Liverpool will be lining up with almost a completely new midfield when the season gets underway, and it is a test of an old Dortmund theory about the Bundesliga winning boss
Once the oddness around Jordan Henderson's exit has been stripped away, and after Fabinho flies off from the same departure lounge in the coming days, Liverpool's midfield will be left looking very different. It is both simultaneously a cause for great optimism and huge concern.
There were those dark days in January and February last season - the heavy defeats at Brentford, Brighton and Wolves to name just three - when Reds supporters would have been quite glad not to see their club's midfielders ever again, but even they can't have imagined it turning out like this.
Since the end of last season five players who have started games for Liverpool in the centre of midfield have either left or are about to, and those five are in the top six for midfield minutes played for the club during Jurgen Klopp's tenure, playing 81 per cent of the time.
It is a sweeping change on a scale rarely seen, but whatever happens next it is certainly exciting.
James Milner, Naby Keita and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain - all of whom received a bigger send-off than the Premier League and Champions League winning captain due to the nature of the latter's exit - were always leaving at the end of last season, and that alone was a big enough shake up.
But with Henderson and Fabinho going too it is a quite staggering changing of the guard, and while the nature of the Saudi bids will have taken him by surprise somewhat, they have presented Klopp with a chance to put something right from his earlier career.
After the end of what turned into his final season at Dortmund in 2015, both Klopp and the club accepted that there really wasn't any other choice but for him to leave. That's just the done thing in football, after all. That's what always happens.
Dortmund chief executive Hans-Joachim Watzke has since said that if he was faced with the same decision again he'd get rid of the players and not their gifted manager.
"You know it too: it's better to leave now after seven years,' Jurgen said," Watzke wrote in his 2019 autobiography.
"We did not try to change his mind any more. But that was maybe a mistake. Perhaps it would have been better if we had exchanged the entire team - not the coach.
"Because I knew that, we would never get back such a coach. When I said goodbye, real tears came."
Change the players and not the manager? It's a fairly radical thought in football, and one that you never see come to pass because of the mind-boggling costs involved. It would never happen en masse of course, but we are perhaps seeing the closest thing you can get to it at the top level.
Klopp wasn't in danger of getting sacked during last season's struggles of course, but trust and confidence in his authority over his side was at its lowest ebb. Things looked broken.
A theme of much of the manager's pre-season talk has been about rebuilding his side and putting right the many things that went wrong. The sense that the legs in the engine room wouldn't be able to carry that burden - or just found it all a bit too hard - is now a real one given that they've almost all slipped away.
"What I would like to ask for: trust us," said Klopp last weekend.
"We feel really responsible for what's happening here and we will do absolutely everything to have a season, in the best possible understanding, we will never forget. That's the plan.
"I want to put things right and that gives me the extra edge as well. The fever, the power, the excitement is bigger when last year was not great."
It is one thing repeating those messages but another putting them into practice, and having an almost entirely new department of the team is going to help with that.
In Alexis Mac Allister and Dominik Szoboszlai the Reds have added two creative, attack-minded and versatile midfielders, but they have also added players with brains full of fresh ideas who will take their new manager's instructions on board.
A more defensive-minded midfielder or two is of course what is needed now, with the Reds desperate to sew up a deal for Romeo Lavia before Chelsea try and muscle in. The 19-year-old wants to move to Anfield and the switch is expected to be completed, but of course anything can happen in the transfer window.
If the Belgian can be secured along with a more experienced head then the midfield overhaul will be complete.
A Red revolution for the ages? That remains to be seen, but the winds of change are blowing at quite the rate.
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