How Jürgen Klopp shows we can choose ourselves

Jonathan Harding, the author of Soul: Beyond the Athlete, writes about what Jürgen Klopp leaving Liverpool tells us about modern coaching.

Klopp's speech announcing his decision to leave Liverpool at the end of the season is enough source material for a thesis on holistic coaching. One passage in particular is worthy of assessing in terms of what Klopp's words say about the environment of elite coaching today.

"I’m like a proper sports car – not the best one but a pretty good one, can still drive 160, 170, 180 mph but I’m the only one who sees the tank meter is going down. The outside world doesn’t see that, that’s good, so you go until as long as we have to go, but then you need a break. In this case, you need to go to the petrol station."

Admittedly, there is some concern reading this. That only the coach is aware that his own tank is low does not sound like a healthy situation, nor does an environment that requires people "to go as long as we have to" and at such intense levels.

"I am still a normal guy”, continued Klopp, “I just don’t live a normal life for too long now. I don’t want to wait until I am too old for having a normal life. I need to at least give it a try at one point to see how it is."

These words suggest that 'the normal one' has become more about Klopp as a coach than Klopp as a person and his desire to leave is as much about the need to look after Jürgen as it is about coaching leaving Klopp with an empty tank.

Given the man who turns 57 this summer has been coaching every day of the last 23 years, that is totally understandable. This, after all, is a man who lives his job with such feeling that he described Mario Götze's departure from Borussia Dortmund to Bayern as “a heart attack”.

Klopp never forgets the community his teams represent and the power that comes with strengthening that connection. At Dortmund, he insisted the changing rooms stay simple and free of screens so the players never forgot they were at work in a working-class city.

Over a decade ago, on the eve of their Champions League final against Bayern Munich, speaking to Donald McRae at The Guardian, Klopp spoke about the emotional high that has followed him throughout his career. "I left Mainz after 18 years and thought: 'Next time I will work with a little less of my heart.' I said that because we all cried for a week. The city gave us a goodbye party and it lasted a week. For a normal person that emotion is too much. I thought it's not healthy to work like this. But after one week at Dortmund it was the same situation."

All of this is a big part of why Klopp has been such a successful head coach, but it's also what makes his approach to the job so demanding. In making the decision to leave, Klopp has added another level to what makes him successful and it is a timely reminder of just how much the coaching world is changing.

Sergio Lara-Bercial is a professor of Sport Coaching at Leeds Beckett University and he recently published a book on how we can learn from serial winning coaches after years of research. Amongst many other things, what the Spaniard found was that those coaches were also deeply aware of the need to look after their own wellbeing. Long gone have the days of arriving on site at 4am and sleeping on the sofa in your office. Effective, modern coaching is also about looking in the mirror at the example you give to your players and staff. If you don't look after yourself - and managing all the various dimensions of your wellbeing is a part of that - how can you ask others to do the same? Klopp has spent a long time putting the needs of others first - he reiterated more than once in his statement that he didn't want anyone to "make a fuss" of him or "make the games about him". That is also a trait of serial-winning coaches, but so is balancing the demands of your own life.

It would be easy to argue that for a man in Klopp's position it's easier to walk away than someone in a less prominent position, and there is no denying the financial security of his situation helps. But the message his decision sends to coaches at any level, and indeed anyone working in a high performance environment or not, is a powerful one: Don't forget to look after yourself as a person.