"Julien, that account you asked me to keep an eye on. Jürgen's posted something tonight. Do you want it on the front page?"
"Yeah," Julien said. "And make sure his fee gets processed."
"Of course. On it."
He ended the call and opened his laptop, logging into the Player's Tribune back-end dashboard. He pulled up Klopp's piece and read the title.
You Have to Be Rocky—and Fight Drago.
He knew the film by reputation more than by memory. He was curious to see what Klopp had done with it.
First, I should tell you something slightly embarrassing.
I have a strong aversion to people treating coaches or players as gods. I find it uncomfortable, and I always have. As a Christian, I believe in one God and I can tell you with complete certainty that He has no interest in football results. He has enough to be getting on with.
The truth is, we all fail. When I was young, failure was practically a daily occurrence. Not dramatic, cinematic failure, just the ordinary, grinding kind.
The training session that goes wrong. The decision you make that you immediately know was the wrong one. The moment you open your mouth in front of twenty people and realize, somewhere around the third sentence, that you have made a serious error of judgement.
I have made many of those. I will make more. This is not a confession, it is simply the reality of doing something difficult in public for years.
But let me tell you about one specific failure. One that I still think about.
In 2011, Dortmund faced Bayern Munich away. We hadn't won there in twenty years.
I knew we needed something different in our preparation. Something that would shift the frame.
I have always looked to films for this kind of thing not because I think football and cinema are the same, but because a great film can do something to a room that a tactics board cannot.
It can change what people believe is possible. And what people believe is possible is, in the end, the only thing that separates a team that wins from a team that doesn't.
I believe Rocky IV should be compulsory viewing for every young person, in the way that learning the alphabet is compulsory. I am not entirely joking about this. The film contains something real about the relationship between hardship and capability.
Before the Bayern match, I gathered the players in a darkened room and said: "The last time Dortmund won in Munich, most of you were still in diapers."
Then I played the clip.
Drago training in a gleaming facility while scientists measure every output. And Rocky, alone in Siberia, running through blizzards in borrowed boots, hauling logs, climbing mountains.
"Bayern is Drago," I told them. "They have everything money can buy. We are Rocky. We're not as big, but we have passion, we have will, and we can do the impossible."
I looked at the room.
The room looked back at me.
Completely blank. Not a flicker of recognition.
Then it hit me. Rocky IV came out in 1985. These players were born in 1989, 1990, 1991. I might as well have shown them something in black and white.
I asked the room trying to keep my voice level who knew who Rocky was.
Kell raised his hand.
Owomoyela raised his hand.
Two people. Out of a full squad. Two.
Ten minutes of preparation, gone.
The entire emotional architecture of what I had built in my head, gone.
I had to stand up in front of the room and start completely over.
I had to start over from scratch, which, looking back, I can't help but laugh at. We're all just human beings. Everyone has moments that make them want to disappear into the floor.
And now I am here. Liverpool. Anfield. Entrusted with this extraordinary, history-soaked club.
In the match we just played against Arsenal, we were 2–0 down. Everyone had written us off.
People would have said: "This German has no idea what he's dealing with. The Premier League has eaten him alive."
But my players refused to accept it.
But my players refused to accept it. Especially Julien, this nineteen-year-old.
And then the second half happened.
When Julien spread his arms and stood there in the middle of the Emirates, with Liverpool fans making noise behind him, I was standing on the touchline seeing something I have only ever seen in films.
I was watching Rocky, still running, in the Siberian snow, long after the world had decided he had already lost.
Julien is our Rocky right now. He has a calmness and a resolve that go well beyond his nineteen years. He has the talent to back up whatever belief he carries in himself. And he never flinches.
In him, I see the hope of Liverpool's future. I see the first light of something this city has been waiting a long time for.
I came to Liverpool with a dream: to bring trophies to a city that lives and breathes football. To give the Red Army the glory they have waited so long to celebrate.
I know it will not be easy. We will face more powerful Dragos at every step. We will fall behind in matches. We will suffer bad luck from deflections, bad timing from injuries. We will face every variety of obstacle that the game invents.
But just as we came back from 2–0 against Arsenal, just as Julien showed what refusal looks like as long as we don't quit, there is always a way back.
This is something people outside football struggle to understand.
This is something people outside football struggle to understand.
The scores, we forget them. I have managed hundreds of matches and I could not give you the scoreline of most of them. They blur, they dissolve, they become part of an undifferentiated past that the memory stops bothering to separate.
But the people in those moments, the specific human beings, in specific situations, making specific choices under pressure that they did not ask for and could not have fully prepared for, those do not blur. Those are carved into you.
The image of Julien fighting to the final whistle in a ground that had been against him since the opening minute. The players gathering around each other at half-time, two goals down, not yet certain of what the second half would require of them but willing to find out.
Those things are permanent.
Those things live in me and will continue to live in me long after the result has gone wherever results go.
Everything I have ever achieved, I owe to the people around me, players, family, and those who believed in me when there was very little to believe in.
I became a father at twenty. I went to university during the day, played amateur football in the evenings, and at six in the morning, three days a week, I drove to a warehouse on the edge of Glauchau and moved film reels.
Not DVDs—actual reels, the large circular metal containers that films were distributed in before the world changed. The long ones were the worst. Ben-Hur. Lawrence of Arabia. Two hours and forty minutes of David Lean inside a container that weighed more than it had any right to. Then training in the evenings. Then back home to my son.
There was a photograph embedded in the piece at this point, Klopp in his twenties, grinning at the camera.
Julien studied it.
'So that's what he looked like.'
Now he understood completely why a twenty-year-old Klopp had already been someone's father. The man had been, there was really no other word for it: absurdly handsome.
A hundred and ninety-one centimeters, that jaw, that grin. Honestly, it was almost unfair on a level.
Julien shook his head, amused, and read on.
Those hard years taught me what life actually is. They made me grow up fast. When friends asked me out to the pub, I had to say no even when I desperately wanted to go because I was no longer living only for myself.
People ask me why I always seem to be smiling, even after a loss.
The answer is simple: the day my son was born, I understood something fundamental.
Football is not life and death, and I know this sentence is sometimes said in a way that is meant to diminish the thing to suggest that caring about football is somehow naive or disproportionate.
That is not what I mean. What I mean is that football exists to inspire. To bring joy. Particularly to children. I never forgot that.. The reason this game exists is the look on a child's face when something impossible happens in front of them.
The first mistake I made as a manager—I remember it vividly.
In 2001 I took over at Mainz, moving directly from player to head coach. The players were my friends. They had trained alongside me, eaten alongside me, given me lifts when my car was in the garage. They still called me Klopp.
I decided and looking back I cannot fully explain the reasoning, except that it seemed considerate at the time that I would tell each player personally whether he was in the starting eleven for our first match. Man to man.
I walked into the first room. Two players, sharing. I told one he was starting. I told the other he wasn't.
The second man looked at me and said, "Why, Klopp?"
And standing there in the doorway, I did the calculation I should have done before I started.
Eighteen outfield players. Nine rooms. Nine versions of this conversation still ahead of me, each one requiring me to explain, to justify.
Even now, thinking about it makes my head hurt.
That was my first real experience of sinking into the mud as a manager. And what can you do?
You wipe the mud off. You go to the next room. You try to learn something from it and carry that learning forward rather than carrying the embarrassment. That is, in the end, all there is.
For me, football is the one thing in this world that comes close to what great cinema can do. The way it moves you without your permission. The way it takes hold of something in you that you were not offering up for the taking.
And the most extraordinary thing is that the next morning, you wake up, and it turns out it was real. The thing that felt like something you invented in a darkened room, the thing that felt too large and too implausible to have actually happened in the world, turns out to have actually happened in the world.
The scoreline exists.
The goal happened.
You beat Drago.
You beat Drago. And it was real.
Just as we did against Arsenal. From 0–2 to level, in Jürgen Klopp's first Premier League match, with a nineteen-year-old scoring the goals that kept us in it. Permanent in the record books and in the memory of everyone who was there.
Why does this sport exist?
We all know the answer. Football exists for people like us, people who refuse to stop dreaming in the face of evidence that would justify stopping.
And my dream is this: at Liverpool, with young men like Julien, with every Red who refuses to give in—we will bring a championship to this city. We will make Anfield shake with the kind of noise it has been waiting years to hear again.
I know it requires time. It requires sacrifice. It requires facing greater challenges than anything we have seen so far.
But just like Rocky, we will not step back.
Because we are Liverpool.
We are the Red Army.
And we fight for the dream.
—Jürgen Klopp
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