After Klopp's departure

Jurgen Klopp is leaving Liverpool. People will talk about him as one of the great Liverpool managers of all time. His place in history is secure. There have been good Liverpool managers in the past. Roy Evans, Gerard Houllier, Rafael Benitez and Brendan Rodgers all managed to mount serious challenges to the league title under their watch. But shortly after, they faded away and their reigns ended with the team going downhill. (Roy Evans was basically fired: he was supposed to be co-manager with Houllier but what was really going on is that his spice boys were being dismantled, and he had to leave in order for Houllier to finish the job.)

I wonder sometimes at what happens when a great manager leaves a club he's successful at. I'm trying to count the number of times it's happened in English football. It was a big thing when Kenny Dalglish left Blackburn, although that was the last time he was ever thought of as a great manager. There was Arsene Wenger, who left as a legend, although his reputation was going downhill because for quite a few years, they weren't able to spend as much as they could have. The failure to win the league in 2016 was a watershed event (and even if they won it that year, they probably wouldn't win again for a long time because that was the start of Man City getting Pep Guardiola and beginning their imperial phase of having a stranglehold on the premier league.

Alex Ferguson actually quit just before the treble winning season, and he also announced that he quit at the beginning of the 2001 season. 2001 was the beginning of his fallow 2001-2006 period, when he was still relatively successful, but only won 1 league title, and during this period, Arsenal, then Chelsea were the top teams in England. But he clawed back the mantle of the greatest team in England with that great champion's league win over Chelsea in 2008. And it was remarkable because that year, Arsenal and Chelsea also had great teams. But Man U and Liverpool were facing the same fate: Liverpool was under the ownership of Hicks and Gillette, who would prove to be lousy owners of the club. And Man U were doing well in spite of the Glazers, who were basically there to strip the club of its assets and capitalise on their popularity.

There was Jose Mourinho, one of the great managers during the first 10 years – maybe even the first 15 years at the top job. He won the UEFA cup and Champions League with Porto, then built Chelsea into a great team whose success would last 15 years. He only lasted 3-4 years during his first stint, but that team would bear his DNA: they were a team that ran on financial steroids, but still saw themselves as underdogs. They had great spirit, but could be emotinally toxic.

Jose Mourinho could only last 3-4 years at a club before he became toxic enough to lose the dressing room. The exception was when he left Chelsea. Apparently his relationship with Abramovich had broken down They had interim managers: Avram Grant did well enough, in spite of his lack of credentials. Guus Hiddink had a great reputation but was never going to be one of the premiership's greatest managers. Ancelotti was a great manager, but he was more of a cup manager, although he did win the league with Chelsea. And Roberto di Matteo happened to be in the right place at the right time to inspire them to win the champion's league.

Chelsea managed to continue their success after Mourinho left because they had a good system in place. The dressing room was good, because the core of their team could always be counted on to provide role models for the team. Mourinho had to go the season after his 2017 league title, because the team was going downhill at an alarming speed, and because he had lost the dressing room. But one wonders if he could have reconstructed another Chelsea team to challenge Man U during Alex Ferguson's last great team, which had Ronaldo and Van Der Sar in it. Because he had gone to Inter Milan and achieved miracles with them again: he took a team that was already winning Serie A every year, to an even greater glory.

That said, the one thing that Mourinho never managed to do was to take a team that he himself had built, and tear it apart and build it back up. Ferguson was very good at this: he built at least 3 different great teams. People wondered if Klopp could do this, because he left Borussia Dortmund when it was going downhill. But he managed to prove that he could rebuild. This team, without Jordan Henderson, Wijnaldum, Mane, Firmano and Fabinho in it, have shown that they can challenge for the league title.

Pep Guardiola does it so seamlessly that you don't notice that there's any discontinuity at all. But of his great 2018 team, Kompany, Sterling, Gundogan, Laporte, Aguero, Fernandinho, Gabriel Jesus and Zinchenko are gone. Cancelo, Mahrez and Benjamin Mendy have come and gone. And I can't think of anybody that they've missed.

Pep Guardiola won league titles every year when he was in charge of Bayern Munich. He was a great manager, but he had only been a great manager when he was working within a great system. He could have primed Barcelona for great success. They had a good youth system. But he left the job after just a few years – the Barcelona - Real Madrid rivalry was too much for him, and as Xavi said, being a Barcelona manager really takes a lot out of you.

Some pundit mentioned that one big factor in this is: did these guys leave a great team behind? Jose Mourinho's Inter Milan were a great team, but also one that was old, and needed to be refreshed. Soon after he left, the chairman Moratti sold the club and the old Inter Milan was gone. Juventus then started their stranglehold on the Serie A.

Alex Ferguson, in spite of his legendary accomplishments, did not leave a great Man U team behind. None of the replacements for his class of 2008 were really up to the mark. He was restricted from buying great players under the Glazers. He was forced to play Wayne Rooney, Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes long after they should have retired or stepped down to a mid table team. The last great player he signed was Robin Van Persie, but that was a stop gap to buy himself a league title so that he could go out on a high. He got the last great season that Robin Van Persie had in him.

When he left, not only was he not adequately replaced, but the previous CEO also replaced him. Not only were Man U not able to spend as much as they previously were able to, but they didn't spend it wisely. You can't say that they were stingy when they spent so much on Angel Di Maria, Paul Pogba, Fred, Anthony Martial, Casemiro and Antony. But they didn't buy well. They didn't have a great way of playing football. There were a few good runs, but they always reverted to being mid table.

And they also had managers who were not great. Alex Ferguson left Man United when a great tactical revolution was under way. The game, from Guardiola onwards, was a combination of high possession, pressing and intense tactical discipline. Man United did not master this new game, unlike Klopp's Liverpool, Tuchel's Chelsea or Arteta's Arsenal. They brought in Ralf Rangnick, the inventor of pressing, to try to change things, although he had never proven himself to be a top manager at a top club. What Rangnick did do was to come up with a list of players that could be purchased, and it turned out to be a pretty good list. Erik Ten Hag was more interested in buying back his old players, and unfortunately he has a very mediocre squad now.

Man United could have had a great decade. This was the era of financial fair play, and when they were still the most popular club in the world, they could have outspent anyone. But they didn't deliver on the football front.

Guardiola left behind clubs in pretty good shape. Barcelona managed a few more years of success. We have no idea whether the Barcelona job killed Tito Vilanova, but it couldn't have helped. Tata Martino was not regarded as a great manager, but they won another treble under Luis Enrique. Subsequently, Barcelona made a few very bad transfer decisions, and they managed to lose that famous Champion's league semifinal to Liverpool, and that is why they have not won the Champion's league since 2015, during an era when it seemed that they, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich would have a complete stranglehold on that competition.

Likewise, his Bayern Munich team continued to be great for a few more years, and won several league titles after Guardiola left. They even won the Champion's League under Hansi Flick. That was the peak of the reputation of German coaches, when it seemed that with Klopp, Nagelsmann, Flick and Tuchel, German coaches were the future of football.

Wenger didn't leave behind a great Arsenal team. He was hobbled by what he could buy during his last few years, when he finally stopped being able to qualify for the champion's league. He had been one of the greatest managers during the first 10 years of his reign, but he stopped being able to take his teams forward, and the emergence of Pep Guardiola meant that he couldn't even pretend that he could do tactically sophisticated but beautiful losers.

Around the time when Arsene left, there were 3 players on very high wages: Mesut Ozil, PE Aubamayeung and Alexendre Lacazette. The players during Unai Emery did not form a great team. Kia Joorabchian had too much influence on the transfers. But since then Arteta came in, and he's greatly improved the team, together with Edu, who managed to get a lot of good players into the club. He was so willing to get some unwanted players off his books (including Ozil and Aubamayeung) that he went to extreme measures to force them out of the club.

We no longer remember Kenny Dalglish as a great footballer and manager, even though he could claim to be both. Kenny's time as a player unfortunately coincided with a strange period in English football history, the 80s. The first half of the decade, they were unbeatable, and by 1984, they had won 7 out of 8 European cups, the greatest domination of the competition by English teams we had yet to witness. However, the stadiums were rotting and the football was dull. English football had a well deserved reputation for hooliganism. Kicking England out of the Europe did not help – even if it were heartwarming that Bucharest, Porto, Eindhoven and Red Star Belgrade could win the European cup during this era, this was the era where the underdog could triumph by being ultra defensive and waiting for penalties.

Kenny Dalglish's time at Blackburn and Liverpool took place amongst this backdrop. But he was also part of a Liverpool team that had dominated English football as much as Man U had done in the 20+ years between 1991 and 2013. Kenny Dalglish was remembered for a long time as the guy who won Liverpool's last league title for 30 years, even though, in hindsight, this was a lot like Alex Ferguson's last league title – not a great team, and a one on the downward slope. He would be remembered as the manager who oversaw the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster, and his effort to provide comfort to the victims' families would see him fondly remembered. But the emotional turmoil was such that he could not carry on. After his last season, he finished second in the football league.

Graeme Souness was the person who dismantled the Liverpool legacy. People no longer speak of his time as a manager. Under him, he allowed Alex Ferguson to steal the mantle of England's greatest club. But his reign at Liverpool was so bad that Leeds, Blackburn, Norwich, Aston Villa and Sheffield Wednesday all at one time or another managed to finish above him. His successors managed to make Liverpool a competitive club again, and maybe it was hard on the Spice Boys to have to be compared unfavourably to the great Liverpool sides of the 80s. But this was a crucial period: Alex Ferguson, then Arsene Wenger had raised the bar of what a great club could do so high that Liverpool would take a really long time to catch up to that.

Perhaps one of the failings of Souness and Evans was that they never came to terms with what was expected of a great footballing club. Serie A in the latter half of the 80s was revelatory. They had some of the richest clubs in the world, and also Arrigo Sacchi had revolutionised how football was being played. It took a few years, but in the 90s, the Italian teams were dominant in the European Cup / Champion's league. AC Milan won 3 titles and Juventus won one. The “English style of football” no longer won competitions. England's premier league was probably destined in the long term to become the greatest in the world, but Man United's 1999 treble was the first indication that this would happen. Football in the 1990s in England was entertaining to watch, but the best players went to La Liga and Serie A. There wasn't enough attention paid to fitness and tactics. Alex Ferguson's Man United could dominate the league because their competitors were Newcastle, Blackburn, Chelsea and Liverpool. The spice boys probably had good players, but they were not consistent enough to win the league. They had a very good opportunity in the 96-97 season, and the “Fergie's babes” team was still developing under the tutelage of Eric Cantona. But they blew their chance to do it. Newcastle had a few foreign flair players, but Kevin Keegan was probably not the greatest tactitian in the world.

That said, the football was open, played at a fast pace, and very entertaining. The players still had the freedom to be party animals, and many of them could enjoy their celebrity status. They bought flashy cars, and bought into the chav / laddish culture that was prevalent during the “cool Brittania” era.

Kenny Dalglish was probably a very good manager for his time, but for whatever reason, his quest to succeed Kevin Keegan didn't work. He finished Newcastle in 2^nd place, and unlike the previous season which was also a 2^nd place, that was regarded as a success. But he started dismantling the Newcastle team, and after one lousy season, he had to be dismissed. His lack of success at Newcastle, and later as director of football at Celtic, would probably be held against him as being a great manager. Later on, he would be manager at Liverpool again, if only to ensure that there would no longer be any more clamouring for him to be the manager. While he did sign Luis Suarez and win 2 domestic cups, he also signed Andy Carroll for way too much money, and he did not improve on Liverpool being a mid table side. The fact that Brendan Rodgers was able to immediately improve Liverpool would also be held against Dalglish.

There would also be other sides who had fairly good managers. Sam Allardyce is a pretty good midtable manager, other than his time at Newcastle. Whatever happened to Bolton, Blackburn and Everton after he left those clubs would be a testimony to the work that he did.

Another such manager in this tier would be David Moyes. He did well at Preston, getting them to their first whiff of the premier league in many years, but ultimately being defeated in the play-offs. Everton were regularly the “best of the rest” in the premier league. They didn't do so badly after he left, but then came the Moshiri era, and the less said about that, the better.

So it was quite unexpected that the defining rivalry of our time in English football would be Man City and Liverpool, when for years it was Man U, Chelsea and Arsenal. It's very hard to gaze at the crystal ball and see what the future holds. The future still looks bright for Arsenal, even though nobody really knows when they'd next win a football league title. Jurgen Klopp would leave Liverpool, and nobody really knows where they'd go from here, although the way things have turned out from the Brendan Rodgers era onwards, one would think that they'd still be qualifying for the champion's league regularly at least. Man City's future is equally uncertain. Pep Guardiola would leave after 2025, and who would take over from him? The premier league has quite a good roster of coaching talent. Unai Emery, Thomas Frank, and Eddie Howe. There are question marks over Graham Potter and Pochettino although Chelsea football club is a poisoned chalice. There is a chance that Ange Postecoglu and Roberto De Zerbi could be great managers. 

Sean Dyche, David Moyes and Marco Silva look like steady pairs of hands. It's hard to predict what would happen to Liverpool. I did forsee that Guardiola and Klopp would do a good job, although I didn't predict that they would turn into all time greats.

One reason why it's hard to predict the future: it's hard to predict the next great manager. I remember that I didn't see it coming when Arsene Wenger won his first premier league title. Pep Guardiola wasn't the favourite to win the 2009 champion's league because people expected Alex Ferguson to win. I didn't see Unai Emery and Eddie Howe doing as well at Aston Villa and Newcastle as they did. Conversely, when Felix Magath came to Fulham or Egil Osen went to Wimbledon, I was surprised at how badly they did. Or Fabio Capello at England.