Jurgen Klopp departing date has already been clarified – FSG leak

The chances of Jürgen Klopp being the next Premier League manager to step down from his managerial role have slimmed down this week, but Liverpool and FSG know the truth.

“You will be sacked tomorrow morning,” Wolves fans shouted at Jürgen Klopp as his side suffered an embarrassing defeat on Saturday afternoon. After 90 minutes of football, Liverpool had lost by three goals to nil, meaning the Reds are in 10th place after 20 Premier League games this season.

Indeed, if Klopp hadn’t been Klopp, Wolves supporters might have been right. Liverpool’s form this season has been very bad and some performances have been even worse, scoring the same number of goals as Everton – who are in 18th place – and winning fewer games than Fulham, who have been promoted from the Championship just seven months ago. . Virtually any heavyweight club manager would be under fire based on the current landscape, and perhaps rightly so depending on the current situation. Football is a demanding sport and the clamor for consistently good results never ends, which may be why many of Klopp’s colleagues rarely last more than two seasons before being sacked.

A whole squad of players can’t just be fired, so more often than not the best solution is to fire the manager, before hiring a new man at the top to install new ideas and hopefully make sweeping changes in search of better players. Results

Klopp is largely away from that hype due to the amount of credit he already has in the bank – he’s carried Premier League and Champions League titles at Anfield in recent years – but his trophy isn’t the only reason he’s at the confident in his work on Merseyside.

Around the time the German was appointed by Fenway Sports Group (FSG) in 2015, the Reds’ owners wanted to take a detailed look at his last season at Borussia Dortmund, which saw BVB finish seventh in the Bundesliga. The FSG wanted to know whether Klopp’s team had been badly trained or just unlucky, and they found out that it was precisely the latter

Ian Graham spearheaded the research, having been appointed Liverpool’s first director of research a few years earlier. A Cambridge physicist, he was the man who would set up the club’s first data science department, where numbers would be used to analyze players, much like the history of Moneyball, Oakland Athletics and Boston Red Sox, FSG baseball. crew.

Convinced Klopp was more than okay despite the Borussia Dortmund spell, Graham hailed his appointment. Throughout his football career, the Reds scientist – known for refusing public interviews – has defied conventional wisdom by debunking popular myths using data.

Prior to his role at Anfield, the Welshman worked as a consultant for The Times, attending a column called Fink Tank. Seeking hard evidence of these historical notions, Graham would regularly turn to a common but unproven legend or cliché.

On one particular occasion he attacked managers and what is the right time to fire them. “My guess is that in the short term – less than 10 games – form problems result in upset fan bases and demands on the manager’s head. Managers duly oblige. Hasty decisions and short-term thinking appear to be behind many sackings managerial”. he wrote in his conclusion.

In his work for the Times, Graham essentially suggested that it was unclear whether the resulting improvement in form was due to a new manager or whether that improvement would occur independently of a management change. For the most part, after surveying the entire football landscape, changing the manager does little other than an initial short-term improvement. Unlike many of his peers across the continent, Klopp has proven his status as a true star, truly capable of getting more from his players than is realistic. The 55-year-old improves the performance of teams and players and he has proven it during his 20-year career.

The Anfield manager hasn’t just lost that innate ability, he’s just navigating his club through turbulent waters. His midfield department needs investment, the FSG are debating a full or partial sale of Liverpool and Graham is withholding his resignation as he will step down alongside sporting director Julian Ward at the end of the campaign.

Perhaps Liverpool and fans across the country should remember the words of Borussia Dortmund CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke. In his book he said: “Maybe it would have been better if we replaced the whole team instead of firing the coach because there are so many good players but not many great coaches. People are always wise after the event.”

At present, Liverpool and FSG have the opportunity to be smart ahead of the event.