Jurgen Klopp explains major reason 'he can leave' Liverpool now

Jurgen Klopp explained one major reason he feels he can now leave Liverpool. The German will step down at the end of the season.

Jurgen Klopp gave everyone a shock on Friday as he announced this will be his final season at Liverpool. He'll leave the club in the summer after eight and a half years.

This day was always coming, of course, but it has caught everyone off guard. Klopp has been the face of Liverpool FC since he arrived and leaves an enormous void with his departure.

So why now? Klopp has explained today how he wants to lead a normal life while he's still young enough to do so - a life without the enormous pressure of running a football club, in other words.

But he was only ever going to do that if he felt Liverpool were in the right position to handle him leaving. Klopp believes they are and says that's one of the main reasons he feels he can take this decision.

"In this world, in football especially, you have a few faces around, like Billy [Hogan], who do an incredible job and you rarely see," Klopp told a press conference on Friday.

"That's just how you live this business. It looks like I do all the work - I can't and I don't. It means that all we've built over the last eight and a half years, there's an incredibly strong structure behind the scenes.

"So everything goes in the right direction - it's one of the reasons that I can leave. My responsibility is so big but my idea was always to put everything in place to help this club get stronger and stronger. We did that. To perfection? No, but as good as we could."

They came as close to perfection as you can really and we'll now see if the structure in place is good enough to keep those standards post-Klopp. Whoever the new manager is, they will have a world-class structure behind them and every chance to succeed.

But the standards they'll be trying to keep are ridiculously high. It'll take an extraordinary manager to meet them.