I think one thing that separates the very best organizations from the very good is succession planning. And this is something owners/Edwards would be very mindful of. Klopp did 7 years each at Mainz/Dortmund, he would have done 3.5 at the end of this season (I think his current contract takes him to 6 total but correct me if I am wrong). I feel that the over the next 3 years, he will take us to a stage where we are dining at the top table (alongside Barcelona/Real/Bayern).
But don't think he will go beyond the 6-7 years (it is a very very taxing job). So, it is vitally important to have that continuity where the new manager fits in with the style the club would have been used to. In our history, we have got this wrong and paid heavily for it (United going through the same now).
It will also be a very tough balancing act and I think this is something the management must already be planning for (there is also the contingency planning where Klopp doesnt even make it to the full 6 years for personal reasons or whatever).
Hopefully Edward aces this because this is the biggest recruitment we will be making at that time (I would say at par with Van Dijk) e
Agree. I think contract extension is on for the end of this season, and then thereafter taking his pulse on how he feels about the long haul. I think well before the end of the 7 year point, we would have stalked out the ideal potential successor and kept tabs. It may be that transition to a new manager a little bit earlier would be preferable to missing the chance and falling back on the wrong one if Klopp leaves and the right person isn't available.
But I think our first order of priority should be trying to figure out any way possible to keep Klopp interested and motivated to do as long a stint as we can.
Not to take this off-topic (i.e. away from the subject of Michael Edwards), and maybe it’s just wishful thinking on my part, but to me it’s certainly not a given, or even probable, that Klopp leaves this job after 7 years, or whatever the case may be.
It’s certainly
possible: no one can see inside the mind of another human being or predict what the future will bring. It’s easy to forget sometimes (well, maybe not when you hear him
speak 
) that the man is German. At some point, perhaps like Ireland’s Kiwi rugby coach Joe Schmidt, regardless of how well the job is going, he might want to move his family back home. And that’s assuming he remains successful: who would have predicted that just eighteen months after the agonising defeat to Bayern in club football’s showpiece occasion at Wembley, his Borussia Dortmund side would be bottom of the Bundesliga? A quick appraisal of Klopp’s history as a manager and Liverpool’s as a club, where Kenny Dalglish once resigned abruptly in the middle of a season and Rafa Benítez was thrown out like yesterday’s garbage for finishing 7th and reaching a European semi-final, should make it abundantly clear that things can change very quickly in football and a club must be prepared for anything.
So I too would like to think that there is a plan in place in the event that Klopp, for whatever reason, were to leave the club suddenly, preferably one that doesn’t simply involve picking up the bat-phone to Steven Gerrard wherever he happens to be at that point in his managerial career and hoping for the best. At the very least, I hope that someone within the Liverpool hierarchy is keeping a watchful eye on events in dugouts throughout European and world football, as they would do with potential signings on the playing side, and is developing and maintaining an understanding as regards: (a) who the best managers in world football are, and (b) which of them would suit this club, its players and its structure at any given moment in time. The last time we lost a bonafide world-class manager, the line of succession went: Roy fn Hodgson — a manager who hadn’t managed in the best part of a decade — a manager with one year of top-flight experience. Some plan. That obviously can’t be allowed to happen again.
Klopp, however, is a unique character. He has managed three clubs in approx. 17 years and, as we know, the duration of his first two jobs happened to be the same (7 years). Naturally, there are implications that his “shelf-life” in a job is limited and that he therefore might leave Anfield in a similar fashion after 7 years or so. To me, that’s a stretch. To me, the pattern with Klopp (if there is one) isn’t the length of time he stays at a club (I have to believe that 7 years at both Mainz and Dortmund is purely a coincidence) but his
reasons for leaving.
His last two seasons at Mainz resulted in a relegation and a failed promotion. As someone who clearly enjoys winning, he was under a lot of strain after those two failures, I’m sure, but unlike his sabbatical after leaving Dortmund he didn’t take any time off after Mainz. He was keen to get right back on the managerial horse and, no doubt, was also excited at the prospect of managing a more powerful club. And as regards his exit from Dortmund, while there is no doubt that seeing your team sitting bottom of the table halfway through a season would bring a ton of stress, both from within and without, I suspect the recent loss of his two best players to Bayern (Gotze and Lewandowski) also probably convinced him that he was always going to be working with one hand tied behind his back there. In other words, in both jobs, he realised that he had taken the club as far as he could. There was a glass ceiling that he felt he could no longer break through. At Mainz, the cycle of relegation—promotion was likely to continue and, with Guardiola in place (“I can’t make myself shorter and learn Spanish”) and Bayern picking off his players at will (Hummels would also leave for Bavaria after Klopp’s departure), it was becoming increasingly unlikely that he would equal past glories at Dortmund.
His situation at Liverpool is different in a number of respects. He has now been backed financially to the point where, as the manager who signed them, his name is listed beside the most expensive goalkeeper and defender in the history of the sport. While Bayern were always the big dog in the Bundesliga yard, his current club has a history and a worldwide reach that dwarfs all domestic pretenders to their territory bar Manchester United, as well as most internationally. And after years of mismanagement on that front, the club is now exploiting that reach to the fullest. The challenges remain and perhaps even exceed the problem of overcoming Bayern at Dortmund, where a wrong managerial appointment or a poor signing could at least give the underdog an opening to exploit. There are five major clubs in England instead of one, and if a couple are in transition (e.g. Arsenal, Manchester United) you will still face three daunting opponents, one of whom is financially doped-up to its vein-popped eyes. Furthermore, Coutinho’s departure for Barcelona must have undermined his work in much the same way as the Bavarian giants once did with Gotze and Lewandowski, a reminder,
as HBHR put it the other day, that he will still have to contend with predators.
But, for the first time in his career, these are challenges that Klopp has been given the tools to overcome. The Coutinho money essentially going straight back into his squad was huge, as we know, and he has a support system around him that gives him a real chance of building long-lasting success. He once said during his time at Dortmund: “We have a bow and arrow and if we aim well, we can hit the target. The problem is that Bayern has a bazooka.” Well despite Manchester City’s riches, that’s no longer the case. In fact, as his team enters the Etihad for a pivotal game with Guardiola’s new club tomorrow night, he might even be minded to look over at Pep and ask to compare the size of their guns.
As for other jobs, the stints at Mainz and Dortmund do illustrate that the German is not a restless manager. He devoted over 14 years to those two clubs, often without silverware to show for it, whereas two of his biggest rivals (Guardiola and Mourinho) have often been hard-pushed to manage more than three. Upon joining Liverpool, he called it an “honour”; he said “it feels like a dream…the best thing I can imagine”. After a few months out of the game, the German’s profile was high enough that he could have easily bided his time and waited for whatever job he coveted in world football, but he said of Liverpool that “the owners have a dream and I have a dream, and so there was not too much they had to say so I could be here.”
Honestly, I don’t think there are too many other jobs that would tempt him for some time, assuming things keep going well. He has spoken before, as I recall, of how being able to speak the language was an important factor in accepting Liverpool’s offer, and more recently responded to De Laurentiis’ comments about previously offering him the Napoli job by saying “unfortunately I don’t speak the language that well”. So it’s a German or English team he would be leaving for, then. Unless he has a massive falling out with someone above him, I don’t see any other club in England being a better fit for him or in a better position to offer success than Liverpool right now. That leaves Bayern and the German national team. I don’t know his feelings about Bayern. It could be a job he secretly covets, or he could hate their guts, who knows? But would he really want to give over some of his prime years as a manager (he’s 51 now) to managing a national team, especially one that has so recently experienced the ultimate success? Perhaps if the pressures of club football become too much?
Well, the pressures of the job will always be there, and he did take a sabbatical after leaving Dortmund. But the man clearly eats, sleeps and dreams football to such an extent that “a holiday for four months…was great, but it was enough.” And even the things he did during that “holiday” were football-related: “I could get interested in many different things and had a few perfect meetings with some very clever and smart people to talk about football, to talk about nutrition and to talk about so many things. Then I felt that if someone interesting called me, I was prepared. Now I am really relaxed”. A four-month break after 14/15 years of non-stop management, and he was ready to go again. His appetite for the game is huge, and his love for Liverpool is clear. Barring anything unforeseen, maybe he’ll double his respective stays at Mainz and Dortmund?
