Jurgen Klopp has moved to clarify his recent comments on Burnley, insisting he did not mean to take a dig at the town ahead of Liverpool’s Boxing Day trip there.
The German’s perceived slight came during a Q&A session that formed part of the test event for the opening of the upper tier of the expanded Anfield Road stand.
Asked about his Christmas plans in front of the 7,000 supporters present, Klopp said: “Where do we go on the 26th? Oh, a drive to Burnley. Yes, a great place to celebrate Christmas.”
Those remarks have since been seized upon on and characterised as a sinister dig at the town as a whole.
However, asked whether they were meant as a joke in his latest press conference, the manager sarcastically replied: “No it was 100 percent true… my God.
“I invite you now a little bit into my life. I come into the stadium at night, kids are playing, they score a goal when I arrive and 7,000 people go bonkers. I thought, ‘Oh my God, how nice is that?’
“So that was the mood I arrived in. Then, Pete (McDowall, LFCTV) asked me questions and I think I said it on the mic, that tomorrow there will be headlines, but I didn’t think for a second that it was serious.
“I said a lot of stuff and I’m a real idiot, I help you a lot with all these things. So the question around that was, ‘How will your Christmas be?’ And I said, ‘Who cares here about my Christmas?’
“Nobody does – yours (the journalists) as well, by the way.
“Obviously I know when we play Burnley but in that specific moment I didn’t have the schedule and he said Burnley and I said, ‘Oh, great place to be’.
“If he would have said London, I would say great place to be; if he would have said Fiji, I would’ve said great place to be, because we play football there and I wouldn’t have been with my family.
“The family of one of my best friends is from Burnley, just to make sure I have no issue with that.
“So if anybody thought I have… I go there for playing football like I go in all other cities, I never saw a bit of Burnley besides the stadium.
“Did I always enjoy being in the stadium? No, because they gave us hard fights, that’s it. Again, welcome to my planet.”
