Jurgen Klopp is not anticipating any teething problems when Julian Ward replaces Michael Edwards as Liverpool’s sporting director.
Jurgen Klopp said: “My relationship with Julian Ward is very good. I have known Jules for a long time. He has been at the club longer than I have, so I have known him since day one or two at the club. He is an expert at all things around player scouting, transfers, all these kinds of things. He worked very closely with Michael Edwards in the past, so I don’t think there will be any kind of rusty things to overcome. It’s just a normal thing in life and business, people leave the position they were in for a few years and then someone has to take over. In this specific case, the person who takes over did parts of the job already in the past. That is how it is when you get promoted from assistant sporting director to the sporting director and I think it will be a very smooth takeover.”
Edwards has helped change the way the sporting director model is viewed in English football, having helped bring a clutch of players to Anfield who have powered the club’s success over the last couple of years. The former Tottenham analyst joined in 2012 and worked as a technical director before he was given his current title on Klopp’s watch in November 2016 and the Reds manager detailed just how important Edwards has been to him behind the scenes.
Jurgen Klopp added: “If I would have come here 10 years ago and I told you the sporting director is really important, you would have told me then to go back to Germany and do that there. It’s still a completely different role to what it is in Germany. In Germany, a sporting director sits on the bench, in Germany the sporting director is talking in press conferences before and after the game. That has never happened here in England. The CEO of a club speaks in Germany. I think you all saw Karl-Heinz Rummenigge or Hans-Joachim Watzke in their positions (at Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund) in Germany, they all did that and it never happens in England, so there’s still a difference. When I came here, I wanted a sporting director and I think that was the reason why Michael, who had a similar job at the time, ended up getting the job because I don’t want to deal on a daily basis with players’ agents and I really think that takes away energy from the really important stuff I had to do. I speak to players constantly, I do that, but it’s not the right thing that a manager speaks to players about contracts, in my understanding it is not [right]. Even when a player is very important to you and you gave him the offer he didn’t want to hear so he says ‘OK, can we do this and that’. I don’t think these conversations should happen between the sports and football people, you need someone in between that. For the player, it is the agent, for the club, it is the sporting director from my understanding. Apart from that, I’ve done what I’ve always done. We speak about players. In my first press conference I spoke about the ‘transfer committee’ so that worked out pretty well since then, I have to say, but it’s still the same. It’s an important job, I really think that, but it has no influence on my job. When it was like this, in the past, the managers did all these talks with the players’ agents, my day is pretty full, I don’t know exactly when they did it. But maybe I am not skilled for that and I am the only one who thinks it is not right to do it like that, but for us it works out how we do it now.”
