It seems increasingly odd, doesn’t it, that the role played by Arsène Wenger in Germany’s World Cup win last year is so widely overlooked? The fact is Wenger barely gets a mention. This despite the fact Jürgen Klinsmann has often described his former manager at Monaco as a key influence when Klinsmann was helping to redefine elite German football, allowed to theorise and restructure, and finding himself at least once in brainstorming meetings at the German FA brandishing a flip-chart with Wenger-ish words like “speed” and “possession” written on it. Words that may – and this has never been specifically disproved – have also included things like “good quality”, “little bit of sharpness” and “Pat Rice”.

What we do know is under Klinsmann, Germany were transformed into a technically refined, quick passing unit, spurred on by the coach’s vision of Peak Wenger teams in France and England. And to this day the Bundesliga academies continue to churn out players in the same template. So, World Cup glory for Wenger then. Arsène-weiss, as they’ve been saying at the Deutscher Fussball-Bund for the past 15 years.

This is, of course, not really true. Or rather it’s maybe just a tiny little bit true, a stretch, a hypothesis, an imaginative assumption of overlapping influences. In fact the only reason for putting forward the notion of Wenger as the godfather of modern German football is the basic rage, scorn and howls of disbelief this would almost certainly draw from the rage-addled, howling periphery of English football. Intangible academic connections! Schools of thought! A shared hierarchy of ideas and influences! Oh no. We’re not having this.

None of which has any obvious connection to the arrival of Jürgen Klopp at Liverpool, the most exciting event this week or indeed – judging by the air of scandalised hysteria – possibly ever. What an appointment it is! Klopp has energy, zeal and charisma. He gets the best out of young players. He looks like a very friendly life-sized cartoon cat who wants to give you a high five and teach you how to cross the road.

Jürgen Klopp: to be Liverpool manager is the biggest honour I can imagine. Guardian

Best of all he is very obviously in love with the basic sound and fury, the clanking, soaring power chords of it all. Never mind the slightly toxic jeering-off of Brendan Rodgers, whose heart was also in the right place. Landing Klopp is a coup. And not only for Liverpool but for the Premier League itself. Perhaps. Fingers crossed. Maybe.

Which is where Wenger and shades of influence come in. There are similarities between the two. Wenger was 47 when he came to England, Klopp is 48. Wenger was greeted with derision on his arrival, Klopp by a swooning guard of honour, the hottest snake-hipped stadium rock footballing property on the planet.

Above all both have a style and a set of methods. Not the same methods: Klopp has gently mocked the “silent song” of late Wenger Arsenal, even if his own notion of heavy metal football isn’t too dissimilar to the Wenger teams Klinsmann admired, all speed, energy and zippy passing. Indeed it is probably fair to say from a purist point of view that Klopp is the most exciting arrival since Wenger himself, José Mourinho’s cult of personality aside, an appointment to refresh the Premier League, to refuel the intellectual rocket launchers.

Except, this is where the music starts to slow. Because, let’s face it, the fact remains that in two decades since his arrival Wenger has had a greater, more visible – albeit rather tenuous – influence on Germany’s world champions than he has on the current England team. Despite being the only long-serving Premier League-era manager with any real sway or heft in the wider world – coach of five of France’s world champions in 1998 – he will leave no real mark on English football development or theory. Rather than cherished, brain selectively picked, Wenger is instead quietly mocked these days, cast as a cobwebbed crank, some doomed, sad stone knight still tending the hearth, a little creaky and mad, friends only with the flies and the beetles and the spiders.

With this in mind it is doubly interesting Klopp should be at Liverpool, a club that provided between 1972-90 the most sustained dynastic success in English football history but perhaps the most puzzling. In a less philistine nation we would still be talking about the Liverpool bootroom now, the way they talk about Cruyff in Catalonia, Rinus Michels in the Netherlands, Arrigo Sacchi’s suffocating machine at Milan. That period of self-sustaining domination would be our own grail, our own enduring template for success.

Except, somehow there just don’t ... can’t seem to ... no words, no ideas. “Everyone wanted to know the secret,” Joey Jones says in the brilliantly readable anatomy of that period Boot Room Boys, but you never really find out what it is. There’s talk about the Liverpool way (keep the ball, stay humble, sign good players) and the usual monastic veneration for football’s greatest ever booze-sodden, slipper-stinking man-cave, fuelled in the good times by Joe Fagan’s crates of sponsor’s stout. But really, there’s nothing to hang a peg on here, no hard theory of coaching and tactics, no blueprint to pass on. When the bootroom vanished that shared golden thread of personality and quiet good sense disappeared with it. Gone for good. No theory. No ideas please. We’re British.

And so here we are. Welcome, Jürgen! Just don’t bother talking to the natives. Because the fact is for all its commercial triumphs the Premier League remains robustly anti-intellectual, a product with plenty of sound and fury but little in the way of innovation. No significant tactical model has ever emerged here, no way of playing beyond the successfully reeled-in power football of the years 2005-11.

Jürgen Klopp gives his first interview as Liverpool manager to LFCTV. Guardian

Not that Klopp comes across as a notable pointy-head. An article by James Corbett in the Blizzard magazine recently identified him as part of a group of coaches from the south-west of Germany with “a highly innovative philosophy” based on the ideas of one Helmut Gross, a man who once spent so long holed up with Ralf Rangnick watching Sacchi videos the VCR machine wore out. But he’s not exactly a Marcelo Bielsa type, the manager as chess-genius obsessive, barely able to put his jacket on the right way round, Post-it Notes tumbling from his turn-ups.

Instead Klopp has a pretty simple set of systems: hard-pressing, counterattack, blitz team defence. It is already fascinating to picture how his brand of goofy wised-up magic may improve what is, in fairness to Rodgers and the dreaded transfer committee, a pretty decent young squad.

Beyond that what the Premier League does with him – Mad Jürg’s five best quotes! Kloppo floppo blows his toppo! Gegenpressing hunk in mind games meltdown! – will be just as intriguing. Klopp is an asset, a modernising force in his prime to be studied and treasured and helped along. Perhaps, who knows, he may even end up being Arsène to our own revolutionary Jürgen one of these days. Either way somebody take some notes. Give him time. Let’s not blow this one, eh?