Jurgen Klopp recalls the days when he was just about making a living as a footballer in Mainz and the club’s visionary manager, the late Wolfgang Frank, was trying to introduce modern psychology to a battle-hardened squad of Bundesliga 2 relegation strugglers.

“The first time I realised I was confident was in a meeting when they said ‘Come on, draw a tree’,” Klopp says. “And there were all these little trees and my tree was as big as the f------ paper but that was only because I couldn’t draw. And the guy taking the session looked at it and said: ‘That’s confidence!’ Since then confidence has been my hobby.”

Klopp chuckles at the memory in his office at the Melwood training ground where his denim jacket hangs on a chair and the view is out to the same training pitches where Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley plotted their triumphs. Klopp has a challenge of his own to consider: first Saturday’s game against Crystal Palace and then Liverpool face the runaway Premier League leaders Manchester City on Wednesday in the first leg of what is shaping up to be an epic Champions League quarter-final.

Klopp is a very modern inheritor of an august job, but there are strong similarities with those of his illustrious Anfield predecessors who had to fight for their place in the game. Klopp only turned professional at the relatively late age of 23, by then a father, and an impecunious university student. He says that when he finished playing at 33 the choices were stark. “I had no money in my account. It was always enough to live, to survive but nothing else. So it was ‘Okay, what are we doing now?’”