“Saying goodbye is never pleasant, but saying goodbye without feeling sad or hurt, that would have meant that the moment was not good,” said Jürgen Klopp, “at peace” two days before his last in Liverpool.
The German coach, who arrived in October 2015, signed “I don’t know how many jerseys”, “had so many wonderful farewells”, that he spent “the most intense week” of his life, before his last match on Sunday at Anfield, he said on Friday during his final pre-match conference.
“That’s part of the thing, saying goodbye. I don’t think it’s ever pleasant, but saying goodbye without feeling sad or hurt would have meant that the time we spent together wasn’t good. So it was always clear that it would be difficult, and I know it will be difficult,” he said.
Klopp was amused by the number of ticket requests he received for his ‘der’ at Anfield and ‘apologised’ for not being able to respond to all the messages fans sent him.
“The emails, the letters, if I start responding to them, I will stay here until 2028. (…) I have read some of them, but not all,” he confided. “Yesterday I had LFC TV with me to read the letters. On one of them, I burst into tears.”
He got emotional about “all the stories behind it, what it meant to people, what we did in those nine years, and how their lives changed in those nine years. I know football can do that to people, to a city, and that’s what we did.”
“A decade in your life is huge, and I won’t forget a day of that time, because I found the best people I’ve ever met. And I did it for the best club I could have imagined, in a wonderful city, very, very, very special,” he added.
He said he was “as close as possible” to the “majority of the inhabitants of this city”, because of “their way of being, their way of managing life, their way of welcoming you, their way of treating you “. “I am completely at peace, it is wonderful to know that I have spent a large part of my life here.”
When you are a manager at Liverpool, “before you set foot on the pitch, people love you, until you disappoint them. We never really disappointed them,” said the coach, winner of the Premier League, national cups and Champions League, among others.
