Except Liverpool have hardly been parsimonious either. After the Loris Karius debacle in Kyiv, they spent £67 million to bring in Alisson in 2018, then a world-record fee for a goalkeeper. Conscious of compensating for Sadio Mane’s move to Bayern Munich, they paid £85 million for Darwin Nunez. These were not the luxury signings open to Ranieri’s Leicester City when they reached the summit in 2016. Klopp has been backed handsomely by Fenway Sports Group, but still he is no more decorated in the league than the man who coined the catchphrase “Dilly ding, dilly dong”.
In Europe, too, a solitary Champions League crown scarcely does justice to a manager of Klopp’s standing. As deliriously as Liverpool celebrated in 2019, with 750,000 people lining the parade route, they lost two other finals, both to Real Madrid, compounding the sense of thwarted ambition Klopp had felt when Dortmund succumbed to Bayern at Wembley. There is a theory, of course, that a final is only ever a flip of the coin. But a study of this generation shows some managers are far better versed in the art than others. Guardiola has won a staggering 26 of his 29 finals. Klopp’s hit rate, by contrast, is six of 13.
Not that you can possibly measure the Klopp effect by raw numbers alone. A tale of the tape cannot reflect all those times when he hauled his players off the floor, when he wandered into bars for casual meetings with fans, when he introduced his players to training-ground staff to foster a sense of common cause. He has given everything of himself to Liverpool, emotionally and ideologically attuned to those he represents. His absence will create a crater. It is the famous Maya Angelou line: that people forget what you said, and even what you did, but never what you made them feel. Klopp has earned this epitaph, many times over. But he closes his body of work at Anfield, spanning eight trophies, amid a sense that it could – and perhaps should – have been more.