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Did Arsenal Miss a Trick with Jürgen Klopp?

Did Arsenal Miss a Trick with Jürgen Klopp?

A year ago, in America, the Chicago Cubs sacked their manager, a man named Rick Renteria, who had been doing a sterling job under difficult circumstances, because the opportunity to go out and get ‘rockstar’ manager Joe Maddon had presented itself to them. A year later, Maddon has led the Cubs to the postseason for the first time in eight years, and is a frontrunner for the Manager of the Year award.

Throughout the last decade, Arsene Wenger has struggled to repeat the level of success that he enjoyed in his first half dozen years at the club, although he did set himself a rather lofty bar, with doubles, championships, and the Invincibles not exactly easy feats to follow. There has been a small (but noisy) contingent of Arsenal fans, mostly to be found on social media, who seem to think that, despite the fact that we are just getting back on our feet properly, and despite the struggles that Manchester United faced after the departure of Sir Alex Ferguson, this would have been a good time to show Mr Wenger the exit door, and appoint Jürgen Klopp as the ‘perfect replacement’.

Klopp is a ‘rockstar manager’. He won the Bundesliga with Borussia Dortmund in an era of mostly Bayern Munich dominance with less money and fewer household names. Before that, he had taken Mainz 05 to the Bundesliga and then Europe (through the Bundlesliga’s fair play nomination, it must be said) for the first time ever. I don’t care about his struggles last season, there were plenty of justifications for that, the man is a truly excellent manager. As his press conference showed, he’s also incredibly charismatic, and harbours a genuine love for the game of football.

So, I love Jürgen Klopp just as much as the next guy/girl, perhaps even more so, but I do find it quite astonishing that a man who has never managed in the Premier League before, and is arriving at a club with significant issues to be addressed (just like 99% of clubs in the world) has been the subject of such a media storm. Sure, we might look back on this season in 10, 20, 30 years and call it a defining moment in the history of Liverpool Football Club, I’d say there’s more chance of that than not, but equally, it might just go down as another high profile import into the Premier League that didn’t quite work out. I wrote an article this week about why Arsenal might win the league this season; the capacity of English football fans in general to envisage the best possible future will never cease to amaze me.

Besides, say Klopp is able to turn things around at Liverpool, would he, right now, have been a better fit at the Emirates than Arsene? Leaving aside the fact that this would cause significant upheaval at the club just two months into the season, I still think that the answer has to be no.

Things were going wrong at Liverpool, it almost seemed as though there was no method to the madness there sometimes, and I think that many felt that it was inevitable that Brendan Rodgers wasn’t going to make it through this season. There are different issues at Arsenal currently. Arsene has the players that he wants in that team (he proved as much by refusing to add anyone other than Petr Cech this summer), and we all know his philosophy and tactics at this stage of the game. The key problems with Arsenal recently have been to do with mentality and consistency. That’s not necessarily Arsene’s fault, and bar the first few weeks where a new manager gives most players an inevitable lift, I’m not sure it’s something that Klopp would be any better at sorting out.

Players naturally gravitate towards Klopp by all accounts, and he’s a popular man manager, but Arsene is no less so, especially with this current squad. Cech, Özil and Alexis all cited conversations with Wenger as key reasons for joining the club, not just because of the respect that they have for him, but because of the vision that he sold them. Communication is also key in a dressing room, and I struggle to think of a player who has labelled that a key issue when dealing with Wenger. Klopp should have no real problems in that respect on Merseyside, but it will inevitably take him some time to get fully used to the culture and new players, further elongating the process.

I think that last point might be the one that most seals the deal for me. Liverpool are not ready to challenge for the title this year. Jürgen Klopp, as fantastic as he is, is not (I would imagine at least) going to turn them into title contenders overnight, and they seem at Anfield to be more focused on the next few years, and developing the club into a powerhouse of English football again.
Arsenal, on the other hand, might well be up for a title fight. Again, I wrote about this earlier this week, and so won’t revisit it here, but at this precise moment in time – and it does come primarily down to the timing of the whole situation – it would make no sense to me to have chucked everything that Arsene has developed for us in the past few years out of the window in the hope that Klopp could lead us to glory for years to come.

Piers Morgan lamented on Twitter a few days ago that we should have got Klopp, but instead that ‘Liverpool will get all the fun, excitement and rewards’. Fun and excitement are one thing, and undoubtedly Klopp brings that, but I would pass on both of those for the latter, and I’m not convinced that the German gives us a much better chance of that, in the short term at least.

In my opinion, and it is just my opinion, Brendan Rodgers is Rick Renteria here. He did little wrong, besides struggling with the hand that he was dealt, and failing to endear himself to the masses. Though Arsene has his critics – and I can be one at times, even if it doesn’t seem like it – the success that he brought to our club, and the team that he has developed now, places him in an entirely different ballpark.

This entire article (as loath as I am to admit it) is all just a moot point anyway. Though some may dream of a world in which managers are moved around with even more regularity, and the most successful manager in the history of a club can be cast aside in a heartbeat for the promise of something new and exciting, it simply is not the case. Jürgen Klopp will be singing along to ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ at his third club in succession for years to come. Arsene is going to see out his contract at Arsenal, and maybe sign on for another few years after that, and I, for one, don’t have too many issues with that.