There's only one problem for Jurgen Klopp and Liverpool - but it's a big one

It is going to be a joy on Merseyside over the next few months. Where there was paranoia and empty management speak now there will be honesty and jokes. Where there was nervy edginess now there will be bold aggression. Where there was a default urge to stifle now there will be an urgent striving forward. The discordant whine of off-kilter electro-pop is about to be replaced by the rib-rattling rumble of heavy metal. Strap yourselves in: this is going to be some ride.

There is just one problem Jurgen Klopp faces at Anfield: he is going to have to do all that with the same bunch of players who made Brendan Rodgers look a joke.

Make no mistake about it, Liverpool have got themselves a gem with Klopp. He not only has the personality to inject some self-confidence and chutzpah back into a jaded operation, he is tactically brave and appropriately ambitious as well. He doesn’t just like to win, he likes to win big.

He is also a man who thrives on being the underdog. He propelled Dortmund on a crusade against the corporate might of Munich. Never mind that the club was a former Champions League winner with a huge match day income generated by a fanatical following, he cast the club as the downtrodden outsiders, the little guys sticking it to the man. It tallies so perfectly with Liverpool’s wider sense of itself it is as if as a couple they were made for each other. Here is a manager whose goal will be precisely that of his fans: showing those cocky Manc and Cockney upstarts who is boss.

Yet Klopp arrives at a club weighed down by the weakest, shallowest playing resources in a decade. There is no arguably about that statement, no equivocation. The squad assembled by Rodgers is as full of duffs as Homer Simpson after a particularly heavy night at Moe’s. Apparently learning nothing from what happened when they squandered the money from the Luis Suarez sale, Liverpool splashed the cash from losing Raheem Sterling on a bunch of rubbish.

Rodgers was very good at talking up the arrival of his procession of second rate no-hopers, speaking of them as of they were the spiritual heir of Lionel Messi. But none of them have yet delivered. Danny Ings and Christian Benteke might be decent lads, whole-hearted triers. But Liverpool players? Come on. And they represent the best of them.

Rodgers’s problem was that he genuinely believed the near miss in 2014 was down to him rather than a front line of Suarez, Sterling and Sturridge. When he tried to replace Suarez with Mario Balotelli under the mistaken impression that, unlike Jose Mourinho, Roberto Mancini and all the others who had tried and failed, he might extract something approaching the player’s potential, he was doomed. Of course he couldn’t: Balotelli is uncoachable, a morale-sapping liability.

Rodgers also genuinely thought he was a good enough manager to make Roberto Firmino, Oussani Assaidi, Iago Aspas, Tiago Ilori and Divock Origi the greatest group of players in Europe. Unfortunately for him he was wrong. Managers can only do so much. In football it has long been the case that you are only as good as the players you have.

But Klopp will inherit not only the current lacklustre bunch of no hopers, he will also take on the system which recruited them. Sure, it is not easy to bring in the very best when you are not in the Champions League, not based in the stockbroker swank of southwest London and not able to waft the sort of money in players' faces available 30 miles east along the M62. But this is Liverpool for goodness sake. They should be doing better than Assaidi and Aspas.

If they have a committee of quants sitting at a bank of computers in the bowels of Anfield they should be able to come up with something a little more likely to succeed than Ilori and Origi. What heritage they have to sell, what dreams, what ambitions. Surely anyone with a bit of romance about them would want to be involved in this club.

Klopp will undoubtedly reinvigorate, reboot and recharge. But ultimately he will also be required to rebuild. His emotional energy can only do so much with what is essentially a moribund operation. He will need to ensure that from now on he is in charge of buying, rather than relying on those in the shadows who have so comprehensively failed. And he would be advised in his act of rebranding to ensure that he has alongside him a team of coaches who the Liverpool fans regard as central.

Jamie Carragher would be the first man I would bring in to help. Robbie Fowler too. And it is not too late to call Steve Gerrard back from semi-retirement in La La Land. With that trio behind him, he will have every fan onside immediately and permanently.

However, even if he is gifted behind-the-scenes power, he is going to need something else, the one quality which has become increasingly rare in the game: time. Miracles, even those conducted by a luxuriously coiffured, generously toothed and genuinely charismatic leader, do not happen overnight. It took Klopp time to mould Dortmund into the dynamic operation it became.

Liverpool’s owners must surely now give their German purchase the proper opportunity to demonstrate he can deliver the change they need. Because of this we can be certain: if Jurgen Klopp fails at Anfield, it is hard to believe anyone can succeed there.