Jurgen Klopp has been talking for less than two minutes when he says, with cheery clarity, that he misses “nothing” about his former life as a coach.
Klopp left Liverpool in the summer of 2024, ending a nine-year reign in which he stamped his personality not just on Anfield but on English football. He won the club’s first top-flight title in three decades and lifted the Champions League, introducing a nation to his trademark “heavy metal football” in the process.
So when last season began, with Klopp out of work and his replacement Arne Slot in situ at Liverpool, was he waiting by the television for the weekend’s games to begin?
“Not. At. All,” he says, speaking in staccato to underline his point. “I was super happy with the way Liverpool performed. I watched some games. But it is not like, ‘Oh, it’s Saturday!’
“I didn’t know when games started. I was just out. I played sports. We enjoyed life, spent time with the grandkids, completely normal stuff, knowing I will work again. But knowing as well, that I don’t want to work as a coach anymore.”
Not ever again?
“That’s what I think,” he nods. “But you don’t know. I’m 58. If I started again at 65, everybody will say, ‘You said you’ll never do it again!’ Er, sorry, I thought 100 per cent (when I said it)! That is what I think now. I don’t miss anything.”
Jurgen Klopp says goodbye to Anfield in 2024 (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
Klopp is back in football but his new job is very different to the pressures of front-line coaching at one of the world’s biggest clubs. In January, he began work as global head of soccer at Red Bull, working across playing philosophy, coaching development and transfer strategy.
The energy drink conglomerate is heavily involved with RB Leipzig in Germany’s Bundesliga, Red Bull Salzburg in the Austrian Bundesliga, Paris FC in Ligue 1 in France, New York Red Bulls in MLS, Red Bull Bragantino in Brazil’s Serie A and RB Omiya Ardija in Japan’s J2 League. The company also has a more limited role at the Premier League’s Leeds United, as a minority shareholder and front-of-shirt sponsor.
Klopp is speaking to The Athletic, in his most extensive English-language interview since starting his new job, at the New York Red Bulls’ training facility in New Jersey, before attending the team’s derby match against New York City FC. He is wearing a NY Red Bulls baseball cap and sipping from a can of Red Bull Zero, in between puffing away on a vape.
Sixteen months out of the Premier League goldfish bowl appears to have replenished him. He looks younger and leaner. The big grin is still there, particularly when poking fun at Manchester United’s troubles, and he still exhibits his full repertoire of facial expressions — those unmistakable Kloppisms which give away exactly what he thinks about a subject.
“You look at my career, there are much more successful careers than mine,” he says. “But I had it all.”
He lists the successes and the disappointments. “I lost more Champions League finals than most people play. I know how to lose and how life goes on. I don’t need to keep my experience for myself. I never did, but I just never had time to talk to people about it because it was the next game coming up. Now if somebody asks me something, I’m the most open book I know.”
A 64-team World Cup, Jurgen? You can imagine the sigh. “I heard about it… I didn’t even want to start thinking. Honestly, I just saw it and I thought, oh no, I don’t get into that.”
There’s plenty he is prepared to get into, though, starting with the criticism he received when joining Red Bull. The group is contentious in Germany as RB Leipzig legally, but controversially, conform to the Bundesliga’s 50+1 rule, which says 50 per cent plus one share of the voting rights in any club must be held by its members.
Leipzig have regularly been targeted by protests from rival fans, many of whom see the Red Bull model as a marketing tool of a fizzy drink company and a challenge to the soul of German football. For some it felt like a stark change for Klopp who, for much of his managerial career at Mainz, Borussia Dortmund and Liverpool, was seen as one of football’s romantics and a guardian of the sport’s traditions.
Even amongst his old fans, there was a backlash. After Klopp’s switch to Red Bull had been confirmed, Leipzig played against his former club Mainz, whose supporters unfurled a banner reading: “Did you forget everything we made you become?”
Mainz fans make their feelings known to Jurgen Klopp (Torsten Silz/picture alliance via Getty Images)
How did he feel about the reaction? “I knew it (would come),” he begins. “I’m German. I know what people in Germany think about the involvement of Red Bull in football. They love Red Bull. In all departments. But in football? No. So whatever, they want to do it that way.
“Funnily enough, it was only in Germany where the reaction was like that. But that’s fine — no problem. Everybody can think what they want. You just have to accept that I do what I want as long as I don’t hurt anybody.
“By the way, I don’t expect people to remember what I did for a specific club. The people in Mainz in the stadium now… they were little kids when I was there (1990-2001 as a player, then seven years as a coach), so their parents had to tell them who I was. So that’s how it is, it is absolutely fine.
“I don’t expect everybody to like what I do. I have to do it for the right reasons — for my right reasons. By the way, in Liverpool, people are overly happy that I do what I do because I am not coaching another team.”
Is there a job which would have earned a better reaction? “If I went to a foreign country, to Italy or Spain, people would have said, ‘Oh my God, that’s great.’ If I go to Bayern (Munich) or whatever, then especially Dortmund fans would have said, ‘I don’t like it!’ I finished at Liverpool at 57. I was 100 per cent certain and sure that I will not finish working. I had a break for seven months or so. I enjoyed it — wow!”
Klopp says he told his girlfriend Ulla, now his wife, in 2001 that he would do “25 years at full throttle without looking left and right” as a football coach. And if it didn’t work out? “Ulla said I can drive a taxi.”
Klopp with his wife Ulla at Anfield in May (Carl Recine/Getty Images)
The risk, as he puts it, was worth taking. “But the thought was not that I would do this until the end of my life,” adds Klopp. “I missed nothing in my life because I never thought about it. So during almost 25 years, I twice went to a wedding — one of them was mine and the other one was two months ago. In 25 years, I have been four times at the cinema — all in the last eight weeks. It’s now nice to be able to do it.
“I was in so many different countries as a coach and I saw nothing of them; just the hotel, the stadium or the training ground. Nothing else. I did not miss it, but I would now.”
Klopp cherished his experiences and the people who made them, but he is not one for looking back. Since leaving Liverpool he has only returned to Anfield once for a match, the final game of last season when Slot and his players were presented with the Premier League trophy.
He values his new-found freedom and flexibility. “I have the choice,” he says. “I can go on holiday. And I decide when. OK, Ulla decides when.” He laughs. “But it is not the Premier League or the Bundesliga deciding.”
He says he sometimes leaves training sessions he observes 20 minutes early “because I don’t have to see the last bit. I did it my whole life. It’s crazy, but I don’t miss it. I’m still in football, I’m still at work in an environment I know about. But I learn every day new things. I didn’t do that for a while to the extent I do it now.”
It would do Klopp’s commitment a disservice to say he was on autopilot as a coach, but that desire to be challenged, to uncover new things, is clearly a motivation. He says he is nine months into his new role but feels like he has gained five years of experience. He jokes about the realities of everyday corporate existence, going through “five million different people” to get things done.
“I come from a world where I say I need that and it happens. Now I may hear, ‘I heard you say that’ and it doesn’t mean anything.”
He seems charmed, rather than exasperated, by such occurrences. He is not yet cross-pollinating with Red Bull’s other sporting ventures, including a Formula One team and ventures in ice hockey and cycling. “I watched one F1 race and they kicked out Max Verstappen (the Red Bull racer) after 30 seconds,” he laughs, joking he has not yet dared ask to go to another one.
At Red Bull, he is developing relationships with the group’s sporting directors and coaches. He says the playing style must be defined by “energy”.
He was involved in an important transfer window for RB Leipzig, who suffered a poor season last year and missed out on European qualification. Twenty-six transfers went in and out and they now have the youngest squad in the Bundesliga. He calls players to sprinkle his stardust and help get deals over the line. He says he reviews videos or profiles of players if he is asked. “When they’re 100 per cent sure, they don’t have to show me. But I was involved in a lot at Paris FC and Leipzig.”
He says the Red Bull fit makes sense. For much of his career, he was a club builder as well as a coach. His own style of play mirrored much of Red Bull’s identity and Liverpool signed players from Red Bull teams, including Ibrahima Konate, Sadio Mane and Dominik Szoboszlai. He had coached at clubs, like the Red Bull teams, who knew their place within the football ecosystem.
“We are not the final destination,” he says. “We are not Liverpool… or in former times Man United!” Another loud laugh. “You can write that if you want.”
He became accustomed to developing talent, selling it on and reconstructing. Even his best Liverpool team was arguably made possible by Barcelona buying Philippe Coutinho for £142million ($191m at current exchange rates), providing the funds to sign defender Virgil van Dijk and goalkeeper Alisson.
Klopp at New York Red Bull (Adam Crafton/The Athletic)
Klopp was intimately involved in planning for new training centres at his three previous clubs. Last week he was given a tour of the New York team’s new training facility, which is under construction. “It will be state of the art and I have never seen something like it. Crazy, really cool. I walked in and changed two things immediately.”
He grins. “But the last thing I want to be is the old man in the room…” He puts on the voice of a geriatric. “The one who says, ‘In the past, everything was good. We did it like that!’ Hopefully I finish before I reach that point. I want to be the counterpart. I want to be, if necessary, the emergency call of the coaches or sporting directors, the guy they call when they don’t know who to talk to. You need to create a relationship.”
There have been coaching changes at Red Bull, most notably when Marco Rose, Klopp’s former player at Mainz, was removed at Leipzig. “It’s not great. It will never be my hobby. But it’s things you have to do,” says Klopp. “What I want is to hire coaches for the right reasons. And if you finish working together, then it is also for the right reasons and not for the media asking for it.
“I want to instil this (stability); more trust, going through the hard times. If you are convinced, then you are convinced. The world is like that: ‘Oh my God, you are great!’ Then it is, ‘Oh no! You’re s***.’ There’s no grey area anymore. And very often life is grey.”
As Klopp goes all big picture, more leadership guru than tactics guru, his world is becoming broader. By his final year in the Premier League, the demands on a coach’s time had become gruelling. He admits he does not miss the number of media assignments, with often more than a dozen interviews in any given week to comply with domestic and international broadcasters. “It was never a problem,” he insists, underlining the privileges that came with the job, but it could be robotic. His world, he says, felt small because it was small.
“Think about your absolute movie star. For me, Daniel Craig, James Bond. And you think, ‘Oh my God, he’s James Bond!’ I would think: Where is he right now? What is he doing?
“But in the end, he gets up in the morning, he brushes his teeth. He’s on a film set and a film set is not what we see later in the cinema. You’re sitting there and you do the same scene 25 times. You don’t think about these things. But I had this life. I know how almost all football managers live. They live for the job, all-in. You can’t be successful in this business without doing it like that.
“But then I tell Pep (Guardiola) — he improved his (golf) handicap with age! I didn’t have a f***ing minute of time to play golf! So that’s why he’s a genius and I am not.”
His voice goes up an octave. “When do you play golf? I cannot believe that.”
What about the changes we are seeing on the field? Manchester City, for example, had 33 per cent of the ball this month at Arsenal, while teams are putting greater emphasis on set pieces. Klopp has praise for Andoni Iraola of Bournemouth and Crystal Palace’s Oliver Glasner, who on Saturday inflicted a first defeat of the season on Klopp’s old Liverpool team.
Klopp is still full of admiration for his old rival Pep Guardiola (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
“Wow, they are doing miracles,” he says. “A lot of things change. I don’t have an opinion about that, really. The football I watch is mainly Red Bull teams. Do I sit there and say, ‘What is football? How is it developing right now?’ That’s not really what I’m doing.
“City is on the way back, they change a little bit. Managers need that as well… a new way of looking at things to keep it fresh. Liverpool is playing a specific (style), so really, really good. Very offensive orientated. Do they take the risk a little bit of being exposed? Different ways to go, let me say it like that.
“I’m not the pope of football who tells people what to do. At least not outside the Red Bull world.”
Klopp is less reserved on player welfare. He previously described FIFA’s 32-team Club World Cup as “the worst idea ever”. Did he see anything during the tournament to change his view?
“No,” he shrugs. “Did I read this morning that Chelsea (the winners of the tournament) have an injury crisis? Maybe they would have had injuries (anyway).
“My expertise is I know how much you can expect from football players. I know about intensity in training. We always ask for more. We go, go, go. I don’t doubt it was a great tournament. I didn’t watch it. Chelsea were super happy to win it. Great, a lot of money. But at one point we have to take care of the few people this game would not exist without: the players.
“There’s no solution besides stopping organising new tournaments in the summer break. There’s no break anymore for the best players in the world. You wouldn’t do this in any other part of life. Imagine you put the best artist out every night until they fall down and then we say sorry, he lost focus…”
And now FIFA is discussing a 64-team World Cup in 2030?
“Whatever I say, I may as well tell it to my microwave,” says Klopp. “It’s exactly the same effect. People will say, ‘Oh, but you earn a lot of money!’ I know that. Or club officials will say, ‘Yeah, it’s players and coaches, they always want more money, so we need to get money.’ Then why not sit all together at the table and you tell the players you could have eight weeks holiday per year? Can we talk (about how we get there)? Give it a try! Would they say yes, take the million over there?”
Does he really think coaches and players would accept less pay for better conditions? “I don’t know, but if you would have talked to me, then definitely.”
Are players scared to talk about it publicly? “It was horrendous,” he laughs. “The players who spoke out got injured the next day! Rodri, for example. He spoke out and the next day he got injured!
“But if you don’t talk about it, they will definitely not stop it. They (FIFA) enjoy so much being involved and having an idea, that they just forget the players. Nobody thinks about them.
“The PFA (Professional Footballers’ Association, English footballers’ union) is pretty strong in it. I’m not the only one. I am probably the most famous voice sometimes — or I used to be!
“So you can’t not talk about it just because it’s uncomfortable and people don’t want to hear it. And if you don’t want to hear it, don’t listen.”
Thankfully for Klopp, his audience will always extend far beyond his microwave.
(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
