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Playing football and watching it are two entirely different pursuits, with one not necessarily having anything to do with the other, especially here in the States. You can watch and not play, play and not watch. Do one before the other or both simultaneously. Pick up the latter once you’ve become too old for the former.
I played. All of my young life. I tried out every sport as a kid, but soccer — which is what I called it then, long before supporting Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool got me to start calling it football — was the one that stuck. Didn’t know why then, still don’t now.
Baseball? Too boring. Football (the American kind)? Hurt too much. Basketball? Well, actually, I wish I learned to play basketball, one of the few you can play past your 40s.
But I never watched. Not for a while, at least. Not until 2017, when I was already midway through my 20s, an odd but exciting time to develop a new hobby. I always wanted to follow the Premier League but choosing a team always felt disingenuous. Given the nature of the league, with six teams so clearly financially superior to the rest, arbitrarily choosing one feels like front running no matter how you slice it.
I’m one of the lucky ones — my Dad worked for a company that was based in Liverpool at the time, narrowing the decision down from 20 possible choices to just two: Liverpool and Everton.
Already saddled with the misery of the New York Mets and Jets in my life, Klopp’s Liverpool were the obvious choice, particularly considering they weren’t the all-conquering force he’d develop them into. It was their first appearance in the Champions League since 2014/15. Prior to that, 2009/10.
Mohamed Salah and later Virgil Van Dijk had just arrived at the club. They played exciting football but were not yet elite. Their matches ran overboard with thrills but with them came a lack of control. But this is what allowed me to pick Liverpool, as I felt I was hitching my wagon to a horse that was just beginning to find its legs. I could hop on board without feeling like I’ve jumped onto a bandwagon. I’m one of the lucky ones.
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Even then — and I can remember the exact first match I watched, the one where Salah scored his Puskas-winning goal — never could I have imagined that what would follow would be the best years of my sports fandom life, filled with seemingly routine displays of electricity, drama, and passion.
I bought my father and me home kits that Christmas to give us something to bond over as we both got older. It worked. He watches every match now.
The last time I saw my Grandfather before he died, we watched Divock Origi pounce on Jordan Pickford’s stupidity and put the ball into the net with his shoulder after a couple of bounces along the crossbar. Screamed so loud when they beat Barcelona by four that multiple neighbors complained.
Watched the Champions League final in New York City and nearly passed out after Salah slotted the pen, both because of the excitement and the sheer heat. We almost got tattoos, too. Luckily, we didn’t. I’m one of the lucky ones, remember. I flew across the Atlantic to Liverpool alone because my love of a team became my enchantment for a city, for a people.
Kissed my friend on the forehead when Salah megged de Gea, the night fans knew they’d finally won the league. Then COVID came and we had nothing. And then football returned and it was everything. I remember walking to my buddy’s apartment, streets as eerily empty as we’d come to expect them, to drink the night away after the club’s first Premier League title was clinched. What I don’t remember, though, is what time I eventually went to bed. It was a late one.
Spent my 30th birthday with my Dad in a bar, ordering a beer every time Liverpool put one into United’s net during their famous 7-0 win at Anfield.
What that means, what that amounts to, is far more than wins in a history book or trophies on a shelf: they’re touchstones of my life, foundational memories that remind me who I was, where I was, when I was. Memories with friends and family, parents and pals, girlfriends who became fiances who became wives.
Football is, as Klopp himself has put it, “the most important of the least important things” — and these are the things that add flavor and color and clarity to life: music, cinema, art, sport, and so on.
And at the center of it all was Klopp, taking the dreams of himself and millions around the world behind him, and manifesting them into reality by sheer force of personality and brilliance and will. He won it all. He engineered nights people will never forget. He forged memories that’ll be eagerly shared with the following generation, prefaced with the unfortunate reality that it’ll likely never be that good again.
There are, more than most ideas, virtually endless quotes that verbalize the phenomenon of the glory days, of not knowing you’re in the good times until they’re gone. Inevitably, and especially, when it comes to Jurgen Klopp, that’s undeniable. The halcyon days of ‘heavy metal football’ will feel endless and out of sight in our rearview from now until forever.
But that was the brilliance of the manager, and more importantly, the man: Klopp made every day feel momentous and worth remembering so deeply that eventually — after those days became weeks, those weeks became years, and those years became your life — they ultimately become who you are.
He’ll never read this, but nevertheless, he knows it. In his soul. Perhaps more than anyone. Because he’s been saying it all along. And hopefully, you’ve been smart enough to have been paying attention along the way. Because football is, inherently, about winning. But more than that — ideologically, philosophically, spiritually, romantically — it’s about living. Spilt drinks, afternoons that turn into evenings, bets won, voices lost, moments made.
“If life should be judged at the end, when we stand in front of the (heavenly) door, they ask, ‘Did you win something or not?’ That would be really strange,” Klopp once said.
“They should ask, ‘Did you try everything to improve the place you have been, the house you have lived in, the mood, the love?’ And I will say, ‘Yes, I tried it everyday.'”
Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool has become part of who I am. I’m one of the lucky ones.