Every word from part two of Ralf Rangnick press conference 27 April 2022

Ralf, you mentioned last week how Jurgen Klopp had a bit of an advantage when he first came, they [Liverpool] finished eighth, next season he didn’t have European football and he could just concentrate on the league. I appreciate that you’re going to try and win every game, but is there a sense that Erik, now you’re not going to be in the Champions League, might benefit from not being in Europe. You’re not going to try and deliberately finish eighth but if that were to happen, and you didn’t have European football, could that be an advantage to him? 
“That could be an advantage, but that does not mean we will give away any of the remaining four games. For us it’s clear, and this is our obligation, this is our job, my job, the job of the players, that we try to get the best possible results then we will see at the end of the season in which position we will finish. Now, to speak about whether that would be an advantage or not, doesn’t make sense because this would be interrupted again…for me it’s important that we get results, that we play as good as we possibly can, because this will affect the mood for the new season.”

If Erik asks you about the captaincy and he asks you in your role as consultant, should Harry Maguire be the captain, would you recommend that, Ralf? What would you say to him, knowing Harry, having been here, five or six months?
“Again, I understand your question, but again I think it doesn’t make sense because you don’t know which kind of players will be here, what the group will look like. I can only tell what I have done in the past when I was the head coach or the manager, because in Germany it’s called match kapitän, so the captain of the team. I strongly believe that the captain should be elected by the team because he’s called the team manager, and we always did that. We always had a board of four or five players, we called it the spielkapitän, elected by the players, the player with the highest amount of votes was the team captain at the end. That’s how I did it, I know that not a lot of head coaches do it that way…”

Guardiola does it at City…
“Yeah, so that’s what I would do if I was still the manager next season, but I’m not, so that is something for Erik to decide.”