#KloppOut - Liverpool suffering similar decline to Dortmund and Mainz

FT Desk

Updated: 8 Sept 2022 08:07 BST
3 min read

Klopp discusses Salah ‘greed’ amid his special Liverpool season — © ProShots

Liverpool have made their worst ever Premier League start and just lost 4-1 to Napoli in the Champions League. From Robert Lewandowski to Sadio Mane, the German's heavy metal football eventually loses its tune.

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Klopp is rightly regarded as one of the best managers in the game. He took back-to-back Bundesliga titles off Bayern Munich - something which feels like a miracle in retrospect - and has won both the Premier League and the Champions League with Liverpool.

Where Manchester City's Pep Guardiola micromanages players and obsesses about tactics to the point of playing with the salt and pepper shakers over dinner, Klopp builds a talented group and puts the fire inside his players rather than under them.

But that fire is fizzling out at Liverpool - as it did at Dortmund and Mainz before that.

Trent cannot be a real person pic.twitter.com/TYnTw9dVf9
— Free 8 (@unorthodoxcam_) September 7, 2022

In his seventh season at Anfield, Klopp's side have dropped 12 of a possible 21 points across all competitions. Beaten by Manchester United and Napoli, held by Fulham, Crystal Palace and Everton, with two wins against promoted Bournemouth and Newcastle in between.

The talismanic Sadio Mane has left for Bayern Munich in a €41 million deal. The Mo Salah he left behind has scored twice, as has the €100m Darwin Nunez. Trent Alexander-Arnold is literally walking through games.

Seven-year cycles

This has happened before. At the end of those halcyon Dortmund days in 2014, Klopp lost Lewandowski on a free transfer to Bayern in January, replacing him with Ciro Immobile, an €18m arrival from Torino, that summer.

Immobile's name was unfortunately fitting - he scored three Bundesliga goals in 24 games and Klopp was gone by the end of the 2014/15 Bundesliga season with Dortmund in seventh.

If two seven-year cycles is a coincidence, three is a pattern.

In his first managerial role at Mainz, he got them promoted to the Bundesliga and led them to an 11th-place finish in their first top-flight season despite having the lowest budget in the league.

But they were relegated in 2007. Mohamed Zidan - scorer of 13 goals in 15 games the previous campaign - didn't stick about for the party. Klopp couldn't get them promoted at the second time of asking and he resigned in 2008.

"Not really," Klopp replied when asked by journalists if he was worried about getting the sack like Chelsea's Thomas Tuchel did. "Our owners are rather calm and expect me to sort the situation and not think someone else will."

Klopp's problem now is that he need to persuade his bosses that this is a blip and not his M.O. Seven seasons in, the German's fist-pumping is beginning to wear thin.