It is Wednesday night and the bell for last orders rings at The Freshfield pub in the village of Formby, a few miles north of Liverpool. It feels like a metaphor for something else that is fast drawing to a close. The party’s nearly over. The carousel that has been whirling Liverpool fans on a joyous ride for nine years is about to shudder to a halt.
When the sound of the bell fades, Jurgen Klopp saunters through the double-doors at the back of the pub and wanders out on to the patio to rejoin his friends. He is grinning from ear to ear. It has been a night of fond reminiscences and funny stories from all the years they have shared together at the club and now he has one more to tell.
Klopp is a regular here at the ‘Freshie’. It’s a country pub not far from the pine woods and the beach, places Klopp loves. No one pays him too much attention in here. They show the football when it’s on and they advertise Premier League games on a sign at the front but it is not the kind of football pub that gets rowdy and rammed.
The only football picture on the walls, in fact, is a team photo of Freshfields Under-15s, title winners in the Liverpool and Halewood junior league.
Klopp is still grinning. He has just been to the Gents, he says. He’s been in the pub for much of the night so the vast majority of the other drinkers know he’s there. But then he walks into the loos and the only two blokes in the entire place who don’t know he’s there are standing at the other urinals.
Jurgen Klopp bids farewell to Liverpool, the Premier League and English football on Sunday
The 56-year-old is bringing to a close a glittering nine-year spell with the Premier League giants
Jurgen Klopp is a regular at The Freshfield pub in the village of Formby in Liverpool
Klopp starts laughing hard as he tells the story. ‘They look up and realise it’s me,’ he says, and ‘they go “what the hell?”’
Which is pretty much what most people said when Klopp made the shock announcement on January 26, that he was leaving Liverpool at the end of this season. One of the most important, charismatic figures in the history of the Premier League was about to make it a poorer, less colourful place through his absence. What the hell?
When Klopp said he was leaving, just as he seemed to be building a new team to challenge for fresh honours, it felt like the moment when fans discovered from Granada television reporter Tony Wilson that Bill Shankly had resigned in July 1974. ‘You’re having us on,’ one of the distraught kids says when Wilson informs him of the news.
Klopp has been a towering presence in the English game. His relentless battle with Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola for supremacy has defined this era and if Guardiola has come out on top then Klopp’s legend has only grown because of his refusal to bow to the odds stacked against him. He is loved in a way that few other managers in our leagues have ever been loved.
And as he has fought, he has carried a city and a region with him in a way that perhaps only Shankly has done before because he is someone who shares their politics and their values, someone who has championed them not only through their football club but in the fight against the machine, someone who is a populist and a demagogue and a leader of men, inside and outside a football club.
‘It is nearly a decade in my life,’ Klopp, 56, said at his final pre-match press conference on Friday morning as he spoke about the bond that has been established between him and the people of the area, ‘and super-influential in so many ways. We spoke before how hard it will be to say goodbye because I love everything about this place.
‘I take memories with me, fantastic memories. I take friendships with me, relationships with me – forever. You realise the older you get when time slips through your fingers you only realise later on you look back and think ‘My God, that was quick’. I don’t think it was quick, the nine years.
‘I really think it was the absolute opposite of a waste of time. We used absolutely everything and tried to make the best out of everything and tried to enjoy it as much as somehow possible. A decade in your life is a massive one and I will not forget a day in that time because I met the best people I ever met and I did it for the best club I could have imagined.
‘That is how it is. In a wonderful, very, very special city. Nothing is perfect nowadays but the maturity of the people in this city is as close as possible because of the way they are, the way they deal with life, the way they welcome you and the way you treat you. And I don’t mean me, I mean all people I know who arrive in this city.
Klopp said he will take ‘special memories’ with him when he departs during his final press conference on Friday
‘I am completely at peace. It is wonderful to know I spent a big time of my life here. I got the key of the city and I know probably for a lot of people that’s rather funny but for me it feels like responsibility. I don’t imagine the club will need my help in the future but if the city needs me, I am there.’
And if Guardiola is a managerial genius then Klopp is a genius, too, a man who, through the brilliance of his tactics and the sheer force of his personality and the blinding light of his charisma, turned Liverpool into the only team standing in the way of Guardiola’s City, stopping them winning seven titles in a row.
He is the man who led Liverpool to three Champions League finals and won one of them, the man who has led Liverpool in a series of titanic league battles with Guardiola’s City, a man whose memory will burn most brightly in the starry recollection of the enchanted night at Anfield on May 7, 2019 where Liverpool produced one of the greatest comebacks in Champions League history, overturning a 3-0 first leg semi-final deficit against Lionel Messi’s Barcelona with a 4-0 win that was the greatest evening in Anfield history.
That summed up so much about Klopp and the team he built at Anfield and its refusal to give up and his planned chaos and the way it thrust an opponent into a tumble-drier and churned it around so that it did not know what had hit it.
But now he has only one game left – against Wolverhampton Wanderers at Anfield on Sunday afternoon. There is no way around it and no turning back. These are the last days and nights of Jurgen Klopp on Merseyside and for him, and for Liverpool supporters, it is a time of goodbyes and a time to say thank you.
He has spent the last week making sure that he does everything right by the people who mean something to him. The day before his night at The Freshfield, he posed for a farewell picture with hundreds of Liverpool club staff, and a collection of the trophies the team has won under his leadership, in the Main Stand at Anfield.
It has been, he said, ‘the most intense week of my life’, and on this Wednesday night at The Freshfield, he is hosting a casual dinner in the pub’s restaurant for friends and colleagues from the club’s in-house television station, who have worked closely with him and travelled round the world with him for a long time.
The Manchester United-Newcastle United match is unfolding on the five or six television screens stationed around the pub but Klopp does not watch it. United may have knocked Liverpool off their perch a long, long time ago but Klopp’s revival of Liverpool has changed the dynamic in that particular relationship.
And as United labour to a 3-2 victory, Klopp tells stories instead and listens to stories and laughs at video clips of celebrations his friends show him on their phones and swaps happy reminiscences and wanders through all his yesterdays.
He revels in the company of friends and colleagues he may not see for some time after the Wolves game when he packs up and leaves and begins to split his time between homes in Mainz and Majorca.
He will miss Formby, too. The sky gets big up here as the city gives way to the countryside and the beauty of this part of Merseyside takes your breath away. Klopp has made the village his home for all but the first few months of his time here and when his dog, Emma, was alive, he and his wife, Ulla took long walks with her through the pine woods that stand between Formby and the coast.
The German manager has formed an unbreakable bond with the city over his nine-year tenure
There is a sanctuary for tawny owls here and for natterjack toads and for red squirrels and for Premier League managers. Klopp felt as if it were a shelter from the relentless pressure of the job. The other place where he has always felt able to relax is The Freshfield, a friendly, elegant, country pub on the outskirts of the village.’
‘We started coming here because they allow dogs,’ Klopp says as he stands on the patio at the back of the pub, next to the car park. ‘I love it here. Nobody cares when they see me. When Stevie (Gerrard) was looking for work, sometimes I’d walk through the pub and hear someone call out to me and it’d be him. We’d sit down and watch a game.’
He laughs when he is told I went to visit his old office at the club’s former training ground at Melwood earlier in the day, now home to Liverpool’s women’s side. The office has been split into two but the windows still look out over the pitches where Phil Thompson and Kevin Keegan and Kenny Dalglish and Alan Hansen and Mo Salah and Virgil van Dijk and all the greats of this club once trained. Klopp loved that view and that link with the club’s history.
Of course, some people do want to have their picture taken with him. And Klopp obliges every one, talking to them like they’re his friends, too. A few guys from Norway, who had decided to go on a Klopp pilgrimage before his last game and visit the pub, cannot believe their eyes when they see him. He spends ten minutes chatting with them like they are old friends.
A group of students from Manchester – United fans – approach him. He has his picture taken with them as well and they tell him their car has broken down. Perhaps there is a metaphor there, too. Klopp is still all smiles and bonhomie. It feels as if the weight of the world is falling gradually from his shoulders.
One other thing is obvious: Klopp has designed this evening as a thank you to his colleagues but it is soon apparent that they want to thank him, too. They want to thank him for everything he has done for them and everything he has done for the club. Leaning against one of the chairs, there is a collage of photos that has been presented to Klopp. It is decorated with big letters that spell out: Danke Jurgen.
One of his friends says his farewells and tells Klopp he has had the same impact as Shankly. Klopp quickly demurs and says that is not true. But Klopp is wrong about that. Shankly was the one who built Liverpool. That is true. But Klopp rebuilt it.
Klopp put Liverpool back on their pedestal. He re-established the club as a giant of European football. He won a first domestic title for 30 years. For so many Liverpudlians, the pride in their city is interwoven with the pride in their club. The club represents the city. It is an ambassador for the city all over the world.
And Klopp has restored their pride in the club and the city. Of all the managers who have followed Shankly, both in style and charisma and in his relationship with the fans, Klopp resembles him the most.
Jurgen Klopp will take his place among the great managers in Liverpool illustrious history
Liverpool fans look on in front of a Jurgen Klopp, Manager of Liverpool mural prior to the Premier League match between Liverpool and Burnley in February
Klopp has forged an unshakable bond with the city the Liverpool during his time at Anfield
There is already a mural of Klopp near Anfield, of course, but more tributes will be created to him and they will stand the test of time, just as the tributes to Shankly are still dotted around the city.
There is a Victorian pub in the Dingle district of Liverpool, handsome and mournfully august, its upper floor windows replaced by sheets of plyboard, which used to be a popular meeting place for dockers, labourers and wagon drivers in the city’s heyday.
Locals still know it as The Phoenix but it is called Wilson’s Tavern now and I went there myself more than 30 years ago as a news reporter for the Daily Post, sent to try to find a villain who had absconded while on bail. My timid questions met only with blank stares.
There was one customer in there when I paid a visit for old time’s sake last week and he was nursing a pint of Guinness and playing cribbage with the landlady but I noticed something about that little pub at the top of bluffs that rise up from the River Mersey that I had not noticed all those decades ago.
On the wall near the bar, hanging from a pillar in pride of place, as if it were a picture of the King or Queen, someone to nod to every morning when you open up, there is a photograph of a man in a grey suit and a striped tie strangely familiar from old black and white television appearances. The photograph is more than 60 years old. It is a photograph of Shankly.
The memory of the man who built Liverpool Football Club into one of the great powers of English football still burns brightly in this proud city and the statue of him outside Anfield, his arms outstretched, his fists clenched, a fan’s scarf around his neck, proclaims ‘He made the people happy’.
A new strand of iconography is being woven into the city’s tapestry, too. On the way back into the city from the Dingle, there is a billboard on the Strand in front of the Albert Dock that was conceived by the accomplished and popular Liverpool podcast, The Anfield Wrap.
The billboard is painted red and Klopp, who has one more day left in the job he has graced for nine years, stares out from one end of it. At the other end, a sentence reads: ‘Jurgen reminded us of who we’ve always been.’
The German guided Liverpool to the club’s sixth European Cup after a 2-0 win over Tottenham
After he leaves the club, Klopp will surely continue to be immortalised around the city
It was here on the Strand that Klopp appeared at the head of two triumphal parades – celebrating a sixth European Cup victory in 2019 and winning the League Cup and FA Cup in 2022 – like Julius Caesar returning to Rome after a victorious campaign, flares turning the sky blood-red and hundreds of thousands of fans lining the streets.
But on Wednesday night, to find Klopp, you had to head away from the Strand, and drive north up Waterloo Road, past the impressive hulk of the new Everton stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock, past the shells of derelict warehouses, past the refineries and the giant cranes of the Port of Liverpool, flashing red in the darkness to the edge of the city, to The Freshfield.
When I say my goodbyes, we laugh a little about his relationship with the media, a theme he revisits on Friday morning. ‘It was never personal,’ he tells one reporter he had once upbraided in a press conference, ‘even when it seemed pretty personal. I am at peace with all of you. If this was a room full of referees, I might not say the same.’
And then he makes one last request, aimed at helping his successor. ‘When you look back,’ he says, ‘do not make me too big.’ I drive out of the car park at The Freshfield and look back at the pub. The patio is still busy, the party is still going on and Jurgen Klopp is still wringing every last second out of his life.