Klopp Says Goodbye to Liverpool

Well, not quite yet. But he's announced when he will, so we're talking about it now.

Jürgen Klopp's announcement that he'll be leaving Liverpool at the end of this season has been the big news in the (English) football world, and rightly so. He's been one of the most successful managers of the past decade, having won every major trophy with Liverpool except the Europa League, and has been consistently up there in the top spots with Pep Guardiola's Manchester City.

When he arrived at Liverpool in 2015, he was coming off a successful few years with Borussia Dortmund, in which he'd turned them into regular challengers for the Bundesliga title. He'd also previously managed Mainz, during which time he'd guided them to the top tier. When he arrived, he was the subject of many adoring profiles that talked about his innovative gegenpressing approach and his "heavy metal football", which came from the fact that this is apparently the type of music he listens to.

He did make an immediate impact, though, which justified all the love. He led Liverpool to the Europa League Final and the League Cup Final in his first season in charge, then the Champions League Final in 2018, and finally won the Champions League the following season. Liverpool took off like a thoroughbred in the 2019-20 season, winning the Premier League at the earliest point in the season, with seven games to spare (although, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, this was also the latest league win in history, in June). 

At the moment, Klopp is Liverpool's fourth-most successful manager in history, in terms of trophies won. He has seven trophies, compared with 20 for Bob Paisley, 11 for Bill Shankley and 10 for Kenny Dalglish (9 in his first spell as Liverpool manager and 1 in his second). One of Shankley's trophies was the old Second Division, which Klopp never managed in, and Klopp also never won the second-tier European cup, but remains the only Liverpool manager so far to win the Club World Cup. Also in contrast to Paisley, Shankley and Dalglish, Klopp never won the league more than once.

He's also the fourth-longest serving manager, in terms of games played, with 467. By this metric, he lies behind Bill Shankly, with 766 between 1959 and 1974; Tom Watson, who managed for 742 matches between 1896 and 1915; and Bob Paisley, who was in charge for 535 matches between 1974 and 1983. Klopp also has the second-highest win percentage of any Liverpool manager, with 60.81%, lying only behind Kenny Dalglish's first stint, which yielded a win percentage of 60.91%. Even legends like Shankley and Paisley only got 51.98% and 57.57%, respectively.

All of these stats mean Klopp can genuinely be considered one of Liverpool's greatest managers. Indeed, he's unlucky to have been in charge at the same time as Pep Guardiola's stint in Manchester - Liverpool twice came second after Manchester City by a single point, including the 2018-19 season, in which Liverpool won the most points ever for a side that didn't finish as champions.

That said, for all the excitement around his time at the Kop, Klopp's Liverpool has sometimes seemed oddly fragile. One glaring example is the 2018 Champions League Final, which they lost to Real Madrid on the back of two insane goals by Gareth Bale (and some pretty dodgy goalkeeping by Loris Karius). And after their title-winning season, the perfectly oiled machine seemed to develop a stutter, as injuries to key players like defender Virgil van Dijk weakened them, as well as rumors of conflict between Mohammed Salah and Sadio Mane, who were at the time Liverpool's best players and leading scorers. In 2023, Liverpool came fifth, missing out on Champions League qualification.

This isn't to say he's bad - just that, for all that he created a genuinely great attacking team, it took a while for his side to gel, and once they won the Premier League and the Champions League, there wasn't really anywhere else for them to go. Again, contrast that with Manchester City, which has won the league every year since 2018 (apart from the year Liverpool won it); though it's also fair to say that this season City's looked a bit off the pace, too, possibly given that they won the league, FA Cup and Champions League last season.

As far as his successor, the talk at the moment is all about Xabi Alonso, whose Bayer Leverkusen is top of the Bundesliga and mounting the first proper challenge to Bayern Munich in over a decade. His qualification for the Liverpool job seems to be his status as a Liverpool legend, but as they said on the Football Weekly podcast today, he'd make a better case for his selection if he holds on to win the German league.

This is a delicate time for Liverpool, in which the wrong managerial selection could send them spinning into chaos for years. One good example is Manchester United, which still hasn't recovered from hiring David Moyes to succeed Sir Alex Ferguson, or more appropriately, from precipitously firing Moyes ten months into the season and then scrambling to recreate Ferguson's dynasty from day one.

Another good example is Liverpool itself, which took about 30 years to recover from Dalglish's resignation in February of 1991. While the team won trophies between Dalglish and Klopp, including most famously the Champions League in 2005, the league title eluded them until Klopp's side in 2019-20.

Looking at that list of managers between Dalglish and Klopp, there's no evidence of panicky decision-making by the boards, apart from that ill-considered stint for Roy Hodgson in 2010-11. But somewhere in the executive boardroom there was a dysfunction that didn't allow them to choose a manager to properly compete with Ferguson's Manchester United in the 1990s, or Jose Mourinho's (or rather Roman Abramovich's) Chelsea in the 2000s. The worry is that this transition from the Klopp era to whatever comes next could herald another set of wilderness years.

On the other hand, Klopp was selected by the owners wanted a manager borne out by the stats, not by his status as a club legend or as an up-and-coming young British manager. Their analysis team is very different from the one that hired Klopp in 2015, but one hopes that the owners keep those stats in mind, rather than chasing someone with a little buzz because he's a former player.

In any case, it's clear that Klopp is leaving Liverpool in better condition than when he found it. It'll be interesting to see who follows him, but it'll be equally interesting to see where Klopp ends up managing next. He's said he won't manage in England again, so that could mean Spain or Italy, in the best case. Worst case is that he goes to Saudi Arabia or even just Paris St-Germain, though you wonder how he'd square that with his politics, which have always been pleasingly leftwing.

Wherever he goes, I'll be looking out for Klopp in his next role. I've never been a Liverpool fan, but it's always been fun watching them while he was in charge. With luck he'll bring his heavy-metal ethos to another storied club and turn that into a magnet for trophies and great players as well.

Finally Back at the Gym

In the latest of my occasional series on "things I couldn't do during the pandemic", I'm ready to wax poetic about going back to the gym. This isn't actually that new for me, since I started going back in August, but it's now pretty much re-established in my life/routine. I'm broadly quite happy with it, though with a few caveats.

I wrote about it in my post from July 2020, in which I talked about a bunch of things that I missed doing. There are a couple still on the list, but those tend to involve flights to Britain, which I'm kinda ready to do but haven't accomplished yet. Of the ones that I had access to here in the Bay Area, going to the gym was pretty much the last hurdle.

This is for obvious reasons: it's a big, enclosed space with a large number of people gathering together and exhaling at one another. The gym was a disease incubator even before the damn pandemic, so it's not surprising that 24 Hour Fitness shut down completely for most of 2020, even to the point of not charging for the monthly membership. They did almost go out of business, and my local gym not only laid off my trainer, but also consolidated with the site nearby (which it had been planning to do already), so it's clear that this decision cost them something.

When they reopened in 2021, I wasn't quite ready to go back in person, even notwithstanding the fact that I was living with someone who wasn't vaccinated against Covid. I had some training sessions left over from before the start of the pandemic, so I burned those off by doing virtual sessions on FaceTime, and when I ran out of those, I suspended my membership.

The trouble with not going to the gym, however, is that there are parts of the year when it'd be really nice to be able to work out indoors. Cold isn't too much of an issue here in the Bay Area, but when we get a rainy winter, it's nice to run without worrying about slipping in puddles or soggy leaves.

The increasingly long and hot summers are more of an issue, especially if we were to have another year like 2020 when the late summer heatwave was paired with dangerously high levels of air pollution caused by wildfires in Northern California. The air quality in the years since then hasn't been as bad, at least not here, but that still left large stretches where the temperature and the humidity were high enough to make running outside a slog.

So last summer I ventured back in. As I said, my club moved to a smaller location, but one that was essentially next door, so my trip to the new gym is pretty much the same. During the summer I was even still parking in the same parking structure. I'll go back to that when it's light enough in the evenings to not get run over by idiots as I walk to and from the gym, but for the winter I'm parking a little closer.

I've focused mainly on the treadmill, and on keeping up my running mileage. I've always had more tolerance for running on treadmills, in part because I amuse myself by keeping an eye on things like speed, incline, distance and calories burned, but I've also started wearing my Beats Fit Pro earbuds when I run, so that I can listen to music or keep up with my never-ending backlog of podcasts.

As an aside, I've discovered that Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is remarkably well-suited to running on a treadmill for 30-40 minutes. Go figure.

The other reason I focus on the section with the cardio machines is that I can pretty much always find a treadmill to run on, or failing that, an elliptical or even an exercise bike. The weight section is always too crowded, though, and so, while I try to do a machine chest press or lat pulldown, it's kind of rare that those machines are available. Which doesn't matter because I've picked up some adjustable weights and resistance bands, and can always rely on the good old bodyweight exercises to do my strength training.

I did, however, also sign up for a few sessions with a trainer. Mainly I wanted to pick up some functional mobility tips and have some accountability for my diet and exercise, but I don't know if I'll continue with it long-term. Still, it was a fixture of my pre-pandemic gym-going, so it's nice to be back to that as well.

As far as Covid precautions, I'll admit I'm relatively lax. I see a few people wearing masks on the treadmills, but I'm not one of them. As I said, it's a place where there's a lot of people breathing out, but the cardio section feels unpopulated enough that I don't feel as much anxiety about it. It also helps that I haven't encountered anybody that was hacking up a storm, the way I used to back before 2020, so that's set my mind at ease.

Plus, I'm up to date on my Covid boosters (for what that's worth, since they don't really stop you catching it, they just stop you dying from it), and I practice good masking etiquette and hygiene everywhere else. The fact that the weight section is always crowded is another blessing in disguise, Covid-wise, because that's probably the dirtier part of the gym. I always make sure to wipe down the machines I use and wash my hands after I've finished my session, which is hygiene theater to a point, but is probably helping to reduce the amount of crap I wipe into my eyes and nose and mouth.

Still, I have no illusions that it's a relatively risky thing to do, especially when cases surge in the winter. I'll look forward to going back to running outside again in a few weeks, although I'll probably have to keep going to the gym when it's too hot to run outside. I'll also revisit the concept if I do catch Covid from there, but again, I'm also heartened by the fact that the strains are less dangerous than they used to be.

Overall, this is probably the sign that, for me at least, the pandemic is over. I accept we haven't been in a state of emergency for a while, and I've modified my behavior accordingly since 2021. I've grown more comfortable with more and more things I used to do, and I'm also lucky to live in a place where the majority of people take it seriously, so vaccinations are common and so are masks. I'm still wearing masks at the grocery store and the doctor's office, and I'm keeping up with my boosters, so some behavior from 2020 persists.

Overall, though, 2020 and its attendant horrors grow ever more remote, and I'm happy about that. I never had much time for the "just gotta live my LIIIIIFFFEEE" crowd, especially when the Delta variant was raging, but it is good to be able to do stuff outside the house again.

And if there is another big pandemic, at least I won't have to worry about one thing: I'm keeping a pretty damn good stock of toilet paper in my special Covid-hoard.

RIP Franz Beckenbauer

The big news in football this week was the passing of legendary German sweeper Franz Beckenbauer, at the age of 78. Much was made of the fact that he was one of only three men to win the World Cup as both a player and a manager, as well as the fact that another of those men, Brazil's Mario Zagallo, also died this week. That leaves Didier Deschamps, who accomplished the feat with France, as the only man still living who's managed it, though the question is whether he can be the first World Cup-winning player to win it more than once as a manager...

Another point that came up in the various testimonials to Beckenbauer on the podcasts I listen to was that he's one of those players that you heard about, but didn't really ever get to see in action. Beckenbauer's heyday was Euro 1972 and the 1974 World Cup, both of which West Germany won under his tutelage, but there's little good YouTube footage of those tournaments, so it's hard to get a sense of how great he was.

This is a problem with all players before about 2006 - even someone like Matt LeTissier, who does have some good reels of famous goals from the 90s, is ill-served by poor-quality transfers to digital. Of course, YouTube highlights aren't always the best way to see players at the peak of their powers, but it seems a shame to lose documentary evidence of them, especially since all that seems to exist of the 1930s World Cups is the odd picture here and there.

On the more negative side, there was also a lot of talk on the podcasts about Beckenbauer's involvement in some of the shadier aspects of winning the 2006 World Cup for Germany. This is too bad on several fronts: on the one hand, it's unfortunate that part of his legacy is tarnished that way, and on the other, that tournament is considered the first great coming-out party for Germany as it is now, dynamic and open and friendly, and so it's equally a shame that an event that brought so much joy to so many people is tarnished that way.

But then, there was also the absurd side, as I learned on Football Weekly. He apparently chose a phone number consisting of all 6'es after appearing on an ad for O2, and this led to him getting a bunch of calls from men who thought they were calling a sex line. Of course, as the host of FW, Max Rushden, said, imagine calling a phone sex line only to find yourself talking to one of German football's greatest players?

I think the most interesting thing I learned, though, was how Beckenbauer seems to have embodied the new (West) Germany. He was born in 1945, amid the wreckage of the Second World War, and his fortunes followed those of his country, so that he came of age as it became one of the richest countries in Europe, and as Bayern Munich became one of Europe's elite too. He was considered a national hero, and despite the damage to his reputation from those FIFA issues mentioned above, it's sad to see him leave the stage.

Revisiting the X-Men Movie Universe

With a few days to kill at the end of the year, I decided to have another look at the X-Men movies, starting with the first one from 2000. I'd been thinking about it for a while, especially now that I'm reading an issue of X-Men per day on the Marvel app, but I'd kept putting it off, in part because a few of them were only available to rent and I wasn't sure I'd be able to finish them in the time before they expired.

When I did decide to do it, I figured on sticking with the main X-Men movies, so the first three from 2000-06, then the four reboot films starting with First Class, and ending with Logan. I briefly considered watching New Mutants, the Deadpool movies and the first two Wolverine movies, but decided that Logan was the only spin-off movie to watch because it acts as a sort of capstone to the entire mini-universe. 

That, and I couldn't bring myself to watch X-Men Origins: Wolverine again.

As I was watching, it also struck me that I haven't rewatched most of these films since I first saw them. Indeed, I know for sure I've watched the first one more than once (but I don't recall watching it since about 2001), and I think I watched Days of Future Past twice. I also watched The Wolverine a second time last year, which, while an okay film, didn't feel like something I wanted to revisit so soon.

I'd also never seen First Class in its entirety, apart from a stint on a plane, so there were large sections I didn't recall. I'd also only seen Apocalypse on a plane, but all I remember being censored from that was Psylocke's cleavage.

My main takeaway is that the movies benefited from some excellent casting, but weren't always particularly well-written. Some of it is the problem of introducing and managing too many characters, but it also comes down to an imperfect grasp of some of the source material. The movies that were strongest - First Class, Days of Future Past and Logan - all had strong relationships at their core, while the weakest seemed to be more an attempt to throw as many characters and images at the audience as possible.

X-Men (2000) is a good example. Rogue (Anna Paquin) is meant to be our gateway in as she gets initiated into the mansion, but Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) steals the show. As a result, the other three main X-Men - Cyclops (James Marsden), Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) and Storm (Halle Berry) - get very short shrift. Storm, in particular, disappears apart from delivering one of the worst lines in movie history. Even Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) get a little lost in the whole business, despite being dream casting for those two characters.

The movie also feels very dated. The other bad guys get very little time to establish themselves, apart from Mystique (Rebecca Romijn), about whom more anon. The camera work is very static, apart from one bit at the end that evokes the Matrix, so there isn't much jumping around, and the little that there is looks cheap.

On the other hand, it was a bit of a shot in the arm for the characters, especially in the comics. I'd stopped reading the books by then, but it was all recognizable to someone who knew the basic story and knew to look for Easter eggs like Kitty Pryde and Colossus. Around the time this movie came out, the X-Books were all rebooted to have the characters wearing black leather, so that they'd look like the movies. It also let Marvel streamline the stories a bit, rather than the bloat that had taken over when I started reading them in 1991.

The second movie, X2 (2003) was a little better than I remembered. I was one of those rare people who didn't particularly like it, but rewatching it more than 20 years later, it's hard to remember what I objected to back then. I think part of it was the seeming death of Jean Grey at the end, but what made me appreciate it more this time was reading about its source material, the graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills. On the negative side, many of the characters from the first movie (mostly Storm and Rogue) were sidelined even more, in favor of Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming), who I normally like but didn't quite land here.

X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) is generally held to be the worst of the trilogy, and it is, but I also didn't hate it as much as I remember hating it back in the day. A lot of it looks pretty dodgy, and it sidelines Rogue so much that she takes the mutant vaccine and gives up her powers. Elliott Page does a good turn as Kitty Pryde, and it was nice to see Leech onscreen, even if they didn't keep him green, like in the comics. But my favorite part of the movie comes early on, when a younger Xavier and Magneto go visit Jean's parents.

It's the first time we get to see Stewart and McKellen together onscreen as anything other than adversaries, and their dynamic is delightful. It's not hard to get a sense of them as a couple, in part because Magneto is delightfully catty. But apart from the homoerotic subtext, which is rife in Bryan Singer's X-Men, the idea that they once worked together is core to the conflict between them, so it was nice to see that firsthand.

After that misfire, they decided to reboot the films entirely and explore that relationship between Xavier and Magneto in First Class (2011). They recast them with James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, respectively, and heavily played up the friendship/boyfriendship as the core of the movie. And it finally works!

It's super fun getting to see Xavier as a groovy scientist who uses his knowledge of genetics to chat up ladies, at the same time that Magneto's rampaging through ex-Nazis in his search for Kevin Bacon. Because the movie's all about getting the X-Men together, it also introduces us to the characters in more organic ways, like discovering that one of the scientists working at the CIA is actually a mutant himself, and the montage where McAvoy and Fassbender go looking together for the other mutants they've identified. The cameo where Wolverine tells them to go fuck themselves is also delightful.

That relationship remains at the heart of the next movie, Days of Future Past (2014), but here I should acknowledge that the third pole of the triangle is Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique. She does a good job of bouncing between their two philosophies in these two films, showing that she herself is looking for her own path in life. She also does a great job of making the character her own, while also paying tribute to Rebecca Romijn's portrayal, which was very far from the comics but worked brilliantly because of it. In fact, I think Mystique in the movies is one of my favorite things about this movie universe, because she's so striking.

The other thing that makes Days of Future Past work, for me, is that instead of building a whole new team in 1973 the filmmakers use it as a bridge to the previous trilogy, bringing Stewart and McKellen and Berry and Jackman, among others, back to reprise their roles. The bit in the future where a dying Magneto tells Xavier that he regrets spending so much time fighting is both touching and a good counterpoint to the relationship between their younger selves.

Apocalypse (2016) and Dark Phoenix (2019) are less successful, in my opinion, because they lose sight of this relationship between Xavier, Magneto and Mystique. Mystique is pretty established as a good guy by now, which takes away much of the tension around her character, and she doesn't have much to do by the time the Phoenix kills her in the final movie. Magneto has a bit of an arc in Apocalypse, as we see his new family in Poland killed by anti-mutant sentiment, but I think it would have been more interesting to see his philosophy contrasted with that of Apocalypse (a kind of mis-used Oscar Isaac).

One thing that I think these two movies do relatively well, though, is the relationship between Cyclops and Jean Grey, now recast with Tye Sheridan and Sophie Turner. Rewatching the original trilogy, it struck me that Marsden and Janssen had no real chemistry together, and there's nothing to show why they're together; Cyclops is just a bit of a dick because he sees that Wolverine has designs on his lady. In Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix, we get to see them bond over being the freaks at their respective schools, and the two actors have better chemistry together. It's just too bad that they ruin that chemistry by killing Jean off again.

And finally, there's Logan. It came out in 2017, so chronologically isn't the final X-Men movie, but it works as such because we finally lay to rest both Wolverine and Xavier (although a version of Xavier turns up again in the second Doctor Strange movie, and Wolverine's apparently coming back for the next Deadpool movie). Like the other good films on this list, it has strong relationships at its core: Xavier is a good father figure for Logan, who in turn works well as a reluctant father figure for Laura (Dafne Keen). It also helps that Keen is a good enough actress, even at 11, to hold her own with Stewart and Jackman.

The movie takes a lot of things about Wolverine and Xavier to their logical extremes, most notably the violence that Logan's claws inflict on just about everybody, and so it's pretty brutal to watch. But it's nice that it has lower stakes, and it's paced well, so that among the violent sequences you get some nice, quiet moments where the characters can experience joy together, after all these years.

Overall the X-Men movies suffered from some variable quality, to put it kindly, so it's not surprising that they aren't as big a deal as the MCU or the Spider-Man movies. However, on balance they do a nice job of showcasing Marvel's flagship team, and when they're at their best, they beat pretty much any MCU film for quality - unfortunately, as I say, not enough of them reach that level of quality.

Apparently Marvel is working out how to bring them into the MCU, which I'm kind of excited about but also makes me nervous. I've said before that I think they sit uncomfortably in the wider Marvel universe - partly because I don't want to know that all my other favorite heroes turn out to be anti-mutant bigots, but also that the X-Men mythos are large enough that you don't really need to have them mingle with the Avengers and such. It's also hard to see how they fit into the wider crossovers, since the X-Men work best when you can do the soap opera and emphasize the differences between Xavier and Magneto.

That said, I'm curious what an MCU version of the X-Men will look like. At the very least, if they get a feature film or two, maybe we can mine some other good stories from the characters. Here's hoping it won't be too long.