Leave Steve if you want him to succeed - Kloop

Jurgen Klopp doesn't mince his words when he considers the impossible pressures facing today's star players, as they attempt to transfer those skills into management.

“In the first few years at Mainz, if I was training naked no-one would have seen it – even if I didn’t do that!” the Liverpoolmanager joked.

The intent is not to shock, but to highlight that legendary players like Steven Gerrard, as he takes the first step towards a different career after calling time on his playing days, face unfair pressures to become top managers instantly

Klopp points out that he made many, many mistakes in his early years as a manager with Mainz, but they were barely noticed as he made his way on the path towards becoming a great coach.

Gerrard, and contemporaries such as Ryan Giggs, Frank Lampard, Gary Neville and his brother Phil, simply don't have that luxury... and the Reds' coach believes English football must change its ideas if another generation of top players is not to be lost to management and another decade passes with the game moaning that there are no top English coaches.

“Maybe you can help create more English managers in England in the future if they can start working at the beginning and not in the middle or the end,” he says.

His point is that Gerrard is expected to take a top job immediately, just as the Nevilles did. And the inference is the pressure of that expectation means they will almost certainly fail, again as the Nevilles did – losing experienced talent to management, possibly for ever.

His answer is simple: let them start at the bottom, not the top, and learn their craft before pitching them into high-pressure roles – just as Patrick Vieira did at Manchester City's academy, before taking his first managerial role with Major League Soccer's New York City.