Flanked by Formula One cars bearing the appropriate livery, Jürgen Klopp cracked open a can of Red Bull and started talking. Product placement has always come naturally to the energy drink brand and here, on home turf, little fanfare was spared in putting a shiny new asset front and centre. This moment had been well over two years in the making but now their head of global soccer could broadcast his mission statement to the world.

These were jarring surroundings in which to see Klopp, champion of the raw and the real, begin his new career. Hangar-7, an events space overlooking the runway at Salzburg airport, lets the public inspect a fleet from a selection of Red Bull’s more daredevil sporting endeavours. The lines are smooth, the Alpine light clear, the corporate self-assuredness pervasive. It could not have felt further from the rough and tumble of the touchline at Liverpool or, even less, Dortmund.

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So what was Klopp doing here? Sitting alongside his new boss, Oliver Mintzlaff, he smiled along to the story of how Red Bull had been trying to seduce him since before he signed his final Liverpool contract in 2022. They got their way last year, capitalising on his wish to escape the coaching fray, and he knew there would be charges to answer. A fortnight ago Klopp, who once expressed pride that Dortmund was “a club, not a company”, began a five-year commitment to sit atop a multiclub machine that has caused ructions in his homeland and beyond. Whatever your position on holding football figures to unwavering moral standards, it has not sat well everywhere.

The reaction to his appointment was always going to be an elephant in the room. Klopp had spent Sunday watching Xavi Simons and Benjamin Sesko put on a show for RB Leipzig, long-time subject of vitriol from Dortmund fan groups, against Werder Bremen. The subject was offered up by Red Bull’s own compere, who referenced the critics and gave Klopp the opportunity to show his working.

“I saw 42,000 supporters from Leipzig,” he says. “I understand and know what everyone is saying about it when they see me there. But I thought: ‘Do they not deserve good football, all the people who are interested in Leipzig and want to see them win?’ For me it’s a completely natural thing. I really felt ‘They deserve it’ and I think it’s worth giving. Not only there: it’s Salzburg, fans in New York, in Japan, in Brazil. They deserve support and improvement. I want to give it.

“A doctor doesn’t differentiate when a patient is coming from a different city. A lawyer doesn’t, either. If you like, I’m Dr Football. I love helping wherever I can, where I can give my all.”

The logic seemed imperfect: of course people in Leipzig are no less deserving than anyone else, and the bone of contention has been around the vehicle delivering football to them. Klopp argued that similarly hard edges dominate the football world far beyond Red Bull’s clubs, suggesting life outside Germany’s cherished 50+1 ownership bubble had compelled him to zoom out.

“After nine years in England you cannot be the same person,” he says. “I had investors in [Liverpool] and I can’t change that. Nobody thought about that. They have the same discussions there about ownership and ticket price. You cannot come back and have the same view as everyone else who never saw another [type of] football. In my opinion people deserve the best possible.”

Red Bull hope Klopp is the man to provide it. Their flagship clubs, Leipzig and Red Bull Salzburg, have both floundered in the Champions League this season and the latter sit fifth in an Austrian top flight they used to devour. A new venture at the Ligue 2 club Paris FC, who Klopp watched defeat Amiens on Saturday, is likely to require intensive attention. The challenges at Bragantino and Omiya Ardija will be more obscure. Klopp suggested the level of hands-on advice he provides will vary per club, and made clear he will not be a knight in shining armour if one of them requires a head coach.

He prefers to cast himself as “an advisor, and a good advisor”, taking pains to suggest the vein-throbbing figure that stalked technical areas belied the strategic mind beneath. Klopp spoke, a little wistfully, of not having been able to feed a broader curiosity while overseeing three games a week and cast his mind forward to a potential meeting with Red Bull’s four-time F1 world champion Max Verstappen. “I want to figure out how Mr Verstappen has such high focus when he is driving at 300mph and going into a bend that is 180 degrees, and performs under that pressure. Give me that information and I will try to translate it to football.”

Perhaps the eureka moment will come and Klopp will happen upon a formula that gives what Mintzlaff called “the extra one, two, three, four or five per cent”. But, even discarding the ethical question, it felt some departure for a manager whose signature strength lay in holding entire stadiums in the palm of his hand through vibes alone.

In one breath Klopp says that, at 57, he is younger than most managers who move into de facto consultancy, in another, he observes that “in every meeting I was the oldest in the room” at Red Bull. Age should be no barrier to self-development, nor should being a supremely well-remunerated veteran of football’s most rarified climes. But it remains to be seen whether Red Bull can offer the best outlet for his restive, redoubtable gifts.

Through the hangar’s sweeping panes, a Red Bull-branded helicopter prepared to leave the tarmac. “I’d like to give wings to people, and now I come to the mother of that phrase,” Klopp beams, hitting another of the obligatory notes. Time will tell whether he was right to take flight himself.