Jurgen Klopp, Liverpool’s magician-in-chief

Jurgen Klopp has done a remarkable job as Liverpool manager, but he may never have a better chance of a major trophy than he does on Saturday.

Jurgen Klopp, as you may have heard, does not have a good record in finals. Played five, lost four, to be exact. The only victory came when he was still in charge of Borussia Dortmund, against Bayern Munich in the DFB-Pokal in 2012, a whole footballing lifetime ago.

Since then, the German has lost to Bayern in the Champions League, to Manchester City in the League Cup, to Sevilla in the Europa League and to Real Madrid in the Champions League again.

Granted, he was the bookies favorite to win only one of those games — the Europa League final in 2016 — but that hardly feels like a convincing defense of his record.

After all, what distinguishes Klopp from almost every other elite manager in the world is that he’s at his most effective against teams that are, on paper, better — that is, teams that want to dominate the ball, to commit numbers forward in attack.

His entire footballing philosophy, his love of the sport itself, is built on the principle that a well-organized, passionate group of mediocre players can beat a disorganized, disinterested group of great ones. That is the s**t that gets him up in the morning, presumably very early, screaming all the way down to the breakfast table.

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This tactical approach is a big part of the reason Klopp keeps reaching these games in the first place, of course, something he’s clearly very good at.

On Saturday, he will become one of nine managers to have taken charge of a team in at least three Champions League finals, and one of five to do so with multiple clubs. This is hardly history-making territory, but the teams Klopp has led to these matches stand out nonetheless.

The others in that group are Zinedine Zidane (who did it with Real Madrid), Carlo Ancelotti (Real and AC Milan), Jupp Heynckes (Real and Bayern Munich), Louis van Gaal (Ajax and Bayern Munich), Marcelo Lippi (Juventus), Fabio Capello (AC Milan), Ottmar Hitzfeld (Borussia Dortmund and Bayern) and Sir Alex Ferguson (Manchester United).

Along with (arguably, the ‘90s were a different era) van Gaal’s Ajax and Hitzfeld’s Dortmund, Klopp’s Dortmund and the Liverpool of 2017-18 are clear outliers among those teams, just as Klopp is a clear outlier among those managers.

All of which is just to say, more than any other coach in the world, he seems ideally suited to knockout football against elite opponents.

How, then, do we explain his record in finals?

The obvious answer, probably the correct answer, is that we don’t. The loss to Sevilla was the one match which was genuinely lopsided, but Klopp had been managing Liverpool at that point for a mere six months. Real outclassed the Reds last year, but only after Mohamed Salah was forced off with an injury, and even then Real needed two awful mistakes from Loris Karius (and a Gareth Bale wonder goal) to get over the line. The other two games were mostly even, a last-minute Arjen Robben finish and penalties the difference between winning and losing.

Point being: Strange things happen over 90 (or 120) minutes. The better team doesn’t always win. Trying to draw meaningful conclusions from such limited information is mostly a waste of time.

Ahead of Klopp’s sixth major final, however, there’s one thing we can say for certain: This one is not like the others.

Liverpool are the better team according to almost any metric you care to cite. They won both Premier League games between the sides this season (though the second match was mostly even, and decided by a freak Toby Alderweireld own goal). They finished 26 points above Tottenham in the league. They have fewer injuries to key players. They have a more talented starting XI and a deeper bench. They are more experienced on this stage. According to 538’s SPI rating, they have a 72 percent chance of winning on Saturday. For the first time since they faced Club Brugge at Wembley over 40 years ago, Liverpool are the big bad wolf on this stage, their opponents the plucky underdogs.

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This position is not without its neuroses, of course. At the end of a season in which they collected 97 league points, the third highest Premier League total ever, and finished second, Reds fans have had a lot of time to think about what it means to be good, possibly even great, and to lose anyway. How disappointing does the destination have to be to tarnish your memory of the journey?

Because of their astonishing Champions League semifinal comeback against Barcelona five days earlier, Liverpool fans didn’t have to seriously reckon with that question on the final day of the Premier League season, when their title challenge officially came to an end despite a win against Wolves, their ninth in a row to close out the campaign.

Perhaps it’s irrelevant now, but it’s tempting to wonder what the atmosphere at Anfield would have been like following that final league match had Barca seen out their first leg advantage. A side that collects 97 points and loses only once in the league all season deserve to be celebrated, and will be remembered fondly, but there’s no question the Reds’ Champions League heroics took the edge off what would otherwise have been a seriously disappointing, emotionally confusing day for the club. There will be no such second chance after Saturday.

Klopp has stressed throughout this season that this is just the beginning. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest his optimism is merited. Liverpool are one of the three best teams in the world, and their best players are almost all right at the beginning or in the middle of their primes, and on long-term contracts.

The club are, for the first time in at least a decade, a desirable landing spot for elite players around Europe. Perhaps most importantly, after the dark days of the Brendan Rodgers transfer committee, they’re also now among the best in the world not just at identifying talent, but at identifying talent that fits into what they’re trying to build on the pitch. Few clubs in Europe operate this intelligently.

All of this is true, and yet it’s still hard to imagine this version of Klopp’s Liverpool will ever get a better chance at a major trophy: One game against a side they’ve already beaten twice this season, a side they’ve lost to only once in nine matches since the German arrived at Anfield in 2015.

Tottenham are obviously a very good team, but for Liverpool to beat the champions of France, Germany and Spain on their way to Madrid, only to lose to a side that finished 26 points behind them in the English standings would be a crushing disappointment, worse than any Klopp has experienced in a major final.

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The suggestion that Klopp is a failure, a fraud, because he’s yet to win anything with Liverpool is patently ridiculous. It’s a particularly feeble criticism of a man who spends so much time talking about (and whose success owes so much to his deep belief in) the power of football as a communal experience — not about winning or celebrating or even commiserating, but simply feeling part of something bigger than yourself.

The idea that what he has built at Liverpool over the past four years — not just the best team Anfield has seen since the ‘80s, but a kind of energy and optimism that has felt for long stretches of the past 30 years like a figment of the imagination, a trick of the club’s collective memory — the idea that all of that will somehow be rendered meaningless by a single defeat is as dumb as it gets.

But football, as the Bard would say (or not), is a results business. In Klopp’s case, I would suggest this means his record in finals should cause us not to ignore what he’s achieved as Liverpool manager, but to admire the magic trick all the more — for its delicacy, for its impermanence, for the fact that, despite its failures, it has held so many people in its thrall for so long.

It’s true that what Klopp has done over the past four years is remarkable, but it’s also true that every season that passes without a trophy increases the pressure on a set of players who know they have far less time to enjoy this ride than the fans they’ve taken with them. That is the cruelty of this game, not what it takes, but what it makes you think you deserve, what it makes you think you need.

May as well win the f**king game, then.