Liverpool are the Goldilocks club – Jurgen Klopp has brought exactly the right amount of success | OneFootball

We originally published this two days before Jurgen Klopp’s public announcement that this season will be his last at Liverpool. Nice to know the great man is on the same wavelength as us. Liverpool have won exactly the right number of trophies under his leadership.

Sometimes ideas hit you when you’re not really expecting them.

Take yesterday, for example. We were merrily tapping away at some tish and fipsy about Harry Kane and Bayern Munich and how funny it would be if he went there and didn’t win anything. Was it all just an excuse to ask in the headline ‘Does Harry Kane need to leave Bayern Munich in order to win trophies’? We prefer not to speak.

But as a throwaway line in there we noted how if you chuck in tinpot stuff like Super Cups and the like, Bayern have won over 40 pots and pans in the 21st century alone. This, we noted without much thought, is too many. It strikes us as self-evidently true: no football club should be winning on average something close to two trophies a year. Because that’s just all a bit pointless, really, isn’t it. Where’s the joy in that? Where’s the soul? You need some lows to really enjoy the highs.

Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe the correct amount of trophies for a club to win truly is ‘all of the trophies all of the time, please’. Certainly, we can see why that would be what clubs themselves would like. We absolutely see why it might be a stretch target for a club – better to fail aiming high and so forth.

But we’re really, really confident it’s not the right amount of success to be the most enjoyable. There’s definitely a Goldilocks amount of trophy-snaffling that is just right. But where exactly is that sweet spot?

If it’s not Bayern with their Bundesliga monopoly, it’s also definitely not your Tottenhams or your Newcastles or your Evertons with their infamous trophy droughts either.

There’s a good-sized middle ground in there of clubs who must be having more fun than either end of the trophy-hoarding spectrum.

Maybe it’s Real Madrid and their run of Champions League titles. That definitely looked good fun. We can absolutely see the argument for Manchester City’s last 15 years being improbably joyous for what genuinely was a ‘long-suffering’ fanbase over the previous decades. A rare – and admittedly questionably sourced – example of genuine and sustained long suffering being followed by a period of staggering success. You’re absolutely going to revel in that. And ticking off the Champions League was huge.

But that’s also what makes us think City aren’t quite the right answer either. If you wanted to be miserably glass-half-empty about it, the novelty of the Champions League success only sharpens the focus on how much less fun winning a trophy becomes when it loses that. Another Premier League pot, is it? Nice one, chuck it with the others.

After giving this more thought than is particularly necessary or certainly healthy, we’ve found ourselves coming round to a conclusion that has frankly surprised us. And that conclusion is this: the best football club to support over the last 10 years or so, pound for pound, has been Liverpool.

Liverpool are that Goldilocks club. Heavens actually help us, but This Means More might actually have been right all along. Not in the way Liverpool meant it, obviously. Their success doesn’t mean more because they’re Liverpool. But it does mean more because of the nature of it.

Think about it. Liverpool have won everything they’ve tried their hands at during the Jurgen Klopp Era. But they’ve done it without those successes ever becoming routine or predictable in any way. Those 30 years waiting for a league title only made it sweeter. That heartbreaking and near-blameless near-miss the year before only made it sweeter.

The 2019 Champions League success meant that season still ended on an enormous high anyway. How perfect is that? You get the heartbreak that tees up the best feeling ever for the following season, and you still end up with the biggest prize in the game to tide you over anyway. Stick your trebles and threepeats up your arse, frankly. This is the good stuff.

Now, people will point to the nature of Liverpool’s long-awaited Premier League title win in 2020, about how it came about in the Covid era, and how rival fans like to convince themselves as much as anyone that it comes with some kind of asterisk. This only makes it better, to be honest. Rival fans’ salty tears? One of the best bits of any success, surely?

This year Liverpool may well win the Europa League. It’s not the biggest thing around, but for Liverpool it still has that novelty factor. It would tick off another, final new trophy on the list for Klopp and his team. That’s better, isn’t it? Winning lots of different trophies rather than the same one or two over and over again?

We’ve decided that it is. Liverpool have got another semi-final tonight, and if they win that it sets up a Carabao final against Chelsea. You can’t get more novel than that. All right, bad example.

But winning all of the things some of the time hits different to winning most of the things all of the time. We’d take Liverpool’s last six or seven years over anyone’s. Because it has never been normalised. Because of what happened in the years before. It really has meant more.