German manager Jürgen Klopp, who left Liverpool in the summer after nine years, will start a new role in football from 1 January 2025. He will not be a coach but a manager, he will be the “world head of soccer” at Red Bull, as well as producing energy drinks, it has invested in sports and football for many years, and has different teams on different continents: Leipzig and Salzburg in Europe, the Red Bulls of New York in the United States and Bragantino in Brazil, among others. Klopp, who is 57 years old and considered one of the best and most influential coaches of the past two decades, will be responsible for managing these teams, and the players.
The Red Bull program is achieving various successes and is respected for the very modern way in which its teams play, as well as launching the careers of many young players. But it is also highly criticized because often when the group gets a team to remove its previous identity, changing its name, its symbols and breaking the link between the club and fans.
The focus of the project is to find young and promising players to grow in the “minor” teams and then transfer them to the more important ones, especially Leipzig, and finally resell them to other profit-generating teams. Over the past ten years, Red Bull teams have produced players who play in the best teams in the world today, such as Manchester City’s Norwegian striker Erling Haaland and Chelsea’s Christopher Nkunku, but also Ibrahima Konaté, Dominik Szoboszlai, Sadio Mané and Naby Keïta, who plays or has played for Liverpool.
Klopp will work to train new players and coaches. The football proposed by the teams he coached (before Liverpool, Borussia Dortmund and Mainz) is similar in many ways to the one played by Red Bull’s teams: both are based on intensity, on a constant search of verticalization (ie attacking often with quick passes towards the opponent’s goal) and the so-called gegenpressingthe attempt to recover the ball immediately after losing it and, when successful, to get a shot on goal as quickly as possible.
Klopp won two German championships with Borussia Dortmund, and with Liverpool, among other things, he won the English championship and the Champions League. According to various media, in the new contract with Red Bull there would be a clause which would allow him to free himself up to coach the German national team, in case he decides to change coach after the 2026 World Cup.
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