Why not even becoming world champions can lift Liverpool’s craving for the Premier League title

The world is not enough for Liverpool. Success in Qatar was uplifting for Jurgen Klopp and his side but the primary target for the season is the Premier League. If the team let slip their ten-point cushion at the top of the table, the Club World Cup will feel like an almost worthless bauble.

That might appear to be a classic Little Englander thought process in keeping with these xenophobic times but that would be far from the truth. It has been way too long since Liverpool were domestic champions. An entire generation has grown up since 1990 without seeing the title paraded at Anfield. With every year the pressure and longing build. Nothing – not being crowned the world’s best nor even winning the Champions League – can remove the craving.

This is the longest title drought in Liverpool’s history. This, after all, is a club that has won the league 18 times. Klopp was brought to Merseyside to deliver the Premier League trophy. Fenway Sports Group, the American owners, understand the importance of bringing the club back to the top of the English game. They know what it means to the fanbase.

John W Henry, the principal owner, has experience in breaking hoodoos. In 2004 he led the Boston Red Sox to World Series victory for the first time in 86 years. The experience was one of the most moving periods of his life.

He explained what it was like in a London restaurant just after Brendan Rodgers’s team had imploded from pole position in the last week of the 2013-14 season to cede the title to Manchester City. Henry explained how he was not particularly sporty – a ‘jock’ in American jargon – and had never been on the receiving end of the hero worship sportsmen and women are routinely granted. After the Sox finally won the big prize, Bostonians who had become inured to disappointment directed almost as much adulation towards the owner who delivered the glory as the players.

“It was overwhelming,” Henry said. “Very few people get to experience anything like it.” The Red Sox have repeated the feat three times since but it was impossible to replicate the joy and release of the moment 86 years of pain were consigned to history. “That first time was special,” Henry said. “It will be like that when Liverpool win the Premier League. It could even be bigger.”

This is the prize everyone at Anfield wants. On Boxing Day it is back to business for Klopp’s team, ironically against a Leicester City side now managed by Rodgers. Despite their defeat to Pep Guardiola’s City at the weekend, Leicester are still Liverpool’s closest challengers. The match at the King Power stadium could redefine the campaign for both teams.

The next five months are among the most important in Liverpool’s history. More than half the season is yet to unfold. No one at Anfield thinks the lead at the top is unassailable but they are confident that they can maintain momentum.

Klopp has managed the squad superbly. Injuries would make life more difficult. The team has evolved in a manner where individual positions are less interchangeable than in some other great sides. Bill Shankly famously claimed that “a football team is like a piano. You need eight men to carry it and three who can play the damn thing.” To get the tuning right in Klopp’s team and cope with the pace of the modern game at least six of the XI need to be able to play and do the heavy lifting. Losing one of Virgil van Dijk, the full backs or the front three for a prolonged period would have a negative impact on performances.

The manager has not received enough credit for the way he has changed his tactics. Few of his contemporaries would have grasped the possibilities presented by Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andy Robertson and made them the focus of the team’s approach play. It does mean, however, a layoff for either full back would require a tactical shift.

The biggest positive for the second half of the season is that opponents have not worked out how to shut down Alexander-Arnold and Robertson. Until they do, Liverpool will continue to win games.

The sense that something momentous is about to happen is growing on Merseyside. Being world champions is a bonus but a title would not only take the weight of history from Anfield but it would transfer it elsewhere. The clock would start ticking for Arsenal, who are about to go 16 years without winning the Premier League. Success in the desert lifted spirits but ending the dry spell in the league back home means much more.