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.
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