Jurgen Klopp, who under Brendan Rodgers transformed a somewhat lacklustre team into one of the world’s most successful clubs, retires at the end of the season.He will be replaced by Arne Slot, who will make a fresh start under the Dutchman’s leadership.
At the ‘Danke, Jürgen’ farewell event, the German manager, who will be out for nearly a year, said that the approach of clubs like Manchester City, Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid, who use their inexhaustible financial resources to keep acquiring top players, does not suit Liverpool.
“Can you imagine LFC as the club with unlimited money?”
“Imagine Kylian Mbappé came here. Imagine Bellingham came here, Haaland. It is not us, it just does not fit. We won what we won and we did it the Liverpool way. We had hard conversations, and other clubs didn’t do that in the same time.”
“We should be really happy that we have these owners and not guys who bought London clubs and other stuff,”
“I wouldn’t have survived a year at Liverpool [with them in charge].”
“‘Great development but not good enough, sack him!’ A year later: ‘Sack him.’ Then finally they play football where people think they might be back and they sack the manager anyway.”
“People always think the grass is greener, but we have owners who really feel responsible for the club and work really hard as well to be successful. I felt supported. We did it as good as we could have done and I’m fine with it.”
“If the whole world loses trust and faith in the player, the manager has to be the one behind the player,”
“I cannot just buy into that, ‘he’s useless,’ like other clubs did by the way, buying a player for £80 million ($102m) and then sending him out on loan.”