Jurgen Klopp is convinced that there’s a ‘more challenging’ Premier League job than Liverpool right now. The German has experience of both.
Jurgen Klopp is flying right now and his Liverpool team just keeps winning games. They now have their eyes firmly fixed on winning the Premier League title – a win over Manchester City next week puts them top.
That’s no mean feat. City keep winning games as just a prolific rate, with the two sides having pushed one another to the limit over the last few years. They’re accomplishing things we haven’t seen before – Liverpool and City are unquestionably two of the best Premier League teams ever.
And yet, Klopp is convinced that managing Liverpool right now is not as challenging as it gets. In fact, he prefers it to at least one other job in football – battling relegation.
“Fighting for survival in the league? It’s more challenging because you work with lesser confidence, you have lesser results,” he told a press conference. “The problem with fighting for winning a league is the teams you are fighting with win pretty much all of their games. But it’s positive pressure.
“If you are ‘down south’, you are there because you didn’t win a lot of games. And if you lose another one, it doesn’t help really. You see how experienced the managers are now that are involved in that battle.
“They’ll have the right nerves for it, they all have the right mindset for it. It’ll be really interesting until the last matchday. In the end, and I’ve had both for a long time in my life, I enjoy more to be on the other end of the table.
“But both are very challenging and very interesting.”
Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool
It does make sense. Pushing a team to be the best of the best is the aim of the game in football but the tools in which you have to do that vary greatly.
Klopp actually experienced both ends of the table in just a few years with Borussia Dortmund. He went from the top of the table and winning Bundesliga trophies to genuine fears of relegation in his final season there. The boss turned it around – even qualified for Europe – but it was enough for Klopp to resign from his post.
The effect on your psyche, when surrounded by all of that negativity and doubt, must be crippling. It’s not something any manager would choose over top-of-the-table positivity and so it’s very easy to believe Klopp here.
How would Klopp and Pep Guardiola cope at the bottom clubs right now? It’s a fascinating question, though one we’re unlikely to see the answer to. No momentum, no money for the perfect transfer – a different world in football and one that might be the toughest job around.
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