Jurgen Klopp has decided to leave his position as Liverpool manager at the end of the season.
The German is in his eighth full campaign of a decorated career with the club, that has seen Liverpool win seven trophies under his management. Klopp led the Reds to Champions League success in 2019, before ending the club’s 30-year wait for a English top-flight title the following season.
Klopp has now announced his shock decision to leave Liverpool at the end of the current campaign, admitting he is ‘running out of energy’ after a long reign at Anfield.
“I will leave the club at the end of the season. I can understand that that’s a shock for a lot of people in this moment, when you hear it for the first time, but obviously I can explain it – or at least try to explain it,” Klopp told the club’s official website.
“I love absolutely everything about this club, I love everything about the city, I love everything about our supporters, I love the team, I love the staff. I love everything. But that I still take this decision shows you that I am convinced it is the one I have to take. It is that I am, how can I say it, running out of energy.
“I have no problem now, obviously, I knew it already for longer that I will have to announce it at one point, but I am absolutely fine now. I know that I cannot do the job again and again and again and again. After the years we had together and after all the time we spent together and after all the things we went through together, the respect grew for you, the love grew for you and the least I owe you is the truth – and that is the truth. That’s it, pretty much.”
Liverpool are five points clear at the top of the Premier League table and remain in contention for FA Cup, League Cup – where the Reds face Chelsea in the final next month – and the Europa League.
Klopp said he hopes his announcement will not impact the team over the remainder of the season, but admits it is ‘impossible’ to keep ‘things like this secret’.
“In an ideal world I wouldn’t have said anything to anybody until the end of the season, win everything and then say goodbye. That’s not possible. In the world we are living in, it’s not possible to keep things like this secret; it’s maybe a surprise that we could keep it [a secret] until now.
“There are so many things which are influenced by it, especially personal situations. 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.”
