Like Klopp, Hayes’ final season has fallen flat – but it is not her fault

As Liverpool's women jubilantly celebrated their barnstorming 4-3 victory over Chelsea on Wednesday night and a dejected Emma Hayes conceded – perhaps a little prematurely – the Women's Super League title to Manchester City, it was easy to draw parallels with Hayes' sadness and the disappointing end to the season that the Merseyside club's men's manager Jurgen Klopp is simultaneously experiencing.

Many people are asking whether there is correlation between both teams looking set to miss out on the WSL and Premier League trophies respectively given that both managers' summer departures were announced months in advance, and whether these two cases are a repeat of the blip that followed Sir Alex Ferguson's initial 'retirement' announcement in 2001-02.

But that comparison is lazy, and I don't buy the argument that Chelsea are losing games because her players know Hayes is ending her 12-year reign as manager later in May.

For starters, these two great modern managers' circumstances are quite different, and I don't simply mean because Klopp is already well accustomed to narrowly missing out on titles while Hayes, who has won four league titles in a row, is not the reasons for their respective teams' recent disappointing results are multifaceted.

Let's firstly distinguish between the two contrasting exit scenarios. Klopp, on his own terms, had the freedom to choose the timing of his announcement that he was leaving Liverpool, doing so because he said, understandably, that he had run out of energy. Whether or not he could have announced news later in the season is a perfectly valid conversation.

Hayes, on the other hand, is leaving because she was offered another job, a bigger job, and therefore the announcement could not