Hello Liverpool, Goodbye Jürgen: A First Visit and Saying Farewell to a Legend

Photo by John Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images

After loving the club from a distance for two decades, the chance to visit for the first time just to say goodbye makes for a bittersweet—but worthwhile—experience.

I’m walking down the corridors of the M&S Bank Arena on a windy May night singing I’m so glad that Jurgen is a Red, and I lock eyes with every stranger in a brief moment of electricity as we belt out the same words, to the same song, about the same man.

It is a fever dream of unity amongst strangers brought together by a shared, common emotion. Is it loss? Or love? A beautiful sadness for what has been but now no longer will be?

---

I became a Liverpool fan in 2006 at the age of 15 in India, a country where cricket reigns supreme and football is overshadowed. I never liked cricket; I preferred the flow and romance, the poetry and democracy of the street sport that is football. Most English football fans in India are boys, and probably support Manchester United, a remnant of their huge fanbase building blitzes across Asia and the world at the peak of their success in the 90s and 2000s. It was annoying.

Luckily, I saw a feisty Stevie Gerrard race up and down the pitch around the time of his Champions League heroics instead, and I was hooked. First to the player, and then to the lore of his club and city. I shared a room with my mom growing up. She graciously let my obsession flourish, allowing me to stay up school nights watching games with the volume on low.

The first time I actually saw Liverpool play was a friendly in the US against Manchester City in 2018, when I was enrolled in a Master’s degree in New York. Sadio Mane scored a penalty. We’d just bought this ₤75 million gazelle of a centre-back. It was fantastic.

The next year I skulked around the team hotel in New York during their next friendly visit, with a dozen other fans, managing even to see Jurgen Klopp in the flesh as he signed autographs. Earlier that season I’d stood on my feet for about seven hours at Carragher’s in Times Square as we beat Spurs in Europe. I danced on the streets of New York with fellow fans, blocking traffic.

In 2020 at the peak of COVID, having just returned to India after five years abroad, I cried and whooped alone in my room at 3 AM as Jordan Henderson lifted our first Premier League trophy in my lifetime. No friends to celebrate with in our pandemic isolation, just my sleepy mom who was shaken awake and told the good news.

As a non-resident, an international fan, I put in the work as we all do—staying up odd hours for European games, learning the urban legends of a city far away on another continent but with which we develop this strange, almost parasocial bond. I got mad at Maggie for her “managed decline” despite never having experienced it. I learned about Liverpool’s trade history and “Europeanness” and of the Scouse identity. And here I was, a Bengali from an Eastern Indian town.

---

I finally set foot in Liverpool this week, a full 18 years after I first became a supporter, and it just so happened to coincide with the night of Jurgen Klopp’s farewell party.

The first glimpse of the Mersey River from the train up from London was like an out of body experience. I knew this was a brand-new, unfamiliar city, and yet it felt like a sort of homecoming. This bipolar switch between I’ve been here before, in my head and my dreams and my view of the city as a new tourist and outsider lasted for the length of my two-day trip.

The sight of the Liver Building was familiar from the hours of parade footage, but the streets I walked down felt foreign. Because, well, they were. Gazing at Trent’s mural felt like a moment I’d already experienced through a screen, but I snapped out of it the moment I looked around at the doors and bins of houses occupied by strangers who’ve known this city longer and more intimately and who don’t know me.

Do they not know me? Do I really look like an outsider? How can I still be an outsider when I’ve spent almost two decades loving, observing, and feeling a place in which I’d never actually set foot? I’ve cried for this place; I’ve defended it in arguments. I’ve made it a huge part of my personality, not just Avantika but “Avantika the Liverpool fan” to everyone who’s known me well. I’ve received club merchandise for birthdays and anniversaries. And yet to this place, I’m a stranger.

I went in and out of this wild trip all day.

Whatever my process of greeting and perceiving Liverpool was, it was always bound to be intense. I ran towards it with all the more fervour coming out of a tumultuous year on the personal front, losing someone who had shared the Liverpool experience with me closely for the past few years. Rushing to see and touch the city felt like I was reclaiming a part of myself that had been solely mine for much longer than it had been a shared experience with this other person. This is one thing you don’t get to take away from me because this was always mine. And it will forever be solely mine.

As the fog and fever of the visit clears, this is something that’s becoming clearer to me.

Losing Klopp has been hard—probably not as hard for me as it is for the players, but devastating, nevertheless. His big personality and successes were addictive. Despite being a world class cynic, I will prostrate myself before that man and gulp down every motivational speech he’s ever made, no matter how cheesy.

But seeing the looming frame of Anfield, the painstakingly hand drawn murals, the devoted neighbourhood pubs—you are reminded of the timelessness of the institution, and how as long-term fans, that is what we are wed to. Idols come and go, stars peak and burn out, but Liverpool Football Club is eternal.

The highs and lows (too many lows), the decline and rebuild, the fresh hope every season, and a dedication to carrying on the legacy built slowly over a hundred years. There’s something in this framing that’s very important to an anxious personality like me—I love the stability, the long-term nature of this relationship with our club.

---

The Liverpool Offside platform has given me a much-needed outlet for all these feelings I have about the club. My lovely friends here gave me tips on what to see and eat and do, and it’s a community I love. I will find kinship with fans wherever I go, as I did at Liverpool fan bars in New York, Minneapolis, Glasgow and Delhi. I hope this grows over the years.

I’ll be be back in Liverpool to feel that electricity many times more, to eat Scouse pies at Homebaked Bakery, and drink pints and sing songs. Yes Klopp is gone, but Liverpool Football Club endures, and next time maybe some part of it will recognize me.