Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp Should Have Stood By His Transfer Fee Stance

In the end, Jurgen Klopp was forced into an embarrassing climbdown.

He has preached for years about the perils of overspending and inflated transfer fees but none were quite as bold as his reaction to Manchester United spending over $100 million on Paul Pogba in 2016.

“If you bring one player in for $ 100 million or whatever and he gets injured then it all goes through the chimney,” he said at the time.

“The day that this is football, I’m not in a job anymore, because the game is about playing together. That is why somebody invented passes so these players can play together. It’s not about running with the ball because you can do it all the time.”

It wasn’t just that Klopp thought the outlay on one player was too large, he questioned the purity of a victory achieved with such a large outlay.

“Building the group is not my unique idea – it is necessary to be successful in football. Other clubs can go out and spend more money and collect top players, yes,” he added.

“Do I have to do it differently to that? I don’t know exactly how much money we could spend because nobody has told me up to this point ‘no, no, no you can’t do this’. If I spend money it is because I am trying to build a real team. You can win championships, you can win titles. But maybe there is a manner in which you want it. It is about how it is.”

As is often the case with teams at the top end of the division Klopp’s description of ‘building a team’ had more than a hint of irony.

That summer he’d added Sadio Mane to the squad for $45 million making the Senegalese forward the fifth player to join the club from Southampton in three years.

The following summer Virgil van Dijk was also acquired from the South Coast club which meant Liverpool had spent over £200 million buying half its starting lineup from another team.

Was that building a team or buying one? Southampton, which now finds itself in a lower division, might well argue it was it who did the building.

Complaints about Klopp’s comments may have been muted at the time, but the club’s outlay in the past two years has seen them revisited with vengeance.

Klopp’s hypocrisy highlighted

Last summer over $100 million was spent by Liverpool on Darwin Nunez and this year the club agreed to an even bigger fee for Moses Caicedo, although the deal subsequently looks like falling through.

Forced to confront his previous comments by the media finally he acknowledged he had made a rod for his own back.

“After that [statement], we bought a center-half for quite a decent fee, we bought a goalie for quite a decent fee,” Klopp said, “our situation is always the same, we try to level it somehow, the things we invest in the boys and in the players we sell, it’s kind of that it’s not going out of any kind of range and that worked so far, but I know, I heard it immediately.

“These kind of things happen. When you want to sign a striker as exciting as Darwin [Nunez] is, that’s the market and you have to pay the price. I said so many things in my life and life caught me then later and showed me that my imagination was obviously not clear enough for how quickly life can change. That’s how it is.”

Klopp is far from the only Premier League manager to demonstrate such short-sightedness.

Jose Mourinho spent the seasons before Pogba’s purchase complaining that a $380 million outlay was “not enough” to compete with Manchester City.

But after United bought the French midfielder for a then world record fee he dismissed the size of the outlay saying: “I am pretty sure that next summer some players with only half his quality probably will cost the same money or more, so I am waiting for that moment to release him from the scrutiny.”

Overwhelmingly in both cases, and there are many more besides, is the sense it’s one rule for whatever club the manager is coaching and another for everyone else.

In 2023 alone Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City have all broken the $100 million mark with transfers, Liverpool did so last summer and is willing to again with Caicedo. Manchester United, meanwhile, has spent more than that fee several times before.

Only Tottenham Hotspur of England’s so-called Big Six has not had a transfer pass that benchmark for a single player.

To put that in perspective, while there are five clubs in England currently capable of breaking the $100 million ceiling for a player across the rest of Europe there are only six teams that have ever passed the milestone.

The current finances of three of those clubs; Atletico Madrid, Juventus and Barcelona, make it incredibly unlikely they’ll be spending a similar amount anytime soon.

What does this show? Well, that Klopp when he stated the game was being distorted but the finances involved were right.

His mistake was not identifying the fact he and his club were part of the problem.

He was a person of privilege complaining about competing with the other elites. It’s a shame when the hypocrisy of his statements was addressed years later he hasn’t doubled down on his initial point.

Klopp’s hardly alone it’s human nature to see a problem but take no personal responsibility for it.