am, how can I say it, running out of energy.” It is, in its own way, the saddest of managerial farewells. Not to mention the most decisive. This is Jürgen Klopp’s thing. He’s an energy source. He’s joules, watts, volts, catalytic reactions. His energy is hisThroughout the Klopp elegies of the past few weeks, the deep-dives and unpeelings, the endless daily Klopp-trap, it is striking how little that decision has been questioned.
Klopp re-geared and updated the idea of the manager as an overarching figure, emotional armature for an entire institution, at a time when feelings and connections and warmth are key to that most vital of things: the product. In the end, that cinematic slightly cartoonish energy – there he goes, the snow king, Father Christmas, a very happy and clever golden retriever who has learned to walk on his hind legs – was Klopp’s greatest gift to the Premier League too.
City are perhaps the greatest, most annihilatingly metronomic footballing entity to be created in England. Chuck in the fact they’re also facing 115 Premier League financial charges. This is the team Klopp lost to by a single point twice. It takes an impressively single-issue degree of tribalism to conclude the story here is his underachievement.
There were three significant Klopp teams in that time. The first was the most fun and vicious and ragged, Mo Salah season one, a team that was all energy, chaotically open to counterattack, but also open to devouring your full-backs in the opening half-hour.