Liverpool Winning the Club World Cup Would Be “Like Landing on the Moon,” says Jürgen Klopp

Just another Saturday in Qatar for many but a day that could be long remembered for Liverpool and Flamengo supporters. The two football clubs will contest the Club World Cup at the Khalifa International Stadium. Jürgen Klopp will have set himself the goal of bringing the World Champions trophy to Liverpool for the very first time.

The competition seems to garner far more attention outside of Europe where the Champions League is considered to be the last word on which is the best team in the world. But Klopp has earned greater respect for the tournament since living amongst it over the passed week.

The manager has always wanted to win the thing, knowing it will be a feather in the cap of everybody involved with the club. Now Klopp has just hours to go to make sure his preparations are spot on and his players are ready to take on an opponent that is largely unknown to them.

“I don’t know how you approach something that has never been done before, like landing on the moon,” said Klopp.

“We’ll just try to play a really, really good game and hope to win against a good side.

“You don’t write history beforehand, you do something and then everybody tells you later ‘you wrote history’. I have no clue whether it would be history.

“Winning it would be great and I don’t even know exactly know how the trophy looks but I didn’t know that about the UEFA Super Cup either and that is a good example.

“Before that, I didn’t know how people spoke about it... Before the game people said ‘do you really need it?’.

“Then you play it and you win it and it feels incredible. It was really a big one.”

Flamengo have quite a few talented players that will try and cause Liverpool problems but, if anything, the manager is more concerned with the emotional lift the Brazilian team have been getting from their homeland while English media largely ignores the event.

“They have the advantage of everybody tells them every day how much it means to them, and we get told all the time ‘why are you here?’.”

Winning silverware is the ultimate measure of a club’s success. The Club World Cup isn’t the competition you think of when you’re dreaming of wild footballing adventures but it’s yet another test of Liverpool’s mettle and hopefully a trophy for the cabinet.