Jurgen Klopp: ‘Don’t tell them I can walk on water’ says Liverpool's new messiah

'After all this hype, we can cool down and talk about football'

(2015 Liverpool FC)

“If you make me out to be Jesus and the next day you say he can’t walk on water, there is a problem,” said Jürgen Klopp, who is well aware that the greatest threat he faces at Liverpool is the overwhelming sense of what he might achieve. “I can’t walk on water,” he smiles. “I dive.”

Klopp’s mantra when arriving on Merseyside on a private jet was that it was not how you came to a club but how you left it. When he quit Borussia Dortmund, exhausted by a seven-year struggle to overhaul Bayern Munich, the fans in the Westfalenstadion unfurled a vast banner that read: “Danke Jürgen.”

There were a couple of banners on the Kop for Brendan Rodgers, but they had disappeared long before his dismissal last Sunday. Generally, the Liverpool managers who have come to Anfield with the greatest expectations – Graeme Souness and Kenny Dalglish second time around – ended their reigns messily. Bill Shankly appeared a managerial mediocrity when he arrived to bind the wounds of a club who had been knocked out of the FA Cup by Worcester City.

“Expectations are important in life,” said Klopp. “After all this hype, we can cool down and talk about football. But expectations are one of the most important things we have to talk about.

“Liverpool fans have been waiting for so many years that I can understand they are losing patience, but it doesn’t work like that. Some things will change, because I am different to other managers, but we cannot change the whole world in one day.

“I don’t want to use my three-year contract as an excuse and after that three years say, ‘Well, now we can rise up’. No, I want to change as many things as soon as possible, but it is really important that we are patient enough to be successful.”

During his unveiling at Anfield, Klopp was constantly reminded what a good fit Liverpool seemed. Like Borussia Dortmund, they have a vast fan base who celebrated winning a European Cup a decade before his appointment. Their great enemy is one of European football’s old aristocracy: for Bayern Munich, read Manchester United.

And yet Klopp was keen to stress that there was no special bond between himself and Liverpool. They had merely called at the right moment, when, four months after stepping down at Dortmund, the prospect of more walks with his dog, more games of tennis, more time at home, was beginning to pall.

His agent, Marc Kosicke, said he received the first phone call from Liverpool immediately after Rodgers’s dismissal on Sunday afternoon. “Naturally, we had a few questions for Liverpool,” he said. “But what I do think is that Jürgen wouldn’t have committed himself so quickly to any other club.”

Klopp reflected: “I left Dortmund in the best way you could leave a club. I did the same with Mainz. For the second time I could say, ‘Thank you, great time.’ Then for the first time I could reflect how big those two Bundesliga titles were. Before, I never had time.

“The feeling was that if somebody calls me, then I’d see how I feel, and when FSG [Liverpool’s owners] called, it was a good moment for me and my family.”

There was an expectation that Klopp might be tempted to wait to succeed Pep Guardiola at Bayern when the Catalan’s contract expires in June. “No, I don’t wait a minute for anything,” he said. “No, really, I am not this type of person. I don’t wait.”