Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has guided Liverpool to within touching distance of clinching an unprecedented quadruple of trophies in 2022, and the German could become the best Premier League manager of all time should he be victorious.
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The argument of ‘greatest ever’ in football can open up many avenues of debate, but for Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp, staking a real claim to the ‘best ever Premier League coach’ crown is a reality this season.
Trophy run-in
Klopp has the chance to complete an unprecedented quadruple this season after guiding the Reds to EFL Cup victory in February with a win over Chelsea, who are incidentally also their final rivals in the FA Cup on May 14, a game in which they will likely be favorites to complete a domestic cup double.
The Anfield outfit also briefly sat top of the Premier League pile after a 4-0 thrashing of Manchester United on Tuesday, but were swiftly replaced by Manchester City, whom they now trail by just one point in second place and could still catch Pep Guardiola’s men with six games each left to play.
Only tidy but second-rate Spanish side Villlarreal sit between Klopp and the Champions League final where they could meet either Man City or Real Madrid should they make it past Unai Emery’s team in the upcoming semi-final stage.
Should Klopp and Liverpool be victorious in leading Liverpool through these fixtures and to four-in-a-season glory, he will reach a promised land never before conquered by the manager of a Premier League team.
History-makers
Despite there being no manager of an English side to previously win a quad, if there’s anyone who knows a thing or two about four-in-a-row trophy hauls, it’s the man with whom Klopp has struck up one of modern football’s greatest rivalries: Pep Guardiola.
The Man City manager achieved a quadruple of La Liga, Champions League, Copa del Rey, and Supercopa de Espana trophy haul in the 2008-09 season with a Barcelona team boasting a Lionel Messi at the height of his powers.
Guardiola then nicely topped off his trophy haul with the UEFA Super Cup and FIFA Club World Cup win an international sextuple, becoming the first team to do so and something only ever matched by Hansi Flick’s Bayern Munich in 2020.
Repeating the quadruple achievement with an English side would probably be considered an accomplishment that carries even more weight given the competitiveness of the Premier League, and the two other international trophies would put the matter beyond doubt.
The Greatest
Staying in England, and only former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson has won a treble with an English team, doing so in dramatic fashion with Manchester United in 1999, clinching the Premier League, Champions League and FA Cup all in the same week.
That season, it was only perhaps the least meaningful of the four trophies on offer that eluded him as his side crashed out of the League Cup to eventual winners Tottenham, something that paled in comparison next to the magnitude of his treble feat, an English football first.
Despite Ferguson winning 13 Premier League titles as opposed to Klopp’s solitary English title, a further Champions League title and a string of FA Cup wins, Klopp would have something that not even the great sides of all-time managerial legend Ferguson achieved in his illustrious career: that of four trophies in one season.
That alone would give him the right to be named among even the greatest to ever grace the English game.
Remaining fixtures
Liverpool’s run to a potential quadruple is not an easy one and the Reds face a Merseyside derby with a struggling Everton next up, before the aforementioned semi-final battle with Villarreal over two legs, as well as Tottenham and Man United away fixtures in the league, together with that FA Cup final with Chelsea.
A first piece of history is within touching distance for Klopp, a man who delivered a first English title to the red half of Liverpool after more than three decades and also European Cup number 6 to the Merseyside club, the chance to join such esteemed company must surely act as added impotence to etch his name firmly into football history.
