An ageing, tiring, injury-hit squad, a backroom in flux, a tactical mindset flagging – a great manager finds himself at a crossroads
. Both challenged the orthodoxy. Both achieved remarkable success. Both found their spending power reduced by investment into stadium development. And both abandoned the hard-scrapping qualities of their early sides for neat and tidy football played by neat and tidy young men: easier to chase an aesthetic ideal than silverware.
This, though, isn’t about individuals. Almost nobody at Liverpool is playing to the levels reached in the past. When that happens, attention inevitably turns to the manager. At both Mainz and Borussia Dortmund, Klopp resigned after a disappointing seventh season in charge; as many have noted, he reached seven years at Liverpool last October.
It is too simplistic to say Klopp suffers a seven-year itch – and few managers in the modern age reach seven years at one club, let alone three – but that recurring pattern may be evidence that he finds rebuilding a side difficult. Which is understandable enough. It was the peculiar genius ofThere has been an attempt to move on, £150m spent on forwards over the past three windows, but injuries have hampered the progress.
To focus solely on Klopp is to ignore how much else at the club has changed. The sporting director, Michael Edwards, left last summer. His successor, Julian Ward, his former assistant, will resign at the end of this season. The director, Mike Gordon, who Klopp once described as “the brain behind all the things at Liverpool”, stepped back from his role in November. The club doctor, Jim Moxon, left at the start of the season. The director of research, Ian Graham, is also leaving.
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