Speaking to the press last Friday ahead of Monday’s Manchester United v Liverpool match at Old Trafford, Jürgen Klopp carefully sidestepped several invitations to offer his tips to Erik ten Hag on how he might get his team out of the current mess.
He repeatedly used the phrase “it’s not my cup of tea,” which Klopp seems to take to mean something like “it’s not my place to say”. He resisted, for instance, the opportunity to give his take on whether United’s players were capable of executing a high-pressing game plan.
In the end the only advice he offered was: don’t listen to the advice.
Klopp spent his first months at Liverpool studiously ignoring what people were saying about his developing team.
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“I can say, I didn’t read anything. And that makes it easier . . . You just focus on work, and go for the little steps. I am pretty sure it’s in each club the same, although in bigger clubs you talk more about them. If [United] or us lose, the first five articles in all newspapers are about that.
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“If you are strong enough not to read that, you can have an okay life, and just worry about the important stuff. And that’s what I do since seven years, and that helps me, and that’s the only advice I could give.”
At this point you had to think of United’s so-called “CEO of Media”, Phil Lynch, who shot briefly to fame last autumn when he revealed some details of United’s vast media-monitoring operation.
”We pull, twice a day, social media fan sentiment graphs for every single one of our players,” he told the Stream Time podcast.
“We have certain thresholds that alert us when we see fan sentiment going one way or the other . . . whether that be a personal issue, whether that be an on-pitch performance issue, and when that happens we then start to work with the player and his team individually to kinda try and start to counter that narrative a little bit.”
So while Klopp’s approach is to ignore all outside comment, there are people at United whose job is to compile dossiers of outside comment and bring it to the attention of their players.
Of all the failings and errors that have characterised post-Ferguson United, none has been more ruinous than their habit of slavishly following and reacting to public opinion.
Conceiving of themselves as an entertainment business rather than a competitive sports institution, they built a system of digital sensors and antennae to better understand what their audience was thinking. Somewhere along the line, they forgot to come up with any thoughts of their own.
The obsession with what people are saying “out there” leads to a paradoxical kind of conservatism, whereby they have been drawn to solutions that appear safe but in reality turn out to be expensive and inefficient.
They are fatally attracted to established ideas, seemingly safe bets, “blue-chip” names who are in reality yesterday’s news. Public opinion, after all, is just another term for conventional wisdom, and United’s obsession with it has condemned them to a perpetually backward-looking orientation, always imitating, always reacting, always surprised by events.
When you look back at their biggest mistakes of the last decade, the common thread is this element of playing to the gallery. They sacked Louis van Gaal just as he won his first trophy as United coach because people who didn’t understand what he was trying to do complained it was “boring”, and appointed José Mourinho for no better reason than he was the most famous available manager.
They made Alexis Sanchez the best-paid player in the league because Manchester City wanted to sign him and they thought the fans would see it as a power play.
They gave Ole Gunnar Solskjaer a three-year contract because they got carried away on the wave of fan euphoria set off by his initial winning run. They signed Ronaldo because he is the most famous player in the world, ignoring all the evidence that he was past it.
They appointed Ralf Rangnick as interim manager (with an initial brief to plan the club’s long-term future) because they had read somewhere that he was the Godfather of Gegenpressing – and with Klopp and Thomas Tuchel among the most successful contemporary coaches, surely nobody could complain about hiring their Godfather?
They have continued this tradition with the signing of Casemiro as part of their apparent plan to recreate Real Madrid’s multi-Champions League winning line-up of four or five years ago.
Imagine Madrid’s delight with the £100 million United have paid them for Raphael Varane and Casemiro, funding the signings of their replacements in Aurélien Tchouameni, Eduardo Camavinga and David Alaba.
A month ago United were confident of getting Frenkie de Jong from Barcelona. Instead they have spent a similar amount of money on a player who has already given his best days to Real Madrid.
It’s not that Casemiro is a bad player. He’s won five Champions Leagues, which is why United see him as a sure thing. But his job in his last team was to win the ball and give it to Luka Modric or Toni Kroos.
He’ll find United’s midfield a more challenging environment, and that’s before you factor in the question of adaptation.
Khalidou Koulibaly’s red card for Chelsea against Leeds yesterday illustrated the difficulties that can be faced by players in their 30s who arrive in England from less-demanding leagues. No sooner will he have adapted than they will have to start thinking about how to replace him.
In any case, Casemiro is ineligible against Liverpool. United have lost their last three matches against this opposition by an aggregate score of 13-2, but this time they are at least facing them early in the season, before they have settled into the winning rhythm that has carried them past the 90-point barrier three times in recent seasons.
Drop Ronaldo and play with energy and there’s no reason why United can’t do what Crystal Palace and Fulham have done already, and take points from Liverpool. But there was little in their defeats to Brighton and Brentford to inspire confidence.
As usual in these days of Klopp, United face their rivals more in hope than expectation.
