Joey Tribbiani is a smooth talker, but Jurgen Klopp insists he is smarter than the Friends character who helped teach him English.

How you doin'? - Liverpool boss Klopp 'smarter than Joey' as he reveals Friends lesson


Jurgen Klopp has explained how he learnt English watching Friends, though he considers himself "a bit smarter" than the smooth-talking Joey Tribbiani.

Liverpool manager Klopp is now a fluent English speaker, but before mastering the Scouse accent, he gained the basics from hugely popular American sitcom Friends.

"[It was] watching Friends, because it's easy to understand," he told BBC 5 live.

Klopp added: "You try to watch movies, because that's next, because in movies they speak dialect, stuff like that, and it's not really well pronounced.

"Trash talk and all this stuff and you have to follow.

"The easiest to follow for Germans in English is Friends. It's an easy conversation. You can understand pretty much each word pretty early, so that's why we use that."

The Reds boss struggled to work out which character he relates to, though, and was compared to Joey.

Klopp did acknowledge Matt LeBlanc's character made up for his lack of brains with his smooth-talking and memorable catchphrase.

“No, no, no, no. I like the girls more than the boys," he said.

"But I cannot play a girl.

"Joey? Yeah... Unfortunately, I'm a bit smarter than the Joey role but my talk with the girls was never as good as his.

"'How you doing?' It was obviously not that easy in my life!"