The best football manager on the planet right now is an uncompromising visionary who has rebuilt a club according to his own immovable ideas. Jürgen Klopp is fuelled by rivalry, revels in conflict and wields a drill sergeant’s discipline. Like all great managers, he is driven by the need to overcome his enemies. He may not be nice, he may not be popular, but he is a born winner.
Except, as you might have noticed, none of that is true. Well, almost none of it. Klopp is the best coach on the planet. But he is about as far from a drill sergeant as you can get. He has no enemies, no desire for strife and rarely gives an interview that doesn’t feature a manic belly laugh. His squad’s togetherness does not come from a confected siege mentality, but from a culture of cheerful, buoyant unity. In a sport beset by blinkered tribalism, he is almost universally well-liked.
It’s difficult to overstate how rare this is within English football, where the received wisdom has always been that that the surest way to success is through iron-fist machismo. But then, as we keep hearing at the moment, we are living in unprecedented times.
Throughout the years, the “warrior winner” figure has been a central one in England’s national sport, be it in the famous captains such as Graeme Souness and Roy Keane, or the iconic, autocratic managers such as Brian Clough, Alex Ferguson and José Mourinho, who described his motivational style as being “ready to provoke your players, to try to create some conflict, to bring out the best from them”.
The character is there in other sports too: in the legend of Vince Lombardi, who said, “I’ve never known a man worth his salt who didn’t appreciate the grind, the discipline”; in the recent lionisation of Michael Jordan, a man who, in his own words, was always ready to “get in your ass a bit”; in the well-rehearsed alpha-dog personas of Lance Armstrong and Shane Warne and John McEnroe.
And it’s present beyond sport. It’s Gordon Gekko and Tony Montana and Michael Corleone. It’s the corporate executive who knocks back protein shakes and quotes Sun Tzu; the supermarket manager who belittles his till staff; the world leader who rides horses shirtless, who tweets in block capitals, or whose first move after winning an election is to sack the pluckier members of his cabinet and replace them with a gang of hand-picked patsies.
As for Klopp, he tends to put his success down to the expertise of others. “You cannot have enough specialists around you,” he says. “For me, it is enough to have the first and the last word. The middle we discuss.” Or in the words of Thomas Gronnemark, one of his coaches, “He’s a leader who says he doesn’t know everything and is willing to listen.”
Not that Klopp is above the odd moment of rage, spite or extreme pettiness, as many a fourth official will testify. Or, indeed, severe discipline: Mamadou Sakho was sent packing after moaning about team selections on Snapchat. But broadly speaking, his MO is one of upbeat encouragement. Alex Ferguson’s most famous mode of behaviour towards his players was the so-called “hairdryer treatment” – bellowing in their face from intimately close range. Klopp’s is probably the on-field bear hugs he dispenses as a matter of course after every win. Both men are great managers who modernised an ailing club and beat their own path to the top. But only one of them left behind a bloody trail of enmity and antagonism.
Over the years, it has been rare for the British public to look to Premier League football stars for moral guidance. But times change. In recent months Marcus Rashford has moonlighted as a powerful lobbyist against child poverty. Raheem Sterling has emerged as one of the country’s more eloquent speakers on race and inequality. And Klopp, like Gareth Southgate, has shown that a volcanic temper is not a prerequisite to effective leadership. That a man who is a ferocious competitor and a bona-fide winner can also be a nice bloke too.
Whisper it, but as Brexit Britain flails under a shambling divide-and-conquer government, Premier League football might just have become one of the more progressive parts of public life. Unprecedented times indeed.
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