Jürgen Klopp shakes aside the madness of English football with an embrace of Red Bull | Jurgen Klopp

JUrgen Klopp couldn’t be more excited. Jürgen Klopp’s passion for football is as strong as ever. Jürgen Klopp wants to work with incredible football talent. Jürgen Klopp is joining Red Bull as head of global football. One of these sentences is clearly not like the others.

That’s not to question the sincerity of the official statement jointly issued by Klopp and the world’s stickiest energy drink on Wednesday morning announcing his new role at the corporate giant. On the contrary: this is a job that positively radiates passion, excitement and connection. Klopp tears through the boardroom after giving a successful seminar. Being harassed by frantic data scientists. Start the Microsoft Teams call with his famous fist pumps.

The reality will probably be somewhat more prosaic. Much of the rapid analysis of Klopp’s decision seemed to view this move as an inevitable pirouette towards a return to management: perhaps at one of the Red Bull clubs, perhaps as manager of the German national team, a job that Klopp reportedly will may receive. take if it ever comes up. But if a return to coaching is the overarching goal here, then this feels like a pretty strange way to go about it.

The national team position is taken by Julian Nagelsmann, who seems fortunate enough to at least advance to the 2026 World Cup, if not beyond. For all of Pepijn Lijnders’ problems at RB Salzburg, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which Klopp willingly replaces his former assistant. Maybe the job in Leipzig will be discussed one day. But why limit yourself when you have the choice of the clubs of the world?

Instead, this feels like something you do when you’re still not sure what you want to do. Aside from the grandiose job title, the assignment itself feels reassuringly vague. “I want to see, feel and find out what is useful for football,” he said. “Also developing football a bit.” As a sacred mission statement, “turning doubters into believers,” this is not the case.

Perhaps the most telling part of Klopp’s own justification for taking the job is when he expresses his desire to “learn again”, to enjoy the luxury of football as a purely intellectual pursuit, without the tyranny of league tables or the obligation to explain things. himself in front of the camera several times a week. This could be the prelude to a renewed coaching career, Klopp 4.0 with a bag full of new tricks. Or it could be the start of a long dotage in the unloved underworld of football administration, with crazy ideas being floated twice a year, a move now known as the ‘pivot to Wenger’.

So that’s about the football rationale. But there are of course other dimensions to this decision, as became abundantly clear when the announcement was made. There is anger among Borussia Dortmund fans at the prospect of their legendary coach forging an alliance with their ideological enemy, just a month after he emotionally returned to the Signal Iduna Park dugout in a testimonial for Lukasz Piszczek and Jakub Blaszczykowski.

Among Liverpool fans – reassured by reports that Klopp was planning to take at least a year’s break from the game – there is a strong sense of confusion at the speed at which Dad appears to have moved on. Meanwhile, among fans of Liverpool’s rivals, there is a kind of grim glee: the idea that taking the evil energy drink dollar is some kind of gigantic self-determination, an act of outright hypocrisy, the long-awaited unmasking of one of England’s greatest footballers. fraudulent messiahs.

Not all of these analyzes deserve serious discussion. There are real evils in football and the Red Bull model – even if a bit insipid and boring – barely registers on the scale. Above all, a lot of disappointment – ​​and schadenfreude – is guilty not so much of engaging with Klopp’s reality as with the caricature created around him: the ancient conflation of sporting virtue with reality.

Five minutes of watching German television – where you can watch Klopp flog everything from beer to Peloton bikes to investment plans – will give you a pretty good idea of ​​where he stands on capitalism. The idea that this tracksuit-wearing millionaire, who spent nine years working for American financiers, could be some kind of anti-corporate revolutionary was always based more on fantasy than truth. And to be fair to Klopp, the role of savior or moral compass was never one he sought or demanded for himself. He also said this during his very first press conference as Liverpool manager. “If you want to portray me as Jesus, but the next day you say, ‘No, he can’t walk on water,’ then we have a problem,” he said.

Perhaps the real problem here is English football’s tendency – and this seems to be largely an Anglocentric phenomenon – to place its coaches on ridiculous moral pedestals, even granting them quasi-divine status, under the flimsiest of pretexts. Arsène Wenger and the early Pep Guardiola certainly fall into this category. Marcelo Bielsa, despite his many protestations to the contrary, is still hailed as some kind of gnomic public intellectual by people who have never met one. Even the moderately talented Ange Postecoglou seems to have attracted a significant cult following, lured by his outsider status, his fortune cookie wisdom and his impeccable good guy vibes.

Klopp, for his part, has spent too much time worshiping a real God to entertain any idea of ​​his own divinity. Perhaps he is guilty of somewhat underestimating the devotion he inspires, the extent to which people need him – for whatever reason – to represent something more. But he’s not that guy. No one is; no one ever has been. Klopp is not joining Red Bull to do the gentleman’s job. But perhaps, little by little, he has helped English football get rid of its God-madness.