It is a condition of football fandom that every supporter must think their club to be special, to be unique.
But selling that idea to those without a lifelong affiliation can be difficult, as Liverpool had often found in the years preceding October 2015.
By that point, the Reds had gone 26 years without a league title and hadn’t won a trophy since the 2012 League Cup - the most lowly regarded of all available silverware.
What’s more, they had played Champions League football in just one of the last six full seasons.
The financial consequences of that absence from Europe’s top table were painfully spelled out by the annual publication of Deloitte’s Football Money League.
Each year, Liverpool were reminded that Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea and Arsenal - the teams they needed to overhaul to secure a top-four place - were streets ahead in terms of revenue
And to make things worse, they were also being regularly outperformed by a Tottenham side hugely overachieving their relatively tight budget.
The ramifications of this combination of circumstances were often most starkly underlined during the transfer window, with the summer of 2014 representing something of a nadir in those terms.
That year, despite having achieved the increasingly rare feat of actually qualifying for the Champions League, Liverpool were unable to prevent talismanic striker Luis Suarez leaving for Barcelona.
Their sales pitch for Alexis Sanchez to come the other way as his replacement also failed to land, with the Chilean opting instead to join Arsenal.
It seemed none of Europe’s big talents truly believed that the Reds were a club on the up, a fact borne out by them starting the season with striking options comprising an injured Daniel Sturridge, Mario Balotelli, Rickie Lambert and Fabio Borini.
It is for this reason that, following Brendan Rodgers’ dismissal just over a year later, suggestions that Jurgen Klopp was the club’s no1 managerial target seemed fanciful.
Only diehard Kopites could see why one of the most coveted managers in world football might want to take on a seemingly impossible job at Anfield.
But, incredibly, it turned out Klopp agreed with them, and so he began a rebuilding job that must surely have exceeded even owners Fenway Sports Group’s (FSG) wildest dreams.
In less than five years, Liverpool have gone from fallen giant to European champions, to world champions, and now, after 30 long years, Premier League champions.
Crucially, the dramatic steps forward taken on the pitch have had a transformative effect on the picture off it.
Published in January of this year, the 23rd edition of Deloitte’s football financial standings positioned Liverpool now comfortably ahead of Chelsea and Arsenal.
Manchester City sit just one place in front of the Reds, whose Premier League title victory and associated resurgence as a brand is expected to send them ahead in the coming months.
That Klopp has overseen all this with a (relatively) negligible net spend of just £74million is what arguably marks him out as the best manager in the world.
And for Liverpool fans, it is also likely to prompt entirely reasonable comparisons with the club’s most iconic head coach: Bill Shankly.
Admittedly, the job Klopp has done is far less striking than taking a historically underachieving club from Division Two to the summit of the English game and then laying the foundations for dominance of Europe.
However, it would be fair to say he has achieved something equivalent in the money-dominated modern game: overseeing a journey from mid-table mediocrity to the summit of European football.
Like Shankly, the German is a gifted orator blessed with limitless charisma and a lifelong champion of the socialist ideals that Liverpool’s fans have always espoused, even if the club’s owners have often stood in opposition to those principles.
But it is his knack for always finding the right words and firm understanding of how football can be simultaneously vitally important and completely unimportant that marks him out as the true successor to Shankly.
Of course, it can feel at times like Klopp’s achievements are being obscured by this sheer force of personality, which has seen him transcend sport on occasion during his time on Merseyside.
For that reason, perhaps true appreciation of his brilliance as a footballer manager will only materialise when he eventually departs Anfield and another (infinitely less quotable) man is tasked with keeping the success rolling in.
If only there were a way to know you are in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.
