Jurgen Klopp gives his verdict on Todd Boehly’s NFL-inspired suggestions for English football

Liverpool gaffer Jurgen Klopp stunned by all-star suggestions by Chelsea owner Todd Boehly

Earlier this week, Chelsea owner Todd Boehly made a suggestion of an All-Star game between the Northern and the Southern clubs of the country. Drawing inspiration from American Sports, Boehly believes that something of this sort could generate more revenue. (h/t Sky Sports

“People are talking about more money for the pyramid, in the MLB All-Star game this year we made 200m dollars from a Monday and a Tuesday. So we’re thinking we could do a North versus South All-Star game for the Premier League, for whatever the pyramid needed quite easily.”

Just like the playoffs in the Championship, Boehly wants to see something similar in the Premier League as well for the bottom four teams to determine who will stay in the division and who shall go down.

It becomes easy to understand that Boehly does not come from somewhere football is not so prevalent as his comments do make sense from a business perspective. But one cannot imagine Everton players and Liverpool players together alongside Manchester City and Man United players. The concept of derbies and rivalries is very massive in England.

Jurgen Klopp on Todd Boehly’s comments

This proposal left Jurgen Klopp rather “stunned”. He pointed out the factor of fatigue in such situations. Two of Liverpool’s games stood called off owing to the Queen’s death and the dates of the rescheduled fixtures should be out sooner than later.

“He forgets in American sports these players have four-month breaks so they are quite happy they can do a little bit of sport in these breaks. It’s completely different in football.”

Notably, one of Liverpool’s deferred fixtures is against Chelsea itself. The other one is Wolverhampton Wanderers. With a World Cup slated for November later this year, it becomes too tough and exhausting for the players to readapt and play just these two fixtures amidst what is already a tight schedule.

Klopp has always stood for players’ demands when it comes to having a large number of fixtures in a tightly packed year and it was no different in this scenario as well. Very recently, Gary Neville took to Twitter as well to disapprove of Boehly’s idea and calls investments from the US a “danger to the fabric of the game”.

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Nevertheless, an All-Star fixture is something which is not very football-like in its features, but it might bring the fans something new to talk about. Much like the controversial European Super League, this idea sees opposition much before something concrete has happened.