What with the Sun unable to believe their own luck following snaps of England captain Wayne Rooney a little worse for wear recently, Jurgen Klopp’s has waded into the conversation on the ways professional footballers should or shouldn’t act in their extra curricular time away from the pitch.
Rooney, hoping to put to bed the recent ‘scandal’, issued a grovelling apology following his drunken night at a hotel post England’s win over Scotland.
However the media non story is still floating around the lips of journos a couple of days later.
Speaking at his Friday press conference, Klopp applied logic to the matter when quizzed, commenting:
I feel for the players. We are all on the sunny side of life, earn a lot of money, do the job we love, but in the end there is a human being behind the kid.
Sometimes we are invited to something – a wedding, a birthday – we can still play the professional role and say ‘no, we don’t drink’ and ‘if you smoke, please, 20 yards between me and you’. That’s not how life works.
Before adding;
This generation is the most professional generation of footballers we’ve ever had. All the legends you still love, all the guys you still admire drank like devils and smoked like crazy and were still good players. Nobody does it anymore.
It’s all about timing. When you are in the wrong moment at the wrong place it’s not good, but I’m pretty sure it was not really serious.
The not-so-nice part of our life is that all we do sounds like a big catastrophe when it’s not perfect. And it isn’t.
He may have a penchant for being a raging maniac on the sidelines, the German manager however doesn’t half have a talent for putting stuff into perspective.