Jürgen Norbert Klopp was born on 16 June 1967 in Stuttgart and grew up in Glatten, a village in the Black Forest, the son of a travelling salesman who had kept goal himself and pushed his children hard at sport.

It is worth holding on to that modest provincial start, because the earnings curve that follows is steep even by football’s standards: a man who spent his whole playing career outside the top division became one of the best-paid coaches in the game.

As a player Klopp was a journeyman. After spells in the lower leagues around Frankfurt he joined Mainz 05 in 1990 and stayed eleven years, converting from striker to right-back and making more than 300 league appearances in Germany’s second division. Second-tier wages in the 1990s were a working salary rather than wealth, and our estimate for the playing career is roughly €2 million gross.

In February 2001 Mainz made him manager while he was still registered as a player. He stayed seven years, taking the club into the Bundesliga in 2004, and on our estimate earned something like €5 million in total over that spell — a figure that started below €400,000 a year and had roughly tripled by the end.

Borussia Dortmund hired him in 2008, and the next seven years made him famous. He won the Bundesliga in 2010-11 and 2011-12, the second of those with a domestic double, and reached the 2013 Champions League final at Wembley. Reported salary levels at Dortmund climbed with the trophies, towards €5 million a year by the end, which puts our estimate for the Dortmund years at about €25 million gross.

Liverpool is where the money changed scale. He arrived in October 2015 and stayed nine seasons. Reporting through that period put his pay at roughly £7 million a year at the outset, rising past £15 million by 2023; the highest figure in circulation came from a DFB vice-president, who told 90min in late 2023, via a German newspaper interview, that Klopp earned €24 million fixed a year plus €26 million in guaranteed advertising income. Taking the reported salary band rather than that outlier, our estimate for the nine Liverpool seasons is approximately €110 million in gross pay.

The trophies are the reason the salary went where it did. At Liverpool he won the Champions League in 2019, the club’s first league title in thirty years in 2019-20, the FA Cup in 2022, two League Cups and the Club World Cup. Across Mainz, Dortmund and Liverpool his total gross management pay 2001 to 2026 comes to about €155 million on our estimate, roughly $170 million — a career total, not an annual one, and a figure that belongs to him personally rather than to any club’s accounts. Liverpool’s own turnover in his final seasons ran to well over £500 million a year, and none of that is his money.

There is one documented payment at the end of it. the Press Association reported from Liverpool’s published accounts that Klopp and his coaching staff received £9.6 million on leaving in 2024, a sum shared across the group rather than paid to him alone.

He has been German Football Manager of the Year three times, won the Best FIFA Men’s Coach award in 2019 and 2020, and is a Freeman of the City of Liverpool. In Germany the recognition ran deeper still: when the DFB announced him as national head coach on 24 July 2026, Bundesliga.com covered the unveiling live from the DFB Campus in Frankfurt, which is not how an ordinary coaching appointment is treated.

Klopp has been a steady commercial presence in Germany for two decades, fronting campaigns for car, beer, confectionery and sportswear brands, and that income is the second real stream in his wealth. The DFB official’s claim of €26 million a year in guaranteed advertising sits far above anything else reported, so the working does not use it.

Our estimate instead applies €1.5 million to €4 million a year across the fifteen years since the first Dortmund title, giving €22 million to €60 million gross and a midpoint near €40 million. It assumes national campaigns rather than one global deal, which is what his advertising record looks like.

His one corporate role sits between coaching and executive work. ABC News reported in October 2024 that he would become Head of Global Soccer at Red Bull, and Red Bull confirmed he started on 1 January 2025, with strategic oversight of the group’s clubs in Leipzig, Salzburg, New York, Brazil and Japan rather than day-to-day management. Sky Sports reported that his agreement carried an exit clause for the Germany job specifically.

It paid well. Sky Sports Germany put the Red Bull salary at between €10 million and €12 million a year, so the eighteen months he served is worth about €16 million gross in the working below.

Klopp’s holdings follow his jobs. He lived in Formby on Merseyside through the Liverpool years and has since moved his base back to Germany for the DFB role. Residential property at the level a coach on his salary buys in those two markets is a mid-seven-figure rather than an eight-figure component, and that is how the working treats it.

The larger part of his balance sheet is retained post-tax income from twenty-five years of rising salaries, which is how a salaried coach rather than a club owner accumulates money.