Jon Smith, the agent who once represented the late, great Diego Maradona, has insisted that Jurgen Klopp is bowing out of Liverpool in the right manner by leaving while his stock remains stratospherically high.
The 71-year-old is a self-proclaimed ‘hardened Arsenal fan’, but even he admitted that part of him would ‘be smiling’ if the German were to win the Premier League title in his final season at Anfield.
In his latest column for CaughtOffside, Smith wrote: “I think Jurgen Klopp’s timing is immaculate. He’s rebuilt for a second or third time, a bit like Sir Alex Ferguson did, and he obviously felt that he didn’t want to have to go through a whole other three-year rebuild.
“Jurgen may yet walk away with two, three or four trophies – what a way to go. I salute him for quitting at the top and I sincerely hope there’s no other reason.”
The agent continued: “If he wants to come back he’d be more than welcome anywhere and everywhere, so I think it’s a perfect exit.
“Even a hardened Arsenal fan like me would be smiling if he won the league again. That’s how much he means to football in this country. Whoever comes in to replace him is on a hiding to nothing unless Liverpool don’t win anything this season.
“If Klopp wins nothing, he’ll still be lauded and people will say ‘it just didn’t quite happen this year.’ If he wins two or more competitions, then I wouldn’t want to be that person coming in. To follow that would be very, very difficult.”
It’s one of the greatest testaments to Klopp’s greatness within English football that even an avid Arsenal supporter in Smith would be happy to see the German winning the Premier League in his final season at Liverpool, despite the two clubs being in direct competition with each other for the title.
It mightn’t be a view which is commonly held among other Gunners fans with a less than cerebral opinion of the 56-year-old and the team he manages, but any football follower who’s not helplessly blinkered would readily agree that the Reds boss has been an exceptional addition to this country’s top flight.
Very few managers in the modern era get to walk away from a job on their own terms, and fewer still can do that on a high note, but it’s a luxury that Klopp has long since earned at Anfield for everything he’s done for the club since his arrival in October 2015.
The dream scenario is that he replicates Ferguson in winning the Premier League in his final season in charge, and hopefully might have a few other trophies to go along with it as Liverpool remain in the hunt for an incredible quadruple.
Fairytale scenarios don’t often come true in football, especially in this avaricious age where money has destroyed much of the sport’s romanticism, but it would be most appropriate for the German’s time at LFC to end in glory rather than anticlimax.