It’s been a little over a month since Liverpool announced that Steven Gerrard would be taking over coaching the under-18 side in the summer — his first foray into head coaching — and Jürgen Klopp is already eager to promote him.
"I told him when I leave, or [if] the club sacks me, I don't care of course who'll be my successor, but I'd love [if] he'd be it," said Klopp, presumably for the sole purpose of keeping every media organization occupied with visions of the future and ignoring the Middlesbrough game this Sunday.
Gerrard will be taking over from Neil Critchley, who will be moving up to coach the U23s.
"It's perfect that we can involve Steven," Klopp said about Gerrard’s role. "What a guy, he's fantastic.
"I'll do everything I can to make sure he gets all the information he needs. Because when you join a club, you have a big responsibility for the future, and the future of this club needs legends like Steven Gerrard in decisive positions."
Gerrard himself sees the U18s as a good place for his managerial career to begin.
“I spoke to Jürgen and we agreed that the 18s was the right age because it still gives you a bit of a spotlight with the coverage it gets, but you have a place where you can make a lot of mistakes and grow and learn,” Gerrard said when his role was initially announced in April.
“The other offers I got, it would have been learning on the job in at the deep end and I probably wasn't ready. I might have been but I didn't want to take any risks, especially when there is no timescale or plan of where I want to be in a certain time so the 18s made sense.”
Klopp’s current contract runs until 2022. If we’re going to go down this road, hopefully Gerrard has enough time to make plenty of mistakes and learn everything he can before that date.