Jurgen Klopp and the leaving of Liverpool: How his final day became a celebration (2024)

There is a respectful hush where Burnand Street meets Randolph Street, where a gable end has been transformed into a tourist attraction.

In the streets surrounding Liverpool’s Anfield stadium, there is noise — sing-songs, guitars being strummed, a buzz of excitement and apprehension — but nobody talks next to the mural of Jurgen Klopp. They walk up to it, they gaze at his face grinning back at them and, on this particular day, most of them pause to catch their breath before posing for a photograph.

They have visited the mural here before, but today, two hours before kick-off against Wolverhampton Wanderers on the final day of this Premier League campaign, it is different.

Today is the day Liverpool’s supporters have been dreading since that Friday in January when Klopp stared back at them from their smartphones, furrowed his brow, sighed and paused before solemnly announcing, “I will leave the club at the end of the season.”

“The moment I saw the news on Facebook, I just thought, ‘No! What the f***?’,” says Happy, 29, who has flown in from Hong Kong. “I couldn’t accept it.”

“I still can’t accept he’s leaving after today’s game,” says Matt, 32, a fellow Hong Kong Red. “This morning I watched his final interview and I cried. I just want to cry every moment.”

Johnny Shah, 45, a Liverpool fan from Wolverhampton, recalls a similar feeling when Klopp dropped his bombshell. “I had a really busy day at work that day, but I couldn’t get any work done for five hours after that,” he says.

What is he expecting Klopp’s farewell to be like? “Emotional,” he says. “Tissues at the ready. I didn’t even cry when my daughters were born, but today’s going to be different.”

There has been a desperation among supporters to be here for Klopp’s final game. At one stage, traders on secondary ticket sale websites were selling £60 ($76) tickets for £1,700 ($2,158). Those prices dropped once Liverpool fell out of contention for the Premier League title, but they were still going for 10 to 20 times face value all week.

The fans from Hong Kong reel off the cost of their trip: HKD 12,000 (£1,211; $1,538) for flights alone, plus accommodation and way beyond face value for tickets.

Aziz Ali, 20, from Kuwait, has flown in from Chicago for the occasion. “I need to be here, screaming my lungs out, to give him the send-off he deserves,” he says. “I just know tears are going to be coming down my face.”

The real Jurgen Klopp: an Athletic special series

• Part 1: ‘The normal guy from the Black Forest’, by Oliver Kay
• Part 2: The powder keg, by Phil Buckingham
• Part 3: The one-man brand, by Caoimhe O’Neill and Andy Jones
• Part 4: Liverpool’s champion, by Simon Hughes
• Part 5: The manager who made Liverpool believe again, by James Pearce

Inside Anfield, George Sephton, the club’s DJ since 1971, was playing All Things Must Pass by the late George Harrison, who grew up a few miles from Anfield — completely indifferent to football, unusually in this city — before finding worldwide fame in The Beatles.

Sunset doesn’t last all evening
A mind can blow those clouds away
After all this, my love is up and must be leaving
It’s not always gonna be this grey

All things must pass
All things must pass away.

Nothing Lasts Forever by Echo & The Bunnymen, another Liverpool band, followed soon afterwards, as did Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U. Inside and outside the ground, the pre-match atmosphere seemed sombre — as if focused on the void Klopp is leaving rather than the enormous void he has filled over the past eight and a half years.

That had been the initial tone of one of the farewell videos Liverpool posted on their social media on Saturday — Klopp walking out at an empty Anfield, dressed more formally than usual, scarf in hand, lump in throat, declaring his love for the club. “It’s difficult to say farewell,” he said. “But let’s remember the good times.”

"It’s difficult to say farewell, but let’s remember the good times…" ❤️🥹 pic.twitter.com/Gnlq0MbI2j

— Liverpool FC (@LFC) May 18, 2024

And then… a figurative needle scratch and into the upbeat chimes of You To Me Are Everything by The Real Thing, an R&B band from Liverpool’s Toxteth area in the 1970s. And the whole thing suddenly became so much more upbeat: a celebration rather than the sombre mood that seemed to have engulfed sections of the fanbase.

That’s how it felt inside the stadium over the afternoon. Cheerful and optimistic rather than the dewy-eyed outpouring some fans had imagined.

The song that rang out at regular intervals during the game — chanted non-stop in the closing stages, getting louder and louder — was Liverpool’s ode to Klopp to the tune of The Beatles’ I Feel Fine.

Jurgen said to me, you know
We’ll win the Premier League, you know
He said so
I’m in love with him
And I feel fine

Klopp’s wife, Ulla, could be seen wiping her eyes in the VIP area. The pair of them will miss this place more than they ever imagined.

She wasn’t the only one feeling emotional. Liverpool captain Virgil van Dijk struggled to hold back the tears during the scenes that followed a routine 2-0 victory over Wolves. Vice-captain Trent Alexander-Arnold was in floods. “And I never usually cry,” he said.

But Klopp held it together. He told the crowd he had feared he would be “in pieces” by that point but, instead, he just felt incredibly happy — “about you all, the atmosphere, the game, being a part of this family and about how we celebrate this day”.

Outside the Kop end of Anfield, you pass the statue of the late Bill Shankly.

It will be 50 years in July since Shankly stunned Liverpool’s supporters by announcing his retirement. Shankly’s status among Liverpool managers is unsurpassed no matter what the club has won in the half-century since — even winning the league championship six times and three European Cups under his successor Bob Paisley.

When Shankly arrived in 1959, Liverpool had been marooned in the old Second Division (now Championship) for five years, a depressed club going nowhere. He energised and transformed the place, building what he called “a bastion of invincibility”. As it says succinctly on the plinth, “He made the people happy.”

So did Klopp. He made them deliriously happy.

From the early 1990s to mid-2010s Anfield was rarely a happy place for long. There were good times — big European nights under Gerard Houllier and Rafael Benitez, a dizzying title challenge under Brendan Rodgers — but there were long periods when the club appeared lost and the fanbase seemed miserable, resentful, struggling to fathom how the empire built over the previous decades had crumbled.

And then along came Klopp, promising to “turn doubters to believers”. And slowly but surely it happened, the next few years a blur of attacking football and, gradually, winning football.

This wasn’t the attritional football seen under some of his predecessors. This was full-throttle stuff, hurtling their way to the Champions League title in 2019 and then that elusive Premier League title in 2020 in thrilling fashion.

“It’s hard even to put into words,” said Aziz. “But from day one, you knew it was going to be a match made in heaven. It’s a cliche to say that and I know people from outside the world of Liverpool won’t really understand what I mean by it, but it truly has been.”

“He’s a truly inspirational figure,” said Bob Strachan, 72, who was raised on the Shetland Islands but worked and lived in Liverpool in the 1980s and now lives in the Midlands. “Life seems so much better when he’s around.”

Now and again, fans have suggested Klopp deserves a statue outside Anfield — but he isn’t interested in statues. One of his oldest friends, Martin Quast, recalled that when the idea was proposed at his former club Mainz, “Klopp said statues were only good for collecting bird droppings at the top and for dogs peeing on them at the bottom”.

No Klopp statue, then.

What will remain are the memories that echo around this place: that crazy win over Borussia Dortmund in the Europa League quarter-final in 2016, thrilling victories against Manchester City and Roma en route to the Champions League final in 2018, Divock Origi’s stoppage-time winner against Everton, that astonishing comeback at home to Barcelona in the Champions League semi-final in 2019, the relentless charge that brought their first league title in 30 years, thrashing Manchester United 4-0 and 7-0, resounding victories over Chelsea and Newcastle United this season — everything, really, up to and including Sunday’s farewell.

It wasn’t just Klopp saying goodbye.

Thiago, 33, and Joel Matip, 32, were given a guard of honour and farewell gifts as they prepare to leave when their contracts expire this summer. Likewise, seven members of the backroom staff (Andreas Kornmayer, Ray Haughan, Jack Robinson, John Achterberg, Vitor Matos, Peter Krawietz and Pep Lijnders) who are also leaving.

Ultimately, however, it was about one man. A hush fell over Anfield before he bounded onto the pitch for the final time, wearing a red hoodie with “I’ll Never Walk Alone Again” on the back. He went through the guard of honour once and was happy for Van Dijk to send him back to do it all over again. He seemed to be loving it, demob-happy, a burden off his shoulders.

For the seven and a half minutes he spent in the centre circle with a microphone, it was pure Klopp: off the cuff, unfiltered, heartfelt, passionate.

“People say I turned them from doubters into believers,” he told the supporters. “That’s not true. You did it. Nobody tells you to stop believing. This club is in a better moment than a long time. We have this wonderful stadium, training centre… and you (the fans), the superpower of world football. Wow.”

He turned his thoughts to Feyenoord coach Arne Slot, who will be confirmed as his successor this week. “You welcome the new manager like you welcomed me,” Klopp told the fans. “Change is good. If you go into it with the right attitude, then everything will be fine.”

There was a faint echo of when Sir Alex Ferguson handed the reins to David Moyes at Old Trafford in 2013, thanking Manchester United’s supporters for standing by him during difficult times and telling them, “Your job now is to stand by our new manager.”

But Ferguson didn’t go quite as far as to start chanting his successor’s name.

That’s what Klopp did, hilariously, reappropriating one of his own chants (to the tune of Live is Life by Opus) in honour of the man who will be confirmed as Liverpool’s new manager this week. “Arne Slot, NA NA NA NA NA!” he shouted — and quite tunefully, too… and quite off-message given Slot’s appointment is yet to be confirmed by the club. The supporters took it on instantly.

There followed a few more upbeat messages — “I will never walk alone again”, “I love you to bits” and “You are the best people in the world” — before Klopp was urged for “one last time, go and see your people”.

With that, he ran towards the Kop with his coaches and produced one more flurry of fist-punches, to rapturous acclaim — then produced another flurry on his own, then another, then another, then another, all four sides of the ground. He might want to give it a few days before his next game of padel.

At that point, you wondered where it might end. Was he ever going to go home? Was he going to pick up the microphone again and come over all Wolf of Wall Street? “I’m not f***ing leaving! The show goes on!”

No, he’s leaving. The show really is over.

Klopp will soon leave Merseyside for good. He plans to go to the Champions League final at Wembley on June 1 as a guest of his former club Dortmund and take in some European Championship games in Germany this summer, but he insists he will take a long break before contemplating whether he has another coaching job in him.

He hopes to come back to support Liverpool next season. To put it mildly, he will be a hard act to follow, though he feels he has prepared the ground for Slot in more ways than one.

It wasn’t quite the send-off Klopp had dreamed of back in January when he said he no longer had the energy to go on beyond this season. At that point, still in contention for four trophies, he suggested that “the best memories” of his time at Liverpool were “yet to come”.

They won the Carabao Cup in February, but their season unravelled between mid-March and the end of April. There were echoes of his final months at Mainz, unable to lead them to promotion back to the Bundesliga, and his final season at Dortmund, when his team ended seventh in the Bundesliga and were beaten by Wolfsburg in the DFB-Pokal final.

“Winning today would have been too kitschy, too American,” he said after his final game in charge of Dortmund.

But even without another trophy to add to the Carabao Cup this season, it was a happy ending at Liverpool. “I love how we said goodbye,” he said afterwards. “An absolutely incredible, wonderful time. I love it.”

It summed up something he said when he arrived at Liverpool in October 2015. “It’s not so important what people think when you come in,” he said. “It’s much more important what people think when you leave.”

It also called to mind something else he said upon leaving Dortmund earlier that year. “Trophies and medals, they get put away somewhere in the clubhouse and you forget when exactly it was and who won which trophy when,” he said in 2015. “What’s important is the moment itself, the memory of being there at the game, that you were part of it.

“That’s what it’s all about. The experience.”

(Top photo: Andrew Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)