Graeme Souness ranks Jurgen Klopp in all-time Liverpool managers

Former Liverpool captain Graeme Souness has ranked Jurgen Klopp in amongst the club's all-time managers. The boss has had an incredible run.

Jurgen Klopp announced on Friday that he's stepping down as Liverpool boss. He's been at the club since late 2015, overseeing an incredible rise from an underperforming team that struggled to qualify for Europe to become one of the world's greatest.

Klopp has done the one thing no manager had done for decades in building a Liverpool team that could consistently compete at the top. Gerard Houllier and Rafa Benitez both built competitive teams but burned out for various reasons.

The 1990s saw Liverpool fail to build a truly competitive team, despite efforts from Graeme Souness and Roy Evans. They're the two who took over the near-impossible task of replicating the success Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan and Kenny Dalglish managed.

And so with Klopp's success, where does he rank among the greats? Souness has given his own opinion on that, having played under those greats and had his own spell in the dugout.

"Where will this leave Jurgen in the list of Liverpool’s great managers?" he wrote in his Daily Mail column. "Most people would pick Bill Shankly at number one.

"He started it all with his ideas and vision of where the game was heading. He got Liverpool going and Bob Paisley came in and took it to another level with winning trophies.

"I’d say Jurgen was at number three."

Most people would agree with Souness here. Shankly and Paisley are utterly untouchable after what they achieved, while Fagan just wasn't in charge for long enough.

Dalglish is a tough one to judge. He wasn't able to manage in European competitions, while he took over the most dominant team in the history of English football. Still, there's an argument that Dalglish's best team is the greatest Liverpool have ever put out.

Klopp, though, has done it all. He built the team himself, took them to new heights and competed - and beat - the very best. Third greatest manager in Liverpool's history?

It's a tough one to argue against.