Jurgen Klopp will leave Liverpool determined to find a “normal life” and confident the club is in “good hands and the future is bright”.
The German made the surprise announcement this morning that he will depart Anfield at the end of the season after eight-and-a-half trophy-laden years.
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Managing a club of Liverpool’s size is an exhausting undertaking and Klopp says he no longer has the energy to continue.
He told the club’s official website: “My role will change, a lot of other things will stay the same, so the club is in good hands and the future is bright – and even brighter when I don’t have to do it anymore with not exactly the same energy level as before.
“If you look at my career, this career is actually not possible, I would say, because where I am coming from, ending up as the manager of Liverpool FC is a fairy tale and a very difficult to thing to plan. Impossible to plan and difficult to reach, but it is only possible if you are very busy and 100,000 per cent committed to everything you do and you dedicate your whole life to it.
“That’s what I did. I came here, and I said it on the first day, as a normal guy. I am still a normal guy, I just don’t live a normal life for too long now. I don’t want to wait until I am too old for having a normal life. I need to at least give it a try at one point to see how it is and will I miss it.
“As I said, I never really had this before so I need to give it a try and it is the right moment for me and I think it is the right moment for the club because I can’t do the job from next year on anymore as I did it before, and then I am not the right one anymore.”
Klopp does not know if he will return to management but has already ruled out taking another job in the Premier League.
He added: “I need to find a different purpose as well, I need to have a look for it. If you ask me, ‘Will you ever work as a manager again?’ I would say now no. But I don’t know obviously how that will feel because I never had the situation.
“What I know definitely – I will never, ever manage a different club in England than Liverpool, 100 per cent. That’s not possible. My love for this club, my respect for the people is too big. I couldn’t. I couldn’t for a second think about it. There’s no chance. This is part of my life, we are part of the family, we feel home here. There’s no chance to do that.
“But all the rest, will I ever work again? Of course, I know myself, I cannot just sit around. I will find something else maybe to do. But I will not manage a club or a country at least for a year, that’s not possible, I cannot do that and I don’t want to. That’s all.
“It’s such a strange situation because I have to explain that I don’t have energy anymore, but now I’m sitting here and I have energy and I’m buzzing for everything that’s happening here. But because of the relationship we have, I have to think about this. Because nobody will sack me, I have to make this decision by myself. The responsibility I have for everything here tells me I’m not the right one for the future, so I have to tell.”
Watch or read our emotional interview with Jürgen Klopp in full as he discusses today’s news in detail and explains the reasons for his decision.
— Liverpool FC (@LFC) JANUARY 26, 2024
Klopp told the club of his intention to quit in November and he hopes that – and the decision to go public today – will give Liverpool the best chance to find a suitable successor.
“There are so many things which are influenced by it, especially personal situations’” he said.
“People from my staff need to know early – and especially the club needs to know early and needs to plan. You cannot plan anything and you cannot really start. You can do a lot of stuff with knowing it but not making it public, but the decisive things, a lot of things, you cannot do. That means the club needs time.
“Over the years my role was a pretty dominant one. It was not intentional, but it happened. There were a lot of moments where I wished that I didn’t have to do that again [leave a club] – it is the third time I have to do something like that and I really don’t want that. But in the end I have to because one thing I am really convinced of [is] if you have to make a decision like that, it is better you do it slightly early than slightly too late.
“Too late would have been absolutely the worst thing to happen [if], I don’t know, next season in September I realised, ‘Oh my God, that’s it – I cannot do it anymore’ and then we are in the middle of a season and everything.
“This club, everything we built in the last years, is a wonderful platform, a wonderful basis for the future and the only thing that could disturb that now is pretty much that you cannot make the right decisions because you are running out of time, and that’s what was very important to me: that I really inform everybody as early as somehow possible.”
