Jurgen Klopp cautions Steven Gerrard: Being a good footballer isn't enough to become a good manager

Gerrard announced his retirement from professional football on Thursday after spending 18 of his best years with his boyhood club Liverpool and 18 months with MLS side LA Galaxy, and expressed his interest in becoming a manager.

“Being a good footballer is not the only thing you need to be a good manager,’ Klopp told Daily Mail. “It helps. It is something I lacked because I wasn’t a good player. But that doesn’t mean I don’t understand the game. I can imagine how it should be on the pitch.

“You are not the only country with this problem. In Germany, the team that won the 1990 World Cup, not a lot of them are managers. A few have tried it, not all of them have tried it. We can’t change the situation for these unbelievably good football players.”

While congratulatory messages flowed from Gerrard’s former teammates and peers, Diouf’s words were loaded.

In his 2015 autobiography,  Gerrard wrote: “It seemed to me, Diouf did not care about football and about Liverpool.”

On Thursday, Diouf alluded to it sarcastically. “When I arrived I showed him he was nothing at all. He was nothing at all,” Diouf told French TV channel SFR Sport. “I asked him to tell me in which big competition, Euros or World Cup, people think about him.”

Diouf remains the only Liverpool forward to have gone two seasons without scoring and took a dig at Jamie Carragher and Gerrard for his difficult time at the Merseyside club.

“People told me at Liverpool, there were some guys you could not touch, but I touched them. That is why it was complicated for me,” the 35-year old said. And when former Arsenal midfielder and fellow guest Emmanuel Petit asked: “Are you talking about Steven Gerrard?”Diouf replied: “I do. Stevie G and Jamie Carragher, the two scousers.”