Lessons from Liverpool FC's Jurgen Norbert Klopp

Jürgen Klopp and the Power of Knowing When to Let Go

On January 26th, 2024, at precisely 10:36 AM, legions of Liverpool fans experienced their ‘Bill Shankly moment.’ The news broke, that Jürgen Norbert Klopp, the man who rebuilt Liverpool FC from its ruins to its renaissance, was leaving.

This wasn’t the typical sporting story of failure, scandal, or being pushed out. Klopp was walking away at the top. On his own terms. For one authentic reason:

He no longer felt he could give 100%, he put the club first.

There are moments in life that feel seismic, not because the world stops, but because something within you shifts. For millions of Liverpool fans, January 26th, 2024, was one of those moments. The news dropped like a thunderbolt to those who cared.

In a world addicted to self-preservation, ego, and extracting every last drop for personal gain, Klopp showed the exact opposite. He walked away from the pinnacle, the love, the power, and the glory of winning more, and in doing so, he gave us all a masterclass in what true leadership looks like.

He chose sustainability over short-termism.

He chose legacy over personal glory.

He chose the institution over himself.

The Rarest Kind of Exit

We live in a world obsessed with holding on. Holding on to power, to success, to relevance, to control.

The modern world is littered with people who stay too long. CEOs who cling to the throne. Founders who doubled down one last time on doubling their enterprises to unsustainable levels. Athletes who can’t hear the crowd's applause dying out beneath the weight of their own ego.

We’re all culprits of this type of behaviour, some less than others. We just need to think back to our younger years, most things were led by popularity and the ego, wanting relevance, but with age and wisdom, things do change.

But Klopp? He did things his way with authenticity, he was a likeable character, and was very popular with all football fans, no matter what club they supported.

When you’ve built something over time, with effort, with love, sacrifice, humility, and purpose, it means more than self-preservation. I’m sure he would have looked around at the young, hungry squad he had rebuilt. He would have looked at the fans who had cried with him over the years. He would have assessed the energy of the city of Liverpool that had adopted him as a father figure almost a decade earlier.

"They’re ready now. They don’t need me anymore. They need new ideas and fresh energy to truly push the club forward"

That is not a weakness.

To my mind, this is the rarest kind of strength because he understood that the true measure of leadership. It’s whether the thing you built can stand without you. This is what legacy means, it’s sustainable and ripples through eternity.

Beyond Football - Why This Matters To You and Me

You don’t have to be a Liverpool FC fan to learn from Jürgen Klopp. You don’t even have to care about football.

Because what Klopp showed us was universal, whether you’re an investor, a founder, a leader, a parent, or simply someone trying to navigate this messy, beautiful life.

He showed us what it means to build something the right way, and to know when to let go.

The Real-Life Moments When We Must Let Go

This lesson isn’t just for football managers. It’s for all of us.

Because life, in its quiet wisdom, constantly asks us to loosen our grip (when we want more control) and trust that what we’ve built can now stand without us. There is a wider question that also resonates and it tends to be an inner game at play. Could it be the fact that ‘we need it’ to give us relevance in our own lives? Naturally, making anything hard to let go.

When Our Businesses Outgrow Us

Every founder begins with passion and ownership. But some businesses mature.
It grows beyond the founder’s fingerprints and becomes institutional, layered, and complex.

The hardest, most selfless decision a founder can make is to step away when the business no longer needs their day-to-day presence, even if they still need it emotionally.

Staying too long can strangle what you’ve created.

When Our Children Grow Beyond Us

Every parent knows the bittersweet ache of time.

One day, you’re holding their tiny hand, and in the blink of an eye, they’re taller, funnier than you (in my case) with dreams of their own.

And yet, we miss the baby they once were, at a time they needed us most to become the young men and women who will eventually go into the big wide world to fend for themselves.

Parenting, like leadership, is about preparing your children to eventually walk alone.

Our job is not to hold them forever, but to let them go, knowing we’ve done enough.

When Relationships Evolve or End

There are friendships, romances, and partnerships that shape us for a season, a decade, and sometimes a lifetime.

But people change. Circumstances shift. Not every relationship is meant to last forever, but some do.

Clinging too tightly, and refusing to let go when the time has come, often destroys the beauty of what once was. We can never control others and certain circumstances in life, but we can control our inner compass and our own actions. This is the only thing we can truly control in our life.

Sometimes love for yourself and others means leaving.
Sometimes the greatest act of care is knowing when to step away.

A Lesson for Every Investor and Leader

If you are an investor, a business leader, a builder of anything, behind the headlines and hashtags is a blueprint for how to build something great, and leave it better than you found it.

The truth is, Klopp didn’t just manage a football team. He managed a portfolio of people, of emotions, of dreams. When the returns stopped compounding for him, he stepped aside so they could grow without him.

Sometimes you’ve got to let your business, money, relationships and children breathe, even if it means a change of direction, letting go of the old and embracing the new.

10 Lessons From Klopp’s Farewell

1. Make the Game Bigger than Yourself.

Build for the next generation, not just for yourself. Klopp never made Liverpool about Klopp.
He made it about the club, the fans, the players, the city. He knew he was a custodian, a steward of something bigger than himself.

As investors and leaders, we must ask: Are we building for our egos, or are we building something that will outlast us?

True compounding happens when we stop making it about ourselves. Sometimes we surprise ourselves of the impact we've made. 

Klopp didn’t hoard his knowledge or power. He built a club culture so resilient that it could breathe without him.

That’s what the best investors and leaders do. They don’t just manage money, or leaders don’t simply sit in their offices, they build systems, teams, and philosophies that can survive without them. Building for the ‘long-term’ isn't a buzzword, time and time again nature has proved nothing meaningful that has lasting value can be built overnight.

Your real legacy is not what you accumulate. It’s what you leave behind.

2. The Courage to Walk Away at the Top

Most people cling on too long. They stay until the wheels fall off. Klopp didn’t. He left when he could’ve coasted. He left millions heartbroken but he left with dignity and his head held high.

In investing, in business, in life, knowing when to step away is one of the hardest, and rarest skills one can master.

Greed makes us overstay. Fear keeps us holding on. Whereas, Klopp chose reason, and freedom for himself, and for the club.

In investing, especially the speculative short-term plays. How many times have fortunes been lost because people stayed with the same outdated thinking, stayed attached to their ego that was one year too long, chased that one more dopamine high, and refused to admit the music had stopped?

The mark of wisdom is the courage to be self-critical and to reason with a rational mind. Why not leave while they’re still clapping?

3. Self-Awareness: Don’t Confuse Momentum With Meaning

Klopp was honest enough to admit he had nothing more to give. He didn’t lie to himself. He didn’t pretend to others around either.

How many of us have the courage to look in the mirror and admit we’ve run out of steam?

Most investors blow up because they stop listening to themselves. Burnout, hubris, overconfidence, it’s all a refusal to hear the inner voice saying, "Enough."

Klopp could have stayed another season. He could have chased one more trophy, one more title, one more night under the lights.

But he understood:

Just because you can keep going doesn’t mean you should.

In investing, markets will tempt you to squeeze one more percentage point of alpha, one more allocation, one more punt (real risk)

But the best who practice quality capital allocation know when the marginal returns aren’t worth the soul they cost.

4. Legacy is Measured in People, Not Trophies

Do you know what Klopp asked for when he renewed his contract a few years earlier?

A pay rise not for himself, but for his coaching staff.

He fought for their recognition. He made them stand in official photos. He knew the secret most forget.

The people you build with are your real legacy.

In investing and business in general, it's not the IRR or the CAGR that matters in the end. Although, in a results-orientated industry these are very important, we need to go beyond the superficial trappings, it’s the ecosystem you’ve nurtured, it’s the trust you’ve built, the relationships that have grown, and the integrity you ultimately leave behind. These inputs are incredibly important.

5. Great Leaders Make Themselves Redundant

Klopp didn’t wait until everything fell apart to leave. He built a strong squad, a new generation, a culture that could survive without him.

True leadership is when the system keeps winning without you.

As investors, founders, and parents, are we preparing others to win without us? Or are we the bottleneck, suffocating the progress?

Klopp could have kept the spotlight on himself forever. Instead, he built a team and a culture that could thrive without him.

The best capital allocators, the best leaders, and the best parents do the same. They don’t make themselves the centre of the story. They create conditions for others to flourish.

6. Play the Long Game. With Joy

Klopp’s Liverpool wasn’t about short-term wins. It was about building brick by brick, this is what made the fans turn from doubters to believers. It was a gradual feeling that he built through tangible results over time. But make no mistake, there were processes, short-term milestones, ample discipline, and a philosophy that paved the way for the favourable long term results.

In investing and business, we compound wins over time, it can’t be forced by greed and by chasing every opportunity, it needs to be built patiently.

 Many of us sometimes forget to enjoy the ride.

7. Put The Mission Before Yourself

Klopp missed his mother’s funeral because of his Liverpool commitments. He gave up years he could’ve spent with his family, and his new grandson, because he believed in the mission and it required him to give 100%.

We all say we care about what we’re building but are we willing to truly sacrifice for it?

Most people want the rewards without the responsibility. Klopp took the weight and asked for nothing above what he was originally offered. He gave his best years, his family time, his health all to make something bigger than himself.

And when he realised he could no longer give fully, he stepped aside to protect what he’d built.

As investors, founders, and CEOs we should aspire to have that clarity.

8. Know When The Marginal Gains Aren’t Worth It

Klopp could’ve stayed another year. Maybe two. Maybe they’d win more trophies. But he knew those extra wins would come at the cost of everything he had left to give.

Investors fall into the same trap, squeezing the last bit of juice, chasing that next buzz word or product, leveraging to chase the last 1%, or chasing returns by forcing cash deployment and burning themselves in the process

The greatest exits are often rationalised well in advance and tend to be based on pre-defined metrics. Leaders know when enough is enough.

9. Success is Temporary. Legacy is Forever

Klopp won everything. The Champions League. The Premier League. The FA Cup, The League Cup and The Club World Cup.

But the real victory was in how he made people feel. He gave the city its pride back. He made children, and the adults that were once children, dream again. He took a fractured fanbase and made them believe in something bigger.

As investors, we spend so much time chasing the scoreboard, but what will people remember when the game ends? I’d like to think it’s more than the numbers, it’s the community, the relationships, the quality of our partners, the processes we followed, the philosophy we lived by, the type of thinking we encouraged to build confident investors. This is what I would like to remember, all of the inputs that enabled our outcomes. Compounding wealth is great, but superficial fulfilment is sometimes fleeting, it has to be about chasing something more meaningful.

Our job is not to convince the world. Our job is to do the work so well that eventually the people we are privileged to serve believe too.

10. Value The Journey, Not The Outcome. Everything is Transient

After all the euphoria, the tears, the heartbreak, the world will move on. Football will move on. Liverpool Football Club will move on.

And so will the markets. So will the companies you invest in, or the ones you've built from scratch. So will your portfolio composition. Everything evolves and moves on.

Everything is transient. The goal is not to hold on to control forever, the goal is to leave something that lasts beyond you, and ironically, this could mean holding equity in a business that outlasts your time. But there will also be times when you will never hold equity in the same business again. The joys of passing on knowledge and understanding to the younger generation are what inspires me, just imagine the 30/40/50/60/70 years of compounding at respectable rates of return? It makes me hopeful the compounding trajectory can continue beyond our time through our children, colleagues, and partners who choose to deploy capital themselves. 

The trophies, the parades, the medals are temporary.

The real gift Klopp gave was the laughter, the heartbreak, the wild nights at Anfield, and the quiet moments of belief throughout his tenure.

The Klopp Blueprint For Life, Investing, and Leadership

Klopp didn’t just win trophies. He played the game well. He taught us what true leadership looked like. You can feel the emotions with a real leader, you tend to feel it when you see ‘that’ leader.

He showed us how to build something meaningful whilst making an impact, to give unconditionally, and ultimately, how to gracefully let go.

And that’s the greatest investing lesson of all:

Build something worth believing in. Give it everything you’ve got. Work hard in pursuit of something greater than you, and when the time comes, pass the understanding to someone who can carry on the torch. Walk away with a smile, knowing you left it better than you found it.

Because in the end, what matters is not how long you stayed, but how many people you organically turned from doubters into believers.

Danke, Jürgen.

Thanks for the lessons.

You’ll Never Walk Alone.