Jurgen Klopp is vividly describing the moment his seven-year-old self fell in love with European football. He is conjuring images of audio commentaries, exotic names and venues and a sense of ‘something special’ capturing the mood of cities, nations and continents.

“You always knew when the big games were on,” he tells me. “My mum would put me in the bath, put the radio on and for one and a half hours I was there. My skin was done. It is more the legend of the competition I remember – the big German players of Bayern Munich and at that time Borussia Monchengladbach... Rainer Bonhoff, Bertie Vogts, Uli Stielike and Jupp Heynckes.”

Great German teams beaten by Liverpool, I remind him. Did he have a bath on the night of the 1977 European Cup Final?

“If you speak to German people and had to name a club that you associate with European nights it is Liverpool,” he says. “It was not one specific game or final. It was the whole era. When a German side was playing it was always something you wanted to read about as a boy. Then you hear the names of these clubs – the big English teams were always involved. This is how you remember it.”