We’ve known for the last month that Jurgen Klopp will be departing Liverpool at the end of this season, and reports on Tuesday evening suggest that another long-serving Anfield figure could be leaving for a new club in the summer.
According to HITC, Pep Lijnders is ready to move on from the Reds and become the new manager of Ajax, who’ve spoken to the 41-year-old over the job opportunity, with current coach John van’t Schip holding the reins for the rest of this campaign before reverting to a technical staff role in Amsterdam.
While LFC chiefs have told Klopp’s assistant that there’s a place for him on Merseyside even after the German departs, they won’t stand in his way if he prefers to pursue managerial opportunities elsewhere, something on which the Dutchman is reportedly keen.
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Aside from a four-month spell in charge of NEC Nijmegen in 2018, Lijnders has been Liverpool’s assistant manager since the summer of 2015, even pre-dating Klopp’s arrival at Anfield by three months.
It’d certainly be strange to look at the home dugout next season and not see either of them among the coaching staff, but the 41-year-old may well view the German’s impending exit as the right time for him to try his luck at management again.
If Ajax were to hire the Dutchman as their new boss, it’d see him reunite with Jordan Henderson, with the pair having worked together on Merseyside for a number of years before the midfielder’s bombshell (and short-lived) transfer to Al-Ettifaq last July.
Lijnders’ previous managerial stint at NEC might’ve gone as he’d have liked, but a lengthy apprenticeship under Klopp may well have given him the desire and the attributes to become a number one elsewhere from next term.
If he’s handed the reins in Amsterdam with a club who’ve been champions of Europe four times, that’d be an enormous feather in his cap, and we’d love to see him making a strong fist of it should he be given that enviable opportunity.