Liverpool won’t want, nor should they pursue, a manager intent on being a carbon copy of Jurgen Klopp.
You won’t find another of the 56-year-old in the short-term, that’s for certain. That said, you can still set certain non-negotiables like high performance in Europe and generally combative sides.
In that case, as Neil Jones has noted, Xabi Alonso would appear to fit the bill.
“I was at the Sparta Prague game on Thursday. You’re just sitting in the press box and every so often someone will shout up a result from the games being played,” the Covering Liverpool reporter wrote in his EOTK Insider column.
“Marseille had a bit of a scare against Villarreal, Aston Villa were beating Ajax in the Conference League… and then someone shouted, ‘Leverkusen are 2-0 down against Qarabag!’. I just thought, ‘Oof! Really? Wow, okay!’ Qarabag were down to 10 men at the time and I think there must have been about 20 minutes to go.
“The Liverpool game was pretty much dead and buried by this point, so you’re not overly invested in what’s happening on the pitch. You’re watching the game, of course, but there’s no jeopardy there. I said to the person next to me, ‘Leverkusen will still win’. I don’t know where that came from, but that was my feeling at the time.
“Maybe I didn’t think they would win in 90 minutes, but I thought they’d get through the tie. I was then just about to do my YouTube video at the end of the Liverpool game and was setting up in the row behind when someone came up to me and said, ‘Do you know Leverkusen got a 97th-minute winner?’
“I thought it was going to extra-time, but they told me they won it in extra-time. You sort of end up just shaking your head, but what also crossed my mind was, ‘That’s a bit of Liverpool, that!’”
The former Real Sociedad youth coach took over a struggling Bayer Leverkusen outfit in 2022.
FOLLOW Empire of the Kop on Instagram (@empireofthekop) HERE
READ MORE: David Ornstein drops afternoon Liverpool update fans will find intriguing
A risk, but a risk worth taking
Xabi Alonso is unproven! Liverpool fans only want him because he once played for them!
So cry the masses outside of Merseyside.
Whilst our emotional connection to our old midfield wizard remains strong and the reality of his relative managerial inexperience to the likes of Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp remains irrefutable, neither are convincing arguments not to pursue his services.
Of the managers available in world football, few set tongues wagging to quite the same degree as the former Spanish international.
Inexperienced or not, how many others could take over a struggling Leverkusen side and quickly transform them into title contenders?
There is a certain amount of risk involved, but given how much risk we’ve mitigated with Michael Edwards’ return, we can surely afford a bit of a gamble elsewhere.