Who turned Liverpool FC into winners after 30 years of being “doubters,” and how can you turn around your organization?

Today, I'd like to talk about Liverpool winning the Premier League for the first time in 30 years and what we could learn about influence from Jürgen Klopp. It may seem a bit of a tangent, but I'd like for us to look at the parallels between Jürgen Klopp and his role at transforming Liverpool, this British football team that hasn't won anything for 30 years, to becoming the winners of the Premier League.

Robert Cialdini wrote the book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. In that book, he lists six ways that individuals can influence others. What I'd like to do is to share how I've looked at Jürgen Klopp in the light of Cialdini's research and studies, and really show that Jürgen Klopp has really mastered influence. Why that's important is because through mastering influence by being himself and bringing in certain practices, Jürgen Klopp has transformed a team that has an amazing history, but in the last 30 years have not won an English title. This means that, for all of us, taking over a team or having our own team that needs to be rejuvenated is possible. Robert Cialdini's book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion gives us some guidelines and Jürgen Klopp gives us a case study. 

When Jürgen Klopp came over and took the reins at Liverpool FC, he gave a keynote on October 2015 and in that, he said, "We must turn from doubters to believers." He addressed the team, the groundsmen, but also the people of Liverpool and their supporters worldwide, including my good friend Andy Gardner, who has been talking with me about Liverpool since we were 16 years old. Andy, this is a good shoutout for you. This must be a very, very proud weekend. 

Jürgen Klopp took over a team that has competed with 19 other teams in 38 games in the Premier League season, and only seven clubs have won this cup since it was started in 1992. In fact, what's amazing is Liverpool has managed to win the cup before the season has actually finished. When he took over the team, he came up with an articulated a message that unified everybody, and that was identifying that people didn't have self-belief. They didn't have belief in themselves nor in the team of Liverpool anymore, and that his fundamental job as the new manager was to change people from being doubters to believers. And as we come through COVID right now and all the struggles that we've all got about whether our business can survive, or our economies or our communities or our shops can survive, we too have to take leadership roles and convert ourselves and anybody around us from doubters into believers, and we can do this through public relations. And as I've said before on many occasions, public relations is not simply press relations. Public relations goes to the very heart of the messaging that we give as owners or managers of our businesses. There are a number of them that Cialdini profiles, and I'd like to share those with you.

The first is one of likability and this idea that influence is a result of how liked a person is. Jürgen Klopp became known as a public persona with a very tactile approach, a big hugger, very much a gentle and open, non-confrontational man with a great laugh. When some of the fans started to leave the grandstand eight minutes before the end of one of the matches they were losing, he said he felt very lonely in that stadium, so he articulated the sense of disappointment that he and all of his team had that the fans were walking out before he had even finished the final whistle. Later on in that season, when they had an away match with a tool draw against another team, he got the team and they stood arm in arm and went to each side of the fans in the stadium, and they thanked the fans for staying till the end of the match. It wasn't something that he had to do. It wasn't something that many managers would ever have dreamt of doing, but what he did was he engaged with the fans. He didn't just see it as the team, the players being his job. We have what I would call the internal audiences, external audiences, and the partners. What Jürgen Klopp did was he saw the essential role that the fans played, the partners, the supporters in the success of the team and in the psychology of the team on the pitch.

A second element that Cialdini says is an important influence is reciprocity; in other words, giving credit to others. When Jürgen Klopp signed a new contract in December of 2019 which would bring him to the club until the summer of 2024, he didn't sit there and just say thank you to himself. In the press conference, he said, "I must highlight the role of our sporting director Michael Edwards in this journey so far. His input and collaboration has been just as important as anyone else's in getting us into a position to compete for the game's top titles." Here is a man signing a contract about himself, but he is being humble, and he's giving credit to others. When we are addressing people about the success of our own business, how much credit do we take and how much do we give to those around us? And of course, it galvanizes those people around us if they feel recognized, and to be recognized in public is even greater. 

The third element of Influence by Cialdini is social proof that people would like to know that other people believe or support that person as well. Our own influence is magnified by the number of people that we influence. It makes sense really, doesn't it? If we're not even influential in our own homes, it gets harder to be influential anywhere else. One of the things that has happened at  over the last number of years is that the teams now have become as loyal to the manager as they have to the team. Midfielder Jordan Henderson, who's the captain that was brought on by Kenny Dalglish, people had given him a hard time but under Jürgen Klopp, he's grown in stature and become indispensable. The players and the management said, "We want to perform for the manager and for the club and for the city," so how important is that here is a soccer player saying that he doesn't see it just about his manager, his boss, but he's playing for his peers on the pitch? They're playing for all of the other people that are part of the Liverpool FC team ecosystem, but also playing for the city. How many of us, when we think about our own company, think about the community that we're supporting and how important those people are, and how important our company can be to the well-being of that society and that community?

Now, in terms of social proof, Liverpool (of course, now, all the major clubs do this ) has their own Liverpool FC international television online. They currently have 14.8 million Twitter followers, 37,348,714 Facebook followers, and 26.5 million Instagram followers. This is pretty amazing. From a social proof point of view, these then become self-fulfilling prophecies as more people get more people as we've seen from the Watts Cascade theory that I've written about in earlier episodes of my blog, that we're looking to find people that are easily influenced to influence others. What Liverpool has done, of course, is to build social media platforms to do that. 

Cialdini mentions consistency and commitment as being another way to influence others. Apparently, behind the scenes, Jürgen Klopp is meticulous in his approach. He is punctual. He is organized. He understands modern football methods and matters outside of the game around commerce, for example, so you could argue he's something of a renaissance man combined with being an engineer. Every training session is apparently meticulously planned with the staff. He then addresses his players to outline their work. He's apparently not only the manager, but he's also the the coach, taking into aspect every particular day and every particular routine that affects his players. Imagine, as we look at our own organization, how much time do we spend looking at, for example, the furniture of our staff, the food? I used to rearrange the desks for my staff when I saw that their monitors were not at the right height. I put books to make sure they're at the eye level, for example.

Another of Cialdini's influence factors is that of contrast. He says that we evaluate our own situations using a reference point. What we see in advertising, certainly in PR in America which is much more confrontational, is, "Who is better or who is worse?" We see this, of course, in the presidential election advertising. Cialdini says that influence means that we must also be contrasting our own product or offering or service against those of others. In the case of UK soccer, we have different people like Jose Mourinho who was at Manchester United, who were very confrontational during the same time, and very much taking press conferences and considering himself to be the person most important and the players to be directed around. There's a contrast between styles and that, of course, creates a contrast in terms of where the players want to work, because by creating a style and demonstrating that style publicly, for example, on pitch holding arms with the players in front of the supporters, he was creating a contrast in how Liverpool has been seen and run compared to other teams in the Premier League.

The other element that Cialdini suggests is an important influence is creating a culture of scarcity that, ultimately, we've come back to this before about people buy from emotion, from logic, and from fear. In Cialdini's influence, he talks about the need to create scarcity, that people hate to miss out on something that's scarce. Jürgen Klopp created some degree of scarcity on his team in that, unlike other managers in other teams, he didn't automatically buy players when he had a slot. He looked in his reserves. He looked in his junior teams. People had to compete for the places on the first team, of course they did, but he also made it so that outsiders would see a scarcity of opportunity within Liverpool, and therefore, they would have to work harder to get those places, to want those places on the Liverpool Football team and within the club. They would join the junior teams and the training teams earlier, because they didn't want to miss out, so creating scarcity at Liverpool was not about saying there's not enough, but about saying that this is a camp that's hard to get into. You have to try very hard to get in, and you have to start at the bottom and work your way up.

Now, if we look at scarcity in terms of tickets, in 2012, they had an average of 37-38,000 attendance. In 2013, it grew to 40,000, 2015 to 43,000, 2016 to 53,000. In 2017, 53,000 people would attend a match, so tickets have been scarce, and they're looking at adding another 10,000 seats to get the stadium to 60,000. The success of Jürgen Klopp and the team has led to a scarcity in availability of tickets, but what people have been doing then is buying the merchandise. In 2019, Liverpool sold 1.13 million replica t-shirts. If you think about it this way, there are only 11 men on the pitch and 1.13 million replica shirts being sold. To give you an idea, Manchester United is still the biggest club in the world in terms of shirt sales. They sold an average of 1.85 million shirts in a season for the last five seasons. One can see, then, how leadership that leads to success on the pitch is creating success off the pitch. These are multi-million, multi-billion dollar businesses now. Over the last 30 years, Liverpool has bought in some 239 players and spent $1.47 billion in order to become the winners of the Premier League this year. Is Jürgen Klopp really a master of Liverpool or of Cialdini's Psychology of Persuasion? 

I've left one last ingredient of persuasion which Cialdini posits and that is that of authority. Former Liverpool chief executive Ian Ayre said at the press conference when Jürgen Klopp joined them in 2015, and said, "Is Jürgen right for Liverpool? The answer is absolutely. Everything is natural. Nothing is made up. He doesn't do anything for effect. He's naturally engaging, and he raises the energy level in a room when he walks in." As leaders of our own organizations, the question that I asked myself is, "Do I raise the energy level when I walk in or when I sit down to a Zoom call or, in other ways, engage with people?" It's possible to see the impact of engaging and raising the energy levels in the organizations we're in.

By seeing a case study in Liverpool, Jürgen Klopp has plainly mastered, without necessarily thinking about it in a conscious way, the psychology of persuasion but not in a manipulative way or a way that seems to be forced. His influence is natural as a function of what he knows how to do and how he does it and in that way, he is a born leader. And as leaders of our own organizations and companies, I think there are many takeaways that we can take from this lesson.

Just to summarize, Cialdini says there is likeability, reciprocity, social proof, commitment, contrast, scarcity, and authority. These six items will lead to great influence, and as we've seen in the case of Liverpool, great success both on the pitch and off the pitch. So with that, I wish all Liverpool fans out there a great weekend and a great end of the season, and congratulations to your long-waited and long-deserved victory. For those of you that are not Liverpool or football or, shall I say, soccer followers, I hope that the parallels between a great team and a great master and the notes of influence make sense to you.

This is a transcript from our podcast which you can find on EastWest PR. If you're interested in learning more about what we do, you can sign up for our newsletter here.

Cover Photo by Thomas Serer on Unsplash