Gooner Daily

…I want a brand new house on the episode of cribs,

I want a bathroom I can play baseball in,

and a king-sized bed big enough for 10 plus me… – Rockstar (Nickleback)

Human beings, naturally, want the very best for themselves. No one wants to suffer, especially when there are better opportunities out there. Let’s try a couple of case studies out there. Enter Emmanuel Adebayor, the Togolese forward that joined Arsenal from AS Monaco on a £35,000-per-week contract. After a very good campaign, he was rewarded with an £80,000-per-week deal before he began his flirtations with AC Milan. He eventually sealed a move to Manchester City under the leadership of Mark Hughes and he received a pay rise of £170,000-per-week and he actually scored a couple of goals for the club, before Roberto Mancini came around and told him that he was surplus to requirements. A loan deal was struck with Tottenham but he was still earning that fat pay check as both teams ‘split the bill’. Manchester City didn’t want him, but he was still under contract. Bad for the club, perfect for Ade.

Playing football is worlds away from being a football manager, and I’m not writing about the simulation video game where everything you know can be done at the simple click of a button. In FM, you get a ‘feel’ of what it is to be a manager and I will not forget that story of how a 21-year-old lad, Vugar Guloglan oglu Huseynzade, got a managerial job in a real football club in Azerbaijan, FC Baku, after because of his Football Manager ‘experience’.

Things are very different in the football world. There are chairmen like Roman Abramovich, that is ‘never really satisfied’ with the work his managers put and since he joined Chelsea in 2003, he has changed managers like babies change diapers. There are men like Silvio Berlusconi that love AC Milan with all his heart but ‘challenges’ off the pitch has seen the club let go of their star players for big bucks and replaced them with some rather mediocre folks. There are the Arab folks like Khaldoon al-Mubarak that would give his manager a blank cheque to sign any and everyone he wants but if he doesn’t match expectations, he’s out like he never got in.

Where I’m I heading with all this? Football clubs are run with different models so it’s up to the manager being hired to adapt to those changes and bring out the best with the players at his disposal. Martin O’Neill fell out with the Aston Villa board after their sale of James Milner to Manchester City,  David Moyes spent 11 years at Everton and worked with a shoe-string budget but things were different for the Scot at Manchester United (we all know how things panned out for him at Old Trafford) and the examples go on and on.

Which brings me to a certain fiery young manager, Jurgen Klopp. Like Ryan Giggs, Tony Adams, Rogerio Ceni, Francesco Totti, Xavi Hernandez, Steven Gerrard, Klopp was a one-club man and he played his entire career at FSV Mainz 05 from 1989 to 2001, playing 337 league games ansd scoring 52 goals. His first stint at management was with Mainz, where he guided the club to their first appearance in the Bundesliga as well as qualification to the 2005-06 UEFA Cup. He suffered the ignominy of relegation with Mainz in 2007 and resigned the season after when he couldn’t bring the club back to the Bundesliga.

Dortmund approached Klopp in 2008 and he progressed well with the team before making history with the team in the 2011-12 Bundesliga season. 81 points accrued by Borussia Dortmund was the greatest points tally ever amassed in Bundesliga history and the 47 points earned in the second half of the season also set a new record. Borussia Dortmund’s 25 league wins equaled Bayern Munich’s 1972–73 milestone, while their 28-league match unbeaten sequence was the best ever recorded in a single German top-flight season. Things were going on well for the team but the performances of some of the players caught the eye with Shinji Kagawa moving to Manchester United. In recent seasons, Klopp rose to prominence in the Bundesliga and he shifted his focus to Europe, were he locked horns with Bayern Munich in the 2012-13 finals but lost 2-1.

Dortmund continued to lose star players with Mario Goetze and Robert Lewandowski moving over to Bavaria to play for the biggest team in the land, Bayern Munich. Players like Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Ciro Immobile were signed to fill in the void and they have performed admirably but this season, things have turned for the worst at Dortmund. The club has suffered major injuries to key players and their from in the Bundesliga has been downright shocking. The team had lost 11 of their first 19 league games that saw them rooted to the bottom of the table before they picked up some form to record five wins in seven that saw them move up to 10th.

In the wake of two successive league defeats to Bayern Munich and Borussia Monchengladach, coupled with other niggling issues best known to Captain America and Chuck Norris, Klopp has requested to end his reign as manager of Dortmund with three years left on his contract,

“I always said in that moment where I believe I am not the perfect coach anymore for this extraordinary club, I will say so. I believe this is the right decision at the right time. I have in the last weeks and days asked myself if I was still the right manager and I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t answer with a yes.”

“I have not had any contact with any other clubs, nor have I any plans to take a sabbatical.

“I just wanted to make my decision known now so that the club can plan for the future. I chose this time to announce it, because in the last few years, some player decisions were made late and there was no time to react.”

A classic tale of a captain putting on his life jacket and jumping overboard because his ship is about to capsize. Maybe he wasn’t going to stay at Dortmund beyond his initial contract because he’s one of them ‘sought after’ coaches as the papers would put it but there was still something to play for in the league, as well as some hope for next season. Klopp’s side are going to take on Bayern in the DFB Pokal semifinals and the side can still fight for a Europa League finish.

Many have linked with the Arsenal job in the past and as expected, Piers Morgan took to Twitter to share his thoughts about Klopp taking over from Wenger. Some fans though.

More on the Reading game in the coming days.
Sayonara

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