. He spotlighted their financial might and offered an Americanised picture of blockbuster names and entertainment while likening United and Old Trafford to the game’s Disneyland.
Klopp, a football romantic who feeds off emotion and who counts time spent on the training pitches as more fundamental than transfers, was turned off.
That came as no shock to Christian Heidel, the former sporting director of Mainz. He has a three-decade relationship with Klopp and was the one who offered him the chance to instantly progress from being a player to the club’s manager. ‘Emotionally powered’ is one of the core descriptors he uses for his friend, who is also a ‘fighter’ and ‘builder’. Heidel knew Klopp’s
