Jurgen Klopp and Liverpool FC - the honeymoon continues

 

Liverpool take on Arsenal at Wembley later today in the Community Shield match that traditionally marks the beginning of a new football season. The official record shows that Liverpool won this competition for the first time only as recently as 1964 but, as highlighted in an earlier blog, Liverpool won the Sherriff of London Charity Shield (an early forerunner of the current competition) way back in 1906 https://sportyman2020.blogspot.com/2020/08/liverpool-fc-second-decade-1900-1910.html 

Liverpool with the (gigantic) Sheriff of London Charity Shield in 1906 

(following a 5-1 victory over Corinthian)

The Community/Charity Shield match is always a natural prompter for thinking of the season ahead, still full of promise and prospect for everyone.

Although now heading into his 6^th season as manager, Liverpool’s love affair with Jurgen Klopp still feels fresh and giddy - such is the nature of true love. And all those past managerial loves of recent years now seem like bad mistakes (e.g. Roy Hodgson) or mere practice runs (e.g. Brendan Rodgers) for the real thing.

Jurgen Klopp with his 2019-2020 squad

Having done a ‘where are they now’ review in an earlier blog on Klopp’s first team in charge of Liverpool https://sportyman2020.blogspot.com/2020/07/liverpool-fc-in-time-of-klopp-beginnings.html , now on the eve of a new season is a good time to see where Liverpool’s best starting team is at in terms of Klopp’s loving imprint, and how many of the key players are mere mementoes from managerial old flames.

Because of recent talk of Billy Beane (of ‘Moneyball’ fame) coming on board at Liverpool https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/liverpool-billy-beane-fsg-news-18608640 , I have applied a numbers based and somewhat ‘Moneyball’ approach to analysing the current Klopp set-up, despite my misgivings about such methods as outlined in another earlier blog: https://sportyman2020.blogspot.com/2020/04/moneyball-why-it-just-didnt-work-for-me.html

Based on an analysis of minutes played in the Premier League for the 2019-2020 season, I have assembled here the most frequently used first eleven Liverpool players for the Premier League season gone by. Virgil van Dijk played the most (3,420 minutes) of any Liverpool player, with Joe Gomez just making it into the top 11 as the 4^th defender, on 1,999 minutes.  

The next question then is how many of those most frequently used first eleven players were signed by Klopp. And the answer is seven: Alisson in goal, defenders Van Dijk and Andy Robertson, midfielders Fabinho and Wijnaldum and strikers Mo Salah and Sadio Mane. Therefore, the Klopp ratio for the most frequently starting Liverpool first eleven in the 2019-2020 Premier League season is 7/11.

Among the remaining four players, Trent Alexander-Arnold came through the youth system. However, Klopp has a good claim on this player, having transformed him from a winger or midfielder to one of the greatest full-backs in the world.

The total spend by Klopp for those 7 first team players he’s signed comes in at 292.3 million pounds from a total spend during his tenure of 435.75 million.

Klopp's three big money signings yet to make sustained impacts are Naby Keita (52.75 million), Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain (35 million) and Xherdan Shaqiri (13.75 million).

And the total money taken in from sales during Klopp’s tenure is 363.5 million giving a balance net spend of 72.25 million pounds, or just over 14 million per season so far. These are astronomical sums but not when considered in comparison to the money spent by some other Premier League and European clubs in recent years.

Since June 2016, the net spend for Manchester City is a whopping 399 million pounds, followed closely by the 375 million handed out by underperforming Manchester United. In fact, on a table of net spend for Premier League clubs, Liverpool come in at 12^th, behind the likes not only of City and United but also Wolves, Leicester, Brighton and even recently relegated Bournemouth: https://tribuna.com/en/liverpoolfc/news/2020-03-06-man-city-crush-liverpool-in-terms-of-net-spend-even-everton-and-bournemouth-do/

The remaining three players not signed by Klopp are all mementoes of past managerial romances. Brendan Rodgers signed the emerging stalwart defender Joe Gomez and the wonderful Roberto Firminho.

And we have to go all the way back to Kenny Dalglish’s second stint as Liverpool manager when, in 2011, he signed Jordan Henderson, our current captain fantastic.