Jürgen Klopp dragged Liverpool into the future. Now He will let it go.

For Jürgen Klopp, the montages will be long and emotional. There will of course be artistic drone shots of the Liverpool skyline. There will be slow-motion images of red and white scarves spinning and wriggling. There will definitely be a moving, possibly classical score.

But especially in the wake of Klopp's announcement on Friday that he will resign as Liverpool managerthere will be images of all the memories he made: the bus parades and the trophy lifts, the fist pumps and the bear hugs, the rich and broad iconography of glory.

Chances are that when they do come – and they will be in large numbers, with Klopp's last game at the club coming at the end of May – they won't dwell too long on the immediate aftermath of a 2-2 draw against West . Bromwich Albion in 2015, a match that took Liverpool to the dizzying heights of ninth place in the Premier League.

And yet, more than eight years later, that evening feels both like a signpost of what was to come and a summary of how it would be achieved. Klopp had only been in charge of Liverpool for a few months at the time. But in retrospect, that match looks a lot like the moment Liverpool became his club.

To recap, a patchwork Liverpool team needed a late goal from Divock Origi – another leitmotif there – to rescue a point at home from a West Brom side battling relegation. At the end of the match, Klopp insisted his players join hands and walk to the Kop, the towering stand where Liverpool's most ardent fans live, and thank them for their efforts.

In Germany this is standard practice. Klopp had grown up knowing that teams do it, or are expected to do it, after virtually every game, regardless of the score. However, in England's dark and distant past in 2015, it was unknown. It wasn't something English teams did. Or worse, it was a foreign condition.

And so the fans did what they always do when confronted with an unsolicited import: they immediately misunderstood and mocked Klopp for encouraging his players to “to celebratea home draw against West Brom.

The perception of the Liverpool that Klopp has built in the years since makes it difficult to imagine that the Liverpool he found when he agreed to become manager in October 2015 could ever have existed. It wasn't just that the team he inherited wasn't particularly successful – the Luis Suárez-inspired title challenge of 2014 was a lonely beacon in a lustrum of mediocrity – it lacked any real sense of how it could ever become successful again.

The club's owners, Fenway Sports Group, had made several clever arrangements in an attempt to turn it into a bastion of modernity – Michael Edwards, the sporting director, and Ian Graham, who would become research director – but there had been resistance to their input from Brendan Rodgers, the coach. For years the club seemed to lack consensus, direction and, to some extent, purpose.

That had reached the stands. All fans, of course, contain a wide variety of opinions, but Liverpool's has seemed irreconcilably divided for years. Some liked the data-driven American owners. Some hated them. Some felt it was their duty to protest. Some thought this bordered on treason. Some supported Rodgers. Some yearned for the return of trophy-winning predecessors like Kenny Dalglish or Rafael Benítez. Each camp considered the other not only misguided, but somehow evil.

A manager's legacy is obviously something that football believes can be assessed relatively easily. For clubs like Liverpool it is measured in silver and gold: it is something that can be weighed. And by those standards, Klopp will be judged more than kindly.

He led Liverpool to a Premier League title, a Champions League, a Club World Cup, a European Super Cup, an FA Cup and a League Cup. (He can win more trophies, of course: Liverpool are still alive in four competitions this season and have reached the final of one of them already). He is without doubt the club's best manager of the modern era, someone who certainly deserves inclusion in the pantheon of Premier League greats.

There are also other milestones that burnish his credentials. He has some of the highest points tally in Premier League history. At one point he had scored 106 out of 108 available points in the self-proclaimed best league in the world. Between 2018 and 2022, he led Liverpool to three Champions League finals in five years.

In the tribal blandness of football fandom, that is of course taken as a sign that he should have won more. Even Klopp might sometimes wonder whether life might have been a little more fun if it hadn't been for Pep Guardiola and Manchester City. A gentler reading would suggest that not only was the consistency of Klopp's Liverpool astonishing, but that occasionally falling short humanized him and his team.

However, the very best managers should be judged not only by how much they win, but also by what they leave behind. It was under Klopp's watch that Liverpool went from a faded giant, a nostalgia brand, to probably – at least alongside Manchester City – the most progressive, most advanced of the game's modern superpowers.

Klopp is proudly a natural delegator. He did not understand how the club's data department arrived at its conclusions. He didn't pretend to know how their algorithms or data pipelines worked. But he knew he trusted their judgment and wanted to work with them rather than against them.

And so, rather than resist, he gave Edwards and Graham the power to direct the club's recruiting efforts. One story goes that when Klopp wanted to sign German playmaker Julian Brandt in the summer of 2017, Edwards, not exactly a shrinking violet, had to be characteristically stubborn to convince him that Mohamed Salah was the better bet.

The same approach played out in almost every facet of the club's existence. He handed over control of the players' diet to Mona Nemmer, the nutritionist he had brought over from Bayern Munich. They joked that the club should one day publish a recipe book. Nemmer still assumed they were joking. The book came out in 2021.

And above all, Klopp made a point of outsourcing the task to the fans to make Anfield imposing again, the kind of place where West Bromwich Albion didn't come in thinking they could steal a point or three. Sometimes that required a bit of belligerence, urging fans to be louder, and encouraging even those who didn't want to join in to hand their tickets to someone else.

However, it was worth it. For eight years, Liverpool has been characterized by the feeling of unity, something that he has – very consciously – created. That awkward moment of communion against West Brom was the first step in rebuilding the bond between pitch and stands, between players and fans.

Ultimately, that's what the very best managers do. No individual is ever bigger than a team. Players and coaches are fleeting and temporary. The institution of the club is eternal. But every now and then a figure comes along who, through sheer personality, can bend and shape and twist the identity of a club, whose charisma is so great that it can change the code of a place.

Liverpool is – not uniquely, but perhaps more than most – sensitive to this. To some extent it longs for it. It's a club that fervently believes in the Great Man theory of history, a place desperate for a leader to follow, an idol to worship, a creed to believe in. Klopp suited that perfectly.

The Liverpool he leaves behind in May is clearly his, different from the Liverpool he found, from the Liverpool that came before. His playing style, rooted in the influential philosophy Klopp brought from Germany, is his own, but so is his belief in data, his drive to experiment, his belief that success is collective and not individual. All of that owes something to Klopp. That's all he leaves behind, and the best measure of his legacy: that the place he leaves is not the same as the place he found.