MODERN football requires its best football managers to be politically savvy. They don’t necessarily need to have full knowledge of specific policy or detail beyond that of their clubs, but on wider issues, a political grounding and a general understanding of what’s happening outside the lucrative football bubble is important, or at least useful.

Football managers have to deal with as much media scrutiny as politicians do, and need knowledge of a range of issues beyond sport. Their job is no longer just about managing and coaching a group of players.

Football was already an inherently political sport but it has increasingly become a political tool on a global scale outside the sport itself. Top-level football’s mingling with billionaires, their media, nation-states, and geopolitics has further embedded it into the system of global capitalism.

Some managers have a natural political footing, often gained through the experiences of working with large groups of people at football clubs, or from life before they were involved in professional football.

From his time as a player in the second tier of German football with Mainz 05 to managing the political powerhouse (at least in a football sense) of Bundesliga side Borussia Dortmund and then to the left-wing city of Liverpool, Jurgen Klopp has worked for clubs that not only matched his political values but also allowed them to develop along with the football.

Klopp has never defined or labelled himself a socialist but has always said that his values and ideas come from the same direction as socialism.

“I wouldn’t call myself very political but I’m on the left, of course — more left than middle,” Klopp told German newspaper Die Tageszeitung in 2009, as quoted in Raphael Honigstein’s book, Bring the Noise.

“I believe in the welfare state. I don’t mind paying [national] health insurance, and I would never vote for a party because they promised to lower the top tax rate.

“My political understanding is this: if I’m doing well, I want others to do well, too. If there’s something I’ll never do in my life it’s vote for the right.”

Legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly once said: “The socialism I believe in isn’t really politics, it is a way of living.

“It is humanity. I believe the only way to live and to be truly successful is by collective effort, with everyone working for each other, everyone helping each other, and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day.

“That might be asking a lot, but it’s the way I see football and the way I see life.”

Shankly’s and Klopp’s words on politics are a departure from labels, hashtags, and sloganeering.

Practical social politics underpins many of the things Klopp has said in press conferences over the years, even when discussing subjects that appear apolitical.

Klopp, like anyone else, doesn’t necessarily have to label himself a socialist to be one. He showed that lived experience and actions are the best way to develop and display a form of socialism in a more meaningful way.

In a political setting, this would be the equivalent of the work done on the ground away from the charade of Westminster, by people who are practical socialists rather than politicians.

Ask why these things are being done and the answer will involve socialist language and ideas, but likely won’t reference socialism itself.

It has been suggested that Klopp would make a good politician. In April 2022 Alastair Campbell wrote an open letter to Klopp in the New European, saying he was wasted in football and encouraging him to become a politician.

Given Labour is shunning as many of their socialist politicians as they can while at the same time welcoming Tories, one of whom is far-right, from across the floor, Klopp wouldn’t be welcomed into the current version of Labour and would instead be one of a growing number of independent left or centre-left candidates.

Perhaps something can be learned from applying the practical politics of a football manager like Klopp to the political landscape in the UK and elsewhere.

The best football managers are focused on the people they manage, the supporters their teams play for, and the culture and the communities in which they reside.

A manager like Klopp has never focused solely on winning, but through collective effort and a natural ideology, both social and sporting, that fits both the club and the place, he helped create one of the greatest Liverpool sides ever. One which for a moment, and against all odds, was the best team in the world.

In a final roundtable with UK national media this week, Klopp again alluded to his political leanings when asked about comparisons between himself and Bill Shankly.

“Bill Shankly didn’t do it alone,” Klopp said. “The people, the city — you couldn’t do what Bill did in each city in the world.

“[Liverpool] is a place you can do it. Because of where the people are coming from politically, you need someone who understands the power of unity, the power of togetherness.

“We give our all, we see what we get for it — we overcome obstacles and difficulties, and Bill was obviously the right man to do that.

“The general view on life for people in Liverpool is very similar to mine. I’m ready to fight for the right things. Do I think I deserve everything? No, it’s fine for others to have things as well.

“I’m not a socialist but I come from there. I understand life like that. I fitted so well. I didn’t have to change a bit, and that was the biggest blessing.

“Just be myself and go from there. That’s why the relationship with the people worked out so well.”

It has been less about the trophies, and more about what happened to put Liverpool in a position to win them.

They haven’t been in a position to win them so regularly since the club Shankly built was left for Bob Paisley to claim trophy after trophy, year after year in the 1980s.

The football landscape is different now, so Klopp’s Liverpool weren’t able to add as many honours as Paisley’s, but the ethos has been the same, and for a short moment at least, Klopp’s team was arguably better than any of those ’80s Liverpool sides.

They were in the argument, in the running, there for the ride as much as the destination, and regularly won.

And though Liverpool FC the business is, like many other clubs, part of the runaway commercialisation at the top level of the game, their greatest success in the modern era came on the back of a togetherness among the team, staff and supporters drawn from socialist values and ideas, even if not labelled as such.