In the 2009/10 Bundesliga season Borussia Dortmund were infuriatingly inconsistent. Jurgen Klopp’s side looked like an emerging force when thrashing opponents 4-0 or 4-1 one week, only to lose 4-1 to Stuttgart the next and set them back once again. Having finished the campaign in 5th, some 13 points behind winners Bayern Munich, nobody foresaw what was coming next.
“In the first year, it was rather normal football, with a pinch of Klopp tactics,” Neven Subotic tells Raphael Honigstein in Klopp: Bring the Noise. “In the second year, it got spicier. In the third year: boom!” Inside the dressing room at Dortmund during that frustrating topsy-turvy 09/10 campaign believe was growing and the players - not to mention Klopp himself - felt that something special was about to happen.
Dortmund’s back-to-back league titles over the following two years came as a surprise to outsiders, but not to those inside the club. It isn’t hard to draw comparisons between that inconsistent – though interesting – Dortmund side of 09/10 and Liverpool in 2017, which is perhaps why Klopp never seems too worried or frustrated by his team’s performances. Liverpool could be on the verge of their own “Boom!” moment.
Virgil van Dijk’s arrival from Southampton for a world-record fee of £75 million obviously breaks from the Dortmund story, but this is the Premier League and needs must. Van Dijk is an exceptional central defender, confident in possession but also considerably more powerful than most, and his leadership could dramatically improve the club’s fortunes. Similarly Naby Keita, arriving from RB Leipzig next summer, is the perfect player for Liverpool. His athleticism in midfield is precisely the sort of Moussa Dembele-esque wriggling in possession that the team needs to successfully instigate counter-attacks against high-pressing opponents (potentially solving a long-standing issue of poor returns against fellow top six clubs).
Together, and with the addition of a reliable goalkeeper, Liverpool will be ready to challenge for the title in 2018/19 – the third of Klopp’s six or seven-year tenure. There is plenty of time for a “Boom!” moment and the wild successes that follow, even if, right now, they look too unreliable to push Manchester City.
“We had this confidence, we felt that we would play everybody off the park,” Subotic said in Klopp: Bring the Noise. “When we didn’t, we simply said, ‘Okay, lesson learned, we’ll smash them next time.’ The first two years were like that. And in the third year, we did smash everybody.”
With Keita, Van Dijk, and a goalkeeper dramatically improving the defensive side of things, this seems like a realistic trajectory at Anfield. It is worth remembering that Dortmund’s title-winning squad contained very few star names, but rather intelligent footballers coached into world-beaters by their manager. Similarly, Roberto Firmino, Sadio Mane, Adam Lallana, Joe Gomez, and Emre Can are beginning to look like title winners despite arriving at the club as mid-level professionals.
Perhaps as a consequence of Antonio Conte and Pep Guardiola performing wonders so quickly after arriving in English football, Jurgen Klopp’s achievements have slipped under the radar. It should not be forgotten that aside from the Luis Suarez-inspired second-placed finish under Brendan Rodgers this is a Liverpool side that was comfortably mediocre when the German took over in 2015. In two years, Liverpool have reached two major finals and are now one of the most exciting attacking teams in Europe.
Having finally landed their first-choice centre-back, and already in the hunt for a replacement between the sticks (Kevin Trapp could be on his way to Anfield in January), Liverpool are very close to becoming one of the best sides in the world. Man City’s brilliance makes 2017/18 a write-off, but talk of a new era of Guardiola dominance is premature: 2018/19 could be the start of a new duopoly in England similar to the Wenger/Ferguson years. Liverpool and Klopp are steadily improving; next year might just be the explosion.
