Jurgen Klopp to Real Madrid is a terrible but intoxicating idea | OneFootball

When Jurgen Klopp was unveiled as Red Bull’s new whatever it was in a great big hangar next to Formula One cars and helicopters and other stuff, we did kinda love that for him.

Obviously we also did a bit of sick in our mouths, but whatever disappointment we felt at Klopp going over to the multi-club dark side was also offset by just not being able to resist that big toothy grin and wanting him to be happy.

Because club management stopped making him happy. But here, he looked happy. He looked at peace. He looked, essentially, about as far away as it was possible for him to look from the man who had made the decision to walk away from Liverpool through the sheer burnt-out exhaustion of it all.

This was a man who was done with first-team coaching and, however much of a shame that was, it was clearly something he was enormously comfortable with and that he was looking forward to his new role of, well, whatever it is he does for Red Bull’s quasi-evil sports empire. We couldn’t stay mad at him.

He even, right there, with his F1 car, told us all straight. Done with coaching. Moving on. He said, and he was right to say it, that he would obviously be linked with every job going but you could ignore it all. He wasn’t interested.

He did slightly caveat it, because none of us ever truly know what our futures hold, and that’s been enough for everyone to jump on whenever it proves convenient.

Klopp saying that while he found it entirely and utterly impossible to even conceive of a time or dimension or alternate reality where he managed another Premier League club but that, fine, yes, if he were to squint hard enough and use all the powers of his imagination he could just about summon up a blurry image of him pulling on the Liverpool tracksuit again, he supposed, has already been co-opted and transformed into ‘Klopp ready to return’ every time Arne Slot hits one of his increasingly frequent sticky spots.

It was even, and we’re really not quite sure how, used to make Klopp at one point second favourite for the Tottenham job.

We were never worried. We’ve never felt like he was about to actually do it. At Liverpool or anywhere else. Definitely not Tottenham, anyway.

We are now a bit worried. Because the job he’s being linked with now is Real Madrid. And, well, that’s different isn’t it? He’s even said “LOL no I won’t be doing that” (we paraphrase) but this time it doesn’t sound so reassuring.

This is almost certainly us, not him. He still seems pretty resolute. But this is Real Madrid Club de Futbol We’re Talking About.

Liverpool fans have recently learned the hard way that Real Madrid hit different. That if you are literally any other club on earth you can be absolutely f*cking enormous but you are not Real Madrid.

The confused fury that greeted Trent Alexander-Arnold’s decision to trade Anfield for the Bernabeu was entertaining enough for the rest of us, but you can still understand the frustration. There really was only one club on earth that could realistically have tempted Alexander-Arnold away from his boyhood club at the peak of his career. Liverpool’s misfortune lay in the fact that one club was the precise one sniffing around.

And now there is every chance they will make a move for Klopp. And we still fear he’ll take that chance.

He definitely shouldn’t. Even if he has decided to get back into the day-to-day coaching game, he still shouldn’t take the Real Madrid job. Hell, do Tottenham before you do Real Madrid.

He’s just a terrible, terrible fit. The great thing about Klopp’s teams is that they were all so utterly and identifiably his teams. He has, undoubtedly, proved that he can take that branding and apply it to bigger and bigger teams and spaces.

We imagine when he went from Mainz to Borussia Dortmund there were some doubts about whether he would be so easily able to imprint himself upon that larger canvas. Those were certainly the doubts when he arrived in England. Could a club of Liverpool’s size with its epic history really take on his identity so thoroughly as those German ones?

Yes, was obviously the pretty emphatic answer there. To the extent that they were even able to win the league as a Jurgen Klopp side after he was no longer around.

But he can’t do that at Real Madrid. Real Madrid will always be bigger than any coach; the very thing that makes us worry he’ll take this chance is the very thing that most fundamentally means he shouldn’t.

He can’t be Jurgen Klopp, Real Madrid coach. Obviously that’s not true. He can in a technical sense be officially employed to perform that role. But he can’t be Jurgen Klopp, Real Madrid coach the way he was at Liverpool or Dortmund or Mainz. They will never be Jurgen Klopp’s Real Madrid in anything like the same way as those clubs were.

But it is still Real Madrid, and we might just have to once again accept that where they are concerned it really does mean more.