Ranking the 10 best players who have played under Jurgen Klopp

#5. Mario Gotze

Gotze won the Golden Boy award in 2011 while playing under Jurgen Klopp

Mario Gotze is another Borussia Dortmund player who left the club only to return a few years later after a failed transfer. However, like Sahin and Kagawa before him. Gotze’s time away from Dortmund was highly successful.

Gotze was one of Klopp’s favourites and the Dortmund academy graduate was given the chance to shine in the first team when he was a teenager.

He played 116 games for Dortmund in his first spell scoring 31 times and winning two league titles. His performance often defied his age and he won the Golden Boy award in 2011 given to the best U-21 player in Europe.

The fleet-footed midfielder was key to Dortmund’s success but in 2013, before the second leg of Dortmund’s Champions League semi-final against Real Madrid, it was announced that he would move to rivals Bayern.

He played 114 games for Bayern scoring 36 times but struggled to replicate the form that made him a star at Dortmund. In 2016, he returned to Dortmund only to find that he had myopathy, a metabolic disease which can cause fatigue and weight gain.

This explains the dip in form and his struggle to maintain fitness while at Bayern Munich.