Former Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp admitted that he is unlikely to return to any club’s dugout but couldn’t promise to have the same opinion in a few years’ time.
The revered tactician ended a near nine-year spell on Merseyside in the summer of 2024, citing fatigue after more than two decades of almost uninterrupted management positions at Mainz, Borussia Dortmund and then Liverpool.
Klopp never claimed that he was retiring, although his appointment as Red Bull’s global head of soccer came as something of a surprise. The Champions League-winning coach has been repeatedly linked with several top-flight positions, most notably last April when he was tipped to replace Carlo Ancelotti at Real Madrid.
That always unlikely scenario never came to pass and Klopp has done his best to quash any future speculation early. “I don’t want to work as a coach anymore,” Klopp emphatically told . When pushed on the definitive nature of that statement, the German provided himself with some wiggle room.
“That’s what I think,” he clarified. “But you don’t know. I’m 58. If I started again at 65, everybody will say, ‘You said you’ll never do it again!’ Er, sorry, I thought 100% (when I said it)! That is what I think now. I don’t miss anything.”
Reflecting on his decision to step down—which was announced to widespread astonishment in January 2024—Klopp outlined: “I finished at Liverpool at 57. I was 100% certain and sure that I will not finish working. I had a break for seven months or so. I enjoyed it—wow!”
“The thought was not that I would do this until the end of my life,” Klopp explained. He pledged to go “25 years at full throttle without looking left and right” when he took on his first managerial role at Mainz in 2001.
“I missed nothing in my life because I never thought about it. So during almost 25 years, I twice went to a wedding—one of them was mine and the other one was two months ago. In 25 years, I have been four times at the cinema—all in the last eight weeks. It’s now nice to be able to do it.
“I was in so many different countries as a coach and I saw nothing of them; just the hotel, the stadium or the training ground. Nothing else. I did not miss it, but I would now.”
