JUERGEN Klopp’s week had been full of goodbyes. Liverpool’s now former manager had bade farewell to the club’s staff at Anfield, the stadium that had sung his name and thrilled at his team for the last nine years, on Tuesday.
A couple of days later, he and his players shared one last barbecue at Liverpool’s training facility.
A mural of Juergen Klopp, who is leaving the club. It is one of similar tributes decorating walls and buildings in the city.
In between, he had signed jerseys – “I don’t know how many, but everyone has one now,” he said – kept countless media commitments, shaken endless hands, received thousands of messages from well-wishers. He had found that particularly difficult, especially intense. “It’s been a lot,” he said.
Throughout it all, the prospect of his final appearance at Anfield had cast a pall. Klopp knew he would have to address the crowd. He would have to say goodbye to his people. He would have to make it real.
At times, during the game — a carefree, sun-drenched win against Wolves — he had dreaded what was to come. The crowd serenaded him ceaselessly. Fans brandished dozens of flags emblazoned with his name. Each of his players came to him for one of his signature hugs; all of them lingered. He started to worry, he admitted, that he would be “in pieces,” unable to speak.
He had no need. When the moment came, Klopp had Anfield in the palm of his hands, as he has for almost a decade: He had them at hello, and he had them at goodbye. He demanded the fans chant the name of his replacement.
They complied. He told them to be “all in, for the first day.” They roared. He told them the future was bright, that what comes next will match what went before.
“Nobody tells you to stop believing,” he told the crowd. “I believe, because we have you: the superpower of world football.”
Klopp does not pretend to understand, not fully, why he has such connected so deeply with Liverpool’s fans – the club’s “people,” as he calls them.
He suspects that his success has something to do with it: the fact that he has turned Liverpool into European, world and, for the first time in 30 years, English champions, restoring what had been a faded giant to the very front rank of European football’s great powers.
Klopp’s impact, though, cannot be accurately weighed in silver and gold; he knows the bond is more profound than that.
The trophies do not quite explain why the crowd, the club and the city have fallen so hard for him. There are bars and hotels named after him. And his face – the bright white grin, the beard now more salt than pepper – beams out from a half-dozen murals around the city.
The first of them, in the Baltic Triangle, went up in 2018, painted by French street artist Akse on the wall of a motorcycle garage.
It was a surprisingly easy negotiation, given that John Jameson, the building’s owner, is a dyed-in-the-wool fan of Everton, Liverpool’s fierce city rival.
Klopp reacts after his last match as Liverpool manager. — Reuters
“He thought it would be good for business,” said his son, also John Jameson. The thinking, the son said, was that even Liverpool publicity “was good publicity.”
Other murals soon followed, some commissioned by the club itself, some by fan groups and some – more recently – as rather more blatant advertisements.
Liverpool can feel, at times, like a city of football-themed murals. Several more are dedicated to current or former players.
“It’s starting to feel a bit like an insult if you don’t have one,” said Shaun O’Donnell, a co-founder of BOSS Nights, a live music brand geared toward Liverpool fans.
No subject is more popular, though, than Klopp. BOSS lent their name to another early mural of him, right around the corner from Anfield, as a play on the word’s dual meaning in Liverpool: both “person in charge” and “great.”
O’Donnell was conscious that he did not want to be seen to be “jumping on a bandwagon” by doing another mural. For Klopp, though, he was prepared to make an exception.
“We owe him everything,” he said. “Everything we’ve been able to do, it’s all down to Juergen.”
Initially, BOSS Nights were distinctly small-scale events: a few dozen friends, familiar from long road trips following Liverpool, gathering in bars around the Baltic Quarter to listen to live music.
Klopp’s arrival, the jolt of electricity he sent running through the club, turned it into something else.
In 2019, the year that Klopp led Liverpool to the Champions League title, BOSS staged a show at a fan park in Madrid, where the final was held.
It attracted tens of thousands of fans. Jamie Webster, who started out performing in O’Donnell’s shows, now has more than 50 million streams on Spotify.
His rendition of “Allez Allez Allez,” the most enduring of the fan anthems from Klopp’s era, has been played 16.5 million times.
Klopp had not been looking forward to Sunday and that final farewell.
“Saying goodbye is never nice,” he said. “But if you said goodbye without feeling sad, or hurt, that would mean the time together had not been right.”
For the fans or for the city, if anything, it was going to be even more difficult. When the contract for the original mural of Klopp, outside the motorcycle garage, expired a few years ago, the proprietors asked Akse if he might like to paint over it. He refused.
Instead, he has come down occasionally over the years to touch it up.
“We get a coach-load of tourists every day, at least,” he said.
“It’s like it’s on the tour: first stop the Cavern Club, second stop the Klopp mural.”
Nine years after Klopp arrived in Liverpool, his image has become an indelible part of the city’s iconography.
“It looks like he’s staying,” Jameson said. — NYT
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
