by As Jurgen Klopp’s time as Liverpool manager draws to a close, there are similarities between how his time at Borussia Dortmund unfolded.
The German announced his decision to leave Anfield at the end of the season back in January, declaring he was ‘running out of energy’.
At a press conference explaining his decision to leave, he said: “My management skills are based on energy and emotion and that takes all of you and needs all of you. I am who I am and where I am because of how I am, with all the good and bad things, and if I can’t do it anymore, stop it.
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“You have to be the best version of yourself, especially for a club like Liverpool. I can’t do it on three wheels, it’s not allowed, and I never wanted to be a passenger.”
It was a similar story for Klopp when he announced his decision to step down as Dortmund manager back in April 2015.
“I’ve always said that the day I feel I’m no longer the perfect coach for this great club, I’ll say it,” he said. “That’s something I thought about at every step here in Dortmund and I decided in the last few weeks, days, that I couldn’t be completely sure about that anymore.”
No longer feeling 100% capable of doing the job, Klopp is walking again.
He intends to take a sabbatical from football when he leaves Liverpool this summer, as he had planned when he left Dortmund nine years ago. Having lured the German to Anfield after just five months out, only time will tell if the now 56-year-old can be tempted back into management ahead of time.
Of course, there are also differences between Dortmund and Liverpool’s success in recent seasons.
The Reds were on the perfect course for promotion as they chased a possible four points. But after a shocking FA Cup quarter-final exit to Manchester United, they surrendered top spot in the league courtesy of a 2-2 draw at Old Trafford and losses to Atalanta and Crystal Palace to leave their Europa League and Premier League hopes hanging by its thread.
Although Liverpool beat Chelsea to win the League Cup in February, Klopp’s final season risks ending with a whimper as his team relegate.
In contrast, Dortmund endured a terrible final campaign under the German before announcing his decision to step down as manager.
General manager Michael Zorc declared the club were in ‘real crisis’ after losing 2-1 to newly-promoted Koln in October. Meanwhile, when Bayern Munich lost 2-1 they entered the relegation zone a few weeks later.
After February, after a humiliating 1-0 home defeat against 10-man Augsburg, they were surprisingly still sitting at the bottom of the Bundesliga table.
“We kept losing games in the same way again and again,” Peter Krawietz, Klopp’s rusty assistant who followed him from Borussia Dortmund to Liverpool, later recalled in Raphael Honigstein’s biography of the German manager, ‘Bring The Noise’.
“Your head is full of questions. Is it your fault? Does it belong to the teams? What will we do? It was a very s***ty situation. More than anyone could really bear. You wouldn’t wish that kind of spell on your worst enemy. It was incredibly exhausting, incredibly depressing.”
And former Dortmund defender Neven Subotic exposed him the Athletic as Klopp once punched a player in the face as he tried to turn around his side’s troubled fortunes.
“When you as a player feel that you have already achieved something, that you have a bit of experience, suddenly you don’t want to say ‘Yes’ to everything anymore,” said the Serbian. “I think that’s human nature.
“If it was needed, Klopp increased the amount. He shook us up a little, to wake us up. Not saying, ‘You’ve got to play something different, guys, it’s going to be tough’.
“No, he went up to a player and hit him across the face. You think, ‘Oh, maybe he’ll hit it back’.”
Fortunately for Dortmund, Klopp would turn things around as they won 30 points from the last 45 available to finish seventh and qualify for European football against all odds.
As well as reaching the DFB-Pokal final, Klopp also joked that he would have announced his decision to leave much earlier had he known it would trigger a downturn in Dortmund’s form.
“If I had known before the start of the season that I would put together such a winning run, I would have announced my departure back then!” he joked at the end of the season “Seventh place feels great!”
In the context of the season, seventh place was brilliant. But it did not stop the mixed feelings about his last year when Klopp left after a cup final loss at the end of a season when Dortmund failed to reach previous heights.
Much has been said about the time Klopp announced his departure from Liverpool back in January, and the impact it could have had on his side. Although they enjoyed early success despite a horrific injury crisis, they have now stalled at the business end of the season.
His bombastic decision was communicated to the club’s bosses the previous November, and the Reds did very well to keep it a secret for three months. Given the advance planning required for the 2024/25 season, it is understandable why such a decision was made and announced when it was.
But in hindsight, it’s easy to suggest that perhaps the German should have kept the decision under his hat for longer and that time has backfired on Liverpool at the end of the busy season. Only Klopp will know how Dortmund’s improved fortunes following his future in 2015 influenced the timing of his retirement announcement in January, and whether he wanted to replicate that at Anfield.
Admittedly, Dortmund had already started to climb the season before Klopp announced his departure. A seven-game unbeaten run took them to 10th in the Bundesliga table, and the German only revealed his decision to quit in mid-April after back-to-back Bundesliga wins against Bayern Munich and Borussia Monchengladbach .
From there, they won six of their last eight games to qualify for the Europa League and reach the DFB-Pokal final. It was a victory where Dortmund found themselves three months earlier, even if they ultimately fell short in their bid to win the trophy.
But since Dortmund had reached the Champions League final two years earlier and followed up two Bundesliga titles under Klopp with two runners-up finishes, he was still falling from grace.
Meanwhile, Liverpool’s dream of their beloved German manager celebrating a treble in five weeks would be over. But even if they only have the League Cup left to show for their efforts, it is a significant change from the campaign the Reds endured last year.
With no mercy and languishing in fifth place after challenging for an unprecedented quadruple in 2021/22, the wheels appear to have come off for a broken Liverpool – as Dortmund did back in 2014/15 . Also suffering in his final season with Mainz, Klopp has repeatedly appeared to prove that, ‘What goes up, most of them come down.’
Perhaps this season has been a long bye for the German as a result, and an epilogue to his reign in Liverpool after last year’s feat as he got the Reds back on track before sunset. After all, after last year’s failures, most of the supporters would have reached out for qualifications in the Champions League and a trophy.
In informing his players of his decision to leave back in January, the Athletic reported, ‘Klopp joked that his departure was partly to blame because Liverpool had reached such a high level so early that he felt he could pass the baton on to someone else.’
Regardless of how the season ends now, it should not be overlooked that this campaign has exceeded the Reds’ initial expectations. But now approaching his final month in the Anfield dugout, Klopp will still be looking to reverse this brief and secure one of Liverpool’s last victories.
