Jurgen Klopp has dismissed suggestions Liverpool should prioritise the Premier League this season.
Gary Neville suggested that the Reds would need to sacrifice their Champions League campaign in order to place a greater emphasis on their league form.
Klopp’s side have their four opening fixtures and are aiming to extend the run in Saturday’s trip to Tottenham ahead of a Group C opener with Paris Saint-Germain.
But the Liverpool manager insists that last season’s finalists are not prepared to jeopardise their European prospects to help end a 29-year domestic drought.
He said: “How should that work? What do we do – we don’t play Champions League or what? Gary should come over and tell me how that exactly works.
“How do you prepare a game when you don’t focus on it? Bring your kids in the Champions League – that would be funny!
“I don’t know what he means, to be honest. A lot of people watch our games when we play Champions League and that’s our job; that we do the best we can in all these games.
“To focus on one competition can only be if you are maybe already out of the competition nearly. If it’s late in the season that you have a chance to do it but last year, for example, we had no chance to focus on one competition.
“We had to qualify for the Champions League and I don’t think that even Gary Neville would have said in the quarter finals of the Champions League, ‘come on, let [Manchester] City win – they are champions anyway’.
“It doesn’t work like this. I don’t want to be too critical about it because I don’t know exactly how he said it, but sitting in an office and talking about football is completely different to doing the job.
“But it’s an opinion. What did he say about Man United in that case? It’s a club that he’s more interested in. Nothing?”