Culture
Jurgen Klopp’s move to Red Bull seems surprising but it shouldn’t be
As Liverpool’s manager, Jurgen Klopp did not like long meetings. Rather than sitting around, poring over the latest big decision, he would regularly have important conversations in the canteen of the training ground while eating his lunch.
Klopp was anything but formal, yet Mike Gordon — the president of Liverpool’s owner, Fenway Sports Group, a man who also operates with the sort of casual confidence you normally get from a dot com entrepreneur — placed the German on the same level as a corporate leader. He was, according to Gordon, “someone you would choose to run your company”, as he told Raphael Honigstein in his book, Bring the Noise.
Klopp’s new role as Red Bull’s global head of soccer, which he starts at the beginning of next year, potentially offers that kind of overarching responsibility. As a statement from Red Bull explained, the day-to-day running of the five clubs it owns, sponsors or has a minority stake in will not concern him but he will be helping sporting directors, scouting departments and coaches, ensuring Red Bull’s “philosophy” runs through each of its interests.
The decision, which arrived suddenly — nine years and a day since his arrival at Liverpool — might, on the face of it, be surprising, given how drained Klopp seemed when he departed Anfield in May. Back then, he said he had run out of energy and needed a total rest from football management.
Jurgen Klopp is given a guard of honour after his last match with Liverpool (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
He had left Borussia Dortmund with a similar message at the end of the 2014-15 season, before quickly landing on Merseyside after a summer largely spent playing tennis.
Klopp finds it hard to sit still for any length of time, but his new job at Red Bull invites a slower and less stressful route back into the game he loves — and, in all likelihood, a precursor to the German national team job he has long coveted, given that reports in the country suggest a get-out clause exists in his contract.
Gordon’s comments about Klopp’s capabilities were made in 2017 and in the years that followed, as Liverpool became more and more successful, his power grew. With that, the support network that had also contributed to Liverpool’s rise was dismantled. Klopp was not running Liverpool because the most important financial decisions were still made by Gordon, yet he was the public face of a multi-national company, and the football department became his. It explains why Liverpool now employs a head coach rather than a manager and the club’s sporting director leads strategic and staffing decisions. It would be good to hear from Klopp on whether he thinks taking on too much contributed to his burnout.
Perhaps the Red Bull gig gives him the opportunity to understand a world he is curious about. Last year, there was some talk of him enrolling on a sporting directorship course, something his representatives did not confirm or deny. Unlike at Liverpool, he will be able to do his job without the pressures of preparing a team, matches, and press conferences. In an Instagram post on Tuesday, he indicated that this treadmill had stopped him from learning as much as he would like. From here, if he ends up taking charge of Germany, he will surely understand better the responsibilities that come with different stations of leadership.
Klopp is not the first former Liverpool manager to take on this particular title at Red Bull. In 2012, after Gerard Houllier was forced into retirement due to deteriorating health, he met with the founder of the company, Dietrich Mateschitz, who turned up for a meeting in Austria on a motorbike, wearing jeans.
Quite how influential Houllier became depends on the impression of who you speak to. While he would later claim that he played a leading role in the organisation’s attempt to bring Sadio Mane into its fold from Metz in 2012, those closer to its running suggest his responsibilities were closer to that of an ambassador: turning up in various countries, shaking hands with partners, and occasionally whispering advice.
Will Klopp’s duties even be as all-encompassing as they might sound? He is certainly useful for Red Bull’s brand, one which has needed a touch of legitimacy ever since it started investing in football in 2005.
Houllier was eight years out of Liverpool by the point his involvement started, while the Red Bull group had not yet produced a team talented enough to qualify for the group stage of the Champions League. Though its club in Leipzig has since made it through to that round of the competition in seven of the last eight seasons, the tale of a team rising up from the regional divisions has not exactly been met with encouragement in Germany, where the rules lean in favour of fan representation and significant outside investment is treated with suspicion.
Dortmund fans protest before a game against RB Leipzig in 2017 (TF-Images/TF-Images via Getty Images)
At Dortmund and Liverpool, Klopp harnessed the authenticity of each club’s following, occasionally taking sideswipes at the artificial elements of rivals and other places. Had he been in charge of Dortmund in 2016 when they faced a recently promoted RB Leipzig in the Bundesliga for the first time, it would have been interesting to hear his thoughts on the actions of the Dortmund supporters who boycotted the fixture in protest at their opponents’ ownership model.
“Dortmund makes money, but we do it to play football,” said Jan-Henrik Gruszecki, one of the protest’s organisers, told The Guardian. “But Leipzig plays football to sell a product and a lifestyle. That’s the difference.”
Klopp, therefore, may have chipped his reputation by aligning himself with the fizzy drinks manufacturer — the antithesis of what he once represented. Perhaps this will be determined, particularly in Germany, by how visible he is while on Red Bull duty.
Klopp will be removed from day-to-day coaching at Red Bull (Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)
Back in England, the company has a minority stake in Leeds United, having taken over as the club’s shirt sponsor. “The ambition to bring Leeds United back to the Premier League and establish themselves in the best football league in the world fits very well with Red Bull,” said Oliver Mintzlaff in May. Mintzlaff, Red Bull’s corporate projects CEO, played a significant role in Klopp’s appointment.
Klopp suggested on his exit from Liverpool in the same month that he would never manage another Premier League club. But it is not too hard to imagine Leeds back in the top flight soon, and if that happens — and Red Bull lends its technical support, as expected — it will be fascinating to see where Klopp, if he remains in the position, fits in. Might he end up helping plot, even in some small way, Liverpool’s downfall come matchday?
GO DEEPER
Marathe exclusive: ‘This club will not become Leeds Red Bulls – they understand that’
Immediately, many have chortled at the suggestion that one of his first tasks might involve the sacking of Pep Lijnders, his former assistant at Liverpool, whose Red Bull Salzburg team were thrashed by Brest and Sturm Graz in successive games last week.
There is no plan to remove the Dutch coach, but Klopp does not begin with Red Bull officially until January. Given how close they were at Liverpool, with Lijnders entrusted to lead training sessions, it seems unthinkable that Klopp, if asked, would suggest making a change. Instead, surely Klopp’s arrival at the Red Bull stable increases the chances of him surviving.
For the time being, Klopp is removed from the grind of the daily management, with this role seeming to strike a neat balance of involvement at the elite end through a new challenge, but without the pressure, and scrutiny, that comes from being a manager. Whether Klopp can resist the buzz of the latter in the long term remains to be seen.
(Top photos: Getty Images)
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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