When a headline has a question mark attached there are certain rules that must be obeyed.
The scene should be set, with a paragraph or two laying out the query in greater detail.
Around a couple of hundred words in, it is now permissible to either answer the question definitively or put forward a personal take on it.
From there context must be provided, offering up reasoning as to why that decision has been reached.
Let’s though dispense with such formalities here. Jurgen Klopp is unquestionably one of the all-time great Premier League managers. To claim anything else leans into petty tribalism, even bitterness.
This conclusion is not merely based on the trophies he has won since arriving on Merseyside in October 2015, though they alone would be justification enough.
Prior to joining, and transforming Liverpool, the Reds had endured a decade of hardship, relative to their immense standing, winning only a solitary FA Cup and a single League Cup. Their failure to secure a Premier League crown had extended well into a third decade.
During his eight years at Anfield however, a revived giant of English football have won six trophies, not least the Champions League in 2018-19.
A year later, after starting the season a distant second in Premier League winner betting odds behind Manchester City, Klopp’s brilliant side finally claimed a league title, doing so in emphatic style.
Unbeaten until February, frankly they had it all wrapped up by early spring.
The silverware and sustained success the German has brought to Liverpool therefore is more than sufficient in seeing him stand tall among the very best managers of the 21st century.
He has, after all, won the fifth most trophies of any Premier League coach since the competition formed in 1992.
But it goes deeper than that, and significantly so.
Like any truly elite coach, Klopp has constructed and maintained a distinct model of football under his watch that has given his football club a clear identity.
Initially influenced by the workings of Arrigo Sacchi, but with notable tweaks to make the Italian’s methods more impactful on the modern game, it is a ferocious and thrilling style of play that has been widely imitated, but never bettered.
Simplified from the get-go as ‘heavy metal’ fare, and with far too much emphasis placed on the gegenpressing element, it is a model containing considerably greater nuance to what it is routinely credited with, conceived by one of the finest coaching minds of his generation.
It is the Liverpool Way, so indelibly linked with Klopp as to forever be one and the same.
Then there is his personality to factor in, a passionate style of management that often takes him to extremes.
There is a reason why he is so adored by Liverpool fans the world over, but disliked – sometimes intensely - by others, and it’s not because he guided the Reds to continental glory or made them permanently among the favourites in the Premier League betting for every tournament they enter.
It’s because he is larger than life. A fixture of the English top-flight. A bit of Hollywood and that never hurts.
We will miss him when he’s gone, this manager whose reputation has only select and highly esteemed company.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to Alamy*
