Your Transfer Rumour Is Bullshit: Barcelona Eye Klopp

It would seem that smashing scoring and unbeaten records on the way to winning two consecutive league titles—one of which was part of a treble—are the sort of good deeds that simply cannot go unpunished at the Camp Nou. Despite currently only trailing Real Madrid in La Liga by a single point, a shocking humbling at the hands of Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League last week has predictably turned up the temperature on Barcelona manager, Luis Enrique’s, for some reason, already-uncomfortable hot seat.

The Mirror have had a think and decided on Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp as the ideal replacement. The rumour has managed to find some legs after Liverpool owner, John W. Henry was spotted at the Camp Nou in attendance of the home side’s win over Leganes on Sunday night, with the assumption presumably being that the FSG boss rocked up to the C-suite after the match, paparazzi in his wake, to hash out a deal for the superstar manager(?)

Well, not so fast. While surely a dream pairing on the surface, the rigidly grueling job that is managing the famed Blaugrana, where inching even slightly off-message swiftly earns one the sack, does feel like an odd fit for a bombastically-irreverent player’s boss like the outspoken German dynamo.

Plus there’s the whole matter of Klopp having just signed that hefty six-year extension only a few shorts months ago, a fact that would presumably require the Spanish giants to pay over-the-odds to secure a move.

Timing is everything with these sorts of rumours as it’s difficult to imagine such linkages sprouting up if the poor Champion’s League result were to have coincided with Liverpool’s own awful run of form at the start of 2017 rather than now (hopefully) at the start of a potential resurgence.

Either way, Enrique does not appear to be long for the job, and with PSG’s Marco Verratti putting in a masterful performance in their win to thankfully draw Barcelona’s lustful gaze away from Philippe Coutinho, the assumption must be that if the Spaniards do make shore on Merseyside in search of a new boss, that their historical preference for Dutch managers, Catalan insiders and ex-Blaugrana will lead them round the corner to Goodison Park and Ronald Koeman rather than Klopp.

Bullshit Rating: 3 turds out of 4