With comparisons made between this season at Liverpool and his final campaign with Dortmund, Jurgen Klopp has insisted the situation is “completely different.”
Klopp’s time at Dortmund came to an end after the 2014/15 campaign, with a short sabbatical then concluding with his move to take over from Brendan Rodgers in the October.
After back-to-back Bundesliga titles in 2010/11 and 2011/12, and consecutive second-placed finishes in the following two seasons, Dortmund struggled throughout Klopp’s final term, limping to seventh in the German top flight.
They suffered with long-term injuries to the likes of Mats Hummels, Marcel Schmelzer, Nuri Sahin, Ilkay Gundogan, Marco Reus and Jakub Blaszczykowski, and their plight has been compared to the current predicament facing Klopp at Liverpool.
But asked if he can see similarities between the campaign that saw him call time on his Dortmund reign and his most difficult season so far at Liverpool, the manager insisted they are “completely different.”
“It’s clear. I’m Jurgen Klopp, I was at Dortmund, I had a situation at Dortmund after a very successful spell and then something happened,” he told reporters.
“It’s not that easy, it’s not even close, the situation at Dortmund was not half as bad.
“From an injury point of view it was not half as bad as it is here, not half, and we had much less points after the first part of the season.
“The difference was we had injuries – and it was the reason, the first part of the season was similar – and then in the second part they all came back.
“I knew after the last game of the first part of the season we’d have a winter break, and I knew when we started the pre-season for the second part of the season all the players would be back.
“That’s a completely different situation, because nobody, pretty much nobody, comes back [this season].
“It’s not a problem, you just cannot compare it. You have to find solutions and it doesn’t stop. You change again and you change again and you change again.
“And you have to change – things don’t work. You cannot say ‘come on, let it be like this’, or whatever, we work on it.
“But it’s not that easy, like you were in a situation like this seven or eight years ago and now you just check out the book you wrote all your notes in and have a look ‘ah yes, that’s what we can do’.
“The only thing you can do is to work as hard as you can, to fight as much as you can, to play as good as you can to win football games. Because that changes everything.”
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