'I was really disappointed because I realised 'oh my god, I forgot that the dressing rooms are really bad!' - and I don't like bad dressing rooms.' Jurgen Klopp admits to Premier League culture shock arriving at Liverpool to find something he didn't like

A frustrated Jurgen Klopp after Liverpool's defeat to Sevilla in the 2016 Europa League final in Basel.
Jurgen Klopp was not enamoured of everything he found at Liverpool (Image credit: Getty Images)

Jurgen Klopp left Liverpool last year in a much better state than he found it...so unsurprisingly, there were things he wasn't too happy with when he joined the club in 2015.

At the time - much as now - Klopp was the hottest managerial free agent in the game having left Borussia Dortmund a few months prior. Meanwhile, Liverpool were coming towards the end of a disappointing post-Istanbul decade that at one point saw the club hit their lowest league finish in 49 years.

And speaking on new Amazon Prime documentary mini-series 'Doubters To Believers Liverpool FC: Klopp’s Era', Klopp admitted that he was not quite ready for the extent of the clamour that surrounded his arrival at Anfield.

Klopp says in the documentary: "There's all these crazy things, like people track the plane and stuff like that. You don't have this idea of yourself or that people could be interested in a football manager flying into a country.

"In the same moment, I was really disappointed because I realised 'oh my god, I forgot that the dressing rooms are really bad!' - and I don't like bad dressing rooms."

Jurgen Klopp embraces Virgil van Dijk

Virgil van Dijk was a game-changing signing for Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool

The documentary goes through the rocky first couple of years of Klopp's tenure and into their return to the top of English football, with the club ending a 30-year wait for a league title in 2020.

One turning point was the signing of Southampton centre-back Virgil van Dijk for a whopping £75m transfer fee.

That figure that led to raised eyebrows at the time but has more than paid off for the Reds: Van Dijk is ranked at No.3 in FourFourTwo's list of the best Premier League defenders of all time.

Klopp said in hindsight: "New signings are not always the solution, but sometimes they are. The quality was obvious. We don't pay [that] amount of money for a guy we're not sure about."

Jurgen Klopp celebrates with Trent Alexander-Arnold after Liverpool's win over Manchester City in the FA Cup semi-finals in April 2022.

Trent Alexander-Arnold was a big player for Jurgen Klopp (Image credit: Getty Images)

Then there was the emergence of Trent Alexander-Arnold, who became one of Klopp's most trusted and influential players after breaking through from the club's academy.

Klopp recounts in the documentary: "I think on day one, Pep [Lijnders] told me about Trent. It was pretty much on the first day: 'that one, but if you see him, wow'. So that's how that started."

Steven Chicken

Steven Chicken has been working as a football writer since 2009, taking in stints with Football365 and the Huddersfield Examiner. Steven still covers Huddersfield Town home and away for his own publication, WeAreTerriers.com. Steven is a two-time nominee for Regional Journalist of the Year at the prestigious British Sports Journalism Awards, making the shortlist in 2020 and 2023.