Jurgen Klopp left Liverpool last year in a much better state than he found it…so unsurprisingly, there were things he wasn’t too happy with when he joined the club in 2015.
At the time – much as now – Klopp was the hottest managerial free agent in the game having left Borussia Dortmund a few months prior. Meanwhile, Liverpool were coming towards the end of a disappointing post-Istanbul decade that at one point saw the club hit their lowest league finish in 49 years.
And speaking on new Amazon Prime documentary mini-series ‘Doubters To Believers Liverpool FC: Klopp’s Era’, Klopp admitted that he was not quite ready for the extent of the clamour that surrounded his arrival at Anfield.
Klopp says in the documentary: “There’s all these crazy things, like people track the plane and stuff like that. You don’t have this idea of yourself or that people could be interested in a football manager flying into a country.
“In the same moment, I was really disappointed because I realised ‘oh my god, I forgot that the dressing rooms are really bad!’ – and I don’t like bad dressing rooms.”
The documentary goes through the rocky first couple of years of Klopp’s tenure and into their return to the top of English football, with the club ending a 30-year wait for a league title in 2020.
One turning point was the signing of Southampton centre-back Virgil van Dijk for a whopping £75m transfer fee.
That figure that led to raised eyebrows at the time but has more than paid off for the Reds: Van Dijk is ranked at No.3 in FourFourTwo’s list of the best Premier League defenders of all time.
Klopp said in hindsight: “New signings are not always the solution, but sometimes they are. The quality was obvious. We don’t pay [that] amount of money for a guy we’re not sure about.”
Then there was the emergence of Trent Alexander-Arnold, who became one of Klopp’s most trusted and influential players after breaking through from the club’s academy.
Klopp recounts in the documentary: “I think on day one, Pep [Lijnders] told me about Trent. It was pretty much on the first day: ‘that one, but if you see him, wow’. So that’s how that started.”
