Klopp agrees to become Germany manager after Nagelsmann’s World Cup exit
The Liverpool icon is set to replace Julian Nagelsmann in the German dugout, with a four-year deal agreed and only the formal announcement to come.
Jul 10, 2026
Germany have their man, and it is the one name the country wanted all along. Jürgen Klopp has agreed to become the next head coach of the national team, ending a two-year break from the dugout to take on a job that will define the German game for the rest of the decade. The German Football Association is still tidying up the final contract details, but the agreement is in place and a formal announcement is expected shortly.
The vacancy opened the moment Julian Nagelsmann walked away. Germany went out of the 2026 World Cup at the round of 32, beaten by Paraguay on penalties in Boston on June 29, and Nagelsmann stepped down soon after, accepting the blame for a tournament that never caught fire. For a four-time world champion, a June exit at a 48-team finals was not the campaign anyone at the DFB had signed off on.
A break that was always going to end
Klopp has not taken a touchline since he left Liverpool at the end of the 2023-24 season, closing a near-nine-year run at Anfield that brought a Premier League title and the Champions League. He did not disappear from the sport. Since 2025 he has run football operations across the Red Bull group, a boardroom role that kept him close to the game without the weekly grind of management. Friends always suspected the itch would return, and the one job capable of pulling him back was the national team.
He inherits a squad that is far from broken. Florian Wirtz, Jamal Musiala and Kai Havertz are all in or approaching their peak, and the group that reached the last 32 carried talent that flattered to deceive rather than a genuine lack of quality. What went missing in the United States was conviction, the sense of a team that knew how to win a knockout game. Germany have not won a World Cup knockout tie since lifting the trophy in 2014, and that drought, more than any single result, is what Klopp has been hired to end.
A four-year mandate
Reports in Germany put the deal at four years, which would keep Klopp in charge through Euro 2028 in the United Kingdom and Ireland and on to the 2030 World Cup. That points to a rebuild rather than a patch job, and it fits a manager who has never been interested in short stays. He is expected to bring in familiar faces, with long-serving Liverpool lieutenant Peter Krawietz and former assistant Pep Lijnders both linked to his backroom staff, while Rudi Völler is set to stay on as sporting director.
The appeal is obvious. Klopp’s best sides have been built on energy, front-foot pressing and a bond with the crowd, and the Euros in 2028 is exactly the kind of stage that brings the best out of him. Nagelsmann left behind a dressing room that had the players but not the identity. Restoring that identity, and the swagger that used to come with the German shirt, is the brief.
The pressure starts now
None of this guarantees anything. International management is a different discipline from the club game Klopp mastered, with fewer sessions, fewer chances to drill his ideas and no transfer market to reshape a squad. Plenty of celebrated club coaches have found the national-team rhythm a hard one to settle into. But few appointments in recent memory have felt this natural, and a German public worn down by a run of underwhelming tournaments will take the lift that comes with a manager they trust.
Once the DFB puts pen to paper, the rebuild starts in earnest. Klopp wanted a project worth returning for. He has found one, and the expectation that comes with it is enormous.