There aren’t many complaints with Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool apart from them not having picked up a trophy. The Reds play a fantastic brand of football, the players seem to be getting along really well and the manager has been brilliant for us from day one.
Liverpool have never looked this good, at least in the Premier League era, and we seem to be getting better with each season under the German.
Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane, Virgil van Dijk and Andy Robertson have been stars since Klopp took over but a surprising aspect is the lack of quality Bundesliga signings under the manager.
Liverpool haven’t made wholesale changes to the side in one go and Klopp has slowly worked to get some quality players in.
This isn’t a criticism of the German manager but it is a little weird as to why we have not been able to tap into the Bundesliga talent available.
The only players we have brought from the league are Ragnar Klavan, Loris Karius, Joel Matip and Naby Keita.
Out of the quartet, Karius and Klavan have joined other sides while Matip is injury-prone and is finding it tough to get into the first-team. And Keita has only just arrived after a big-money move from RB Leipzig.
Although Matip came on a free, Karius and Klavan were economical signings but the trio couldn’t and haven’t made a positive mark at Anfield yet.
Klopp had one of the most exciting teams in the Bundesliga with Borussia Dortmund and he has built something similar with Liverpool too, albeit with greater spending.
When Gerard Houllier was managing the Reds, we had a sizeable French/French-speaking contingent. We had a similar situation with Rafa Benitez, who had a number of Spanish-speaking players.
Klopp, on the other hand, has brought in players from the Serie A, Ligue 1, Premier League and the Bundesliga but most of his bargain signings have been from Germany.
It is difficult to get all the signings firing on all cylinders and there will be hits and misses during a manager’s tenure at a club.
However, Klopp’s Bundesliga buys haven’t been great and it is a shame as to why we haven’t cracked that market yet.
Klopp purchased some great talents like Robert Lewandowski, Julian Weigl, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Marco Reus, Sven Bender and Ilkay Gundogan at Dortmund and a number of them were bought from other Bundesliga clubs.
We haven’t seen that from Klopp at Liverpool yet but it must be noted that the German spent seven-plus years at Dortmund. Hopefully, he will have time to find such transfer gems from the Bundesliga and make us a force to reckon with for years on end.
