The team missed out on Europe, however, in classic, painfully dramatic Klopp style: in the last minute on the final day of the season. Fifth-placed Hamburger SV, 2-0 down to Eintracht Frankfurt after an hour, rallied to win 3-2, thanks to a Piotr Trochowski goal scored from an offside position. Dortmund, who had drawn their match 1-1 at the other Borussia (from Mönchengladbach), were left empty-handed. Missing out on the 5 to 7 million euros the club could have made in the re-branded Europa League group stage left a hole in the budget.
‘There’ll be a little less money,’ Klopp said after the frustration had receded. ‘But we’ve had some incredibly powerful experiences and have become much more of a unit with the fans. I’m hoping that some sponsors will say: “Something’s happening here, that’s cool, we want to be part of that.” Everyone can jump on the bandwagon. But it’s much more rewarding to be a part of getting something started.’
‘On the whole, it was a great season,’ Watzke says. ‘Unfortunately the icing on the cake was missing. The way it ended was a huge disappointment to all of us. We hadn’t exactly been spoilt before; an improvement of seven places was pretty good. There were other disappointments over the years, and they always brought us closer together. At the end of the day it’s a fact that the three of us–Jürgen, Michael Zorc and me–were an extraordinarily good fit. That was key.’
Somewhere, half-buried underneath the relentless, contagious positivity Klopp was projecting, there had also been anxiety and trepidation about a coach who’d only ever worked on German football’s periphery. Too many managers had come and failed since the departure of Matthias Sammer in 2004. ‘There was a bit of fear inside the club, due to the recent history. “Please not another failure,” they said,’ says Subotić. ‘We managed to allay those fears in the first year. Finishing sixth after coming thirteenth the season before was a success. We won games, we drew games, we also lost games of course but on the whole, you could see that the plan was working. We learned that we could trust him and each other. The whole club could take a deep breath.’ Kehl agrees. ‘It was palpable that the mood had changed completely,’ he says.
But not everyone was deemed suitable to continue the journey. Swiss striker Alex Frei was offloaded to FC Basel for €4.25m in the off-season. Dortmund spent all the money bringing in a replacement, Argentinian striker Lucas ‘The Panther’ Barrios, who would be happier to toil selflessly on the frontline, as Klopp’s system demanded. Hummels’ loan deal was made permanent in a €4.2m deal that Bayern Munich would come to regret. Two more crucial signings cost almost nothing. All-rounders Sven Bender (twenty, TSV 1860, €1.5m) and Kevin Großkreutz (twenty-one, Ahlen, free transfer) added youthful dynamism in midfield.
Munich-born Bender remembers Klopp phoning to sell Dortmund to him during that summer. ‘I was in the car. The connection dropped four times but he kept on trying. I knew that Dortmund were interested, but the moment a coach calls you and tells you why and how much they want you is really decisive. First of all, it was cool for me to speak to him. I only knew him from television, so to have him on the phone was very nice. He came across exactly like the guy on the box. The conversation was very pleasant. He told me about all the things he had encountered in his first year there, that Dortmund was a fantastic club that he could wholeheartedly recommend to me and that I should do it. And he said he’d be “brutally” happy if I chose him as my coach and Borussia as my club. Of course I wanted in. Dortmund are a big club, with a huge aura, and Klopp was the perfect man at the helm from the very start.’ Bender was even more impressed once he met his new coach in person. ‘The guy was huge! Astonishing. He didn’t look that tall on TV, I had to do a double-take. He was a superb motivator. As a young player, he really hit the spot for me.’
Klopp had a talent for hitting the spot with everyone, Lünschermann says. ‘He didn’t have a routine in the dressing room before a game, or a particular superstition but away from home, he always looked for a quiet, secret place to have a smoke. That made him extremely likeable in my eyes. He didn’t pretend to be ascetic, he had the odd beer, he was unashamedly human–unlike many coaches who try to hide anything others could perceive as a weakness. It was that human side of his, above everything else, that got the whole club going.’
At Dortmund, sporting director Michael Zorc and chief scout Sven Mislintat were responsible for finding player solutions in line with Dortmund’s relatively narrow budget, a few Mainz players (Zidan, Subotić, Markus Feulner) who Klopp had personally put on the shopping list excluded. There was little choice but to plump for exotic nobodies such as Barrios and unknown Polish striker Robert Lewandowski, who was signed from Lech Poznan in 2010. The €4.25m outlay was so significant that Lewandowski was scouted about thirty times. Klopp himself travelled to Poland to cast an eye on the forward, disguising himself with a hoodie and baseball cap.
Empty coffers made playing the youth card a must. Fortunately for Dortmund, Klopp developed an appetite beyond coaching, as Subotić noted. He enjoyed building a new team. ‘At Dortmund, he had a chance to change the squad, almost from scratch, to put his vision in place. I think that really appealed to him. My guess is that it was similar at Liverpool.’
Klopp regularly proclaimed that his young side ‘were hot like frying fat’, but his second season started off rather lukewarm. Two heavy defeats, at Hamburg (1-4) and Bayern (1-5), three draws and a troublesome 1-0 home defeat in the derby against Schalke in the first seven games made for the club’s worst start in twenty-four years. One month ahead of the club’s hundredth anniversary, the team had crashed to fifteenth place. ‘The supporters got a little antsy,’ Watzke says. One hundred angry ultras turned up at the training ground after the Schalke defeat, demanding answers from players and officials. Klopp defused the situation by engaging with the dissenters head-on. Schneck: ‘He got out of the team bus and said: “Okay, tell me.” They complained that the team hadn’t fought enough, that they weren’t true Borussia, that sort of thing. Jürgen explained to them over fifteen or twenty minutes why that wasn’t the case at all, and assured them that he took their concerns and ideas very seriously. They went home peacefully, thanking him for his time. That was no mean feat. Other coaches don’t want anything to do with these types of situations.’
Klopp had a great knack for hitting the right note with supporters, he spoke their language, says Dickel. ‘We had plenty of coaches who would say: “Today, our game between the lines, between defence and midfield, and between midfield and attack, hasn’t quite worked out.” Or: “The transition game was a little off.” Nobody wants to hear that in the Ruhr area. Jürgen said: “We played some real crap today, that’s why we deserved to lose.” Everybody can live with that.’
The media were less easily placated. When Dortmund got knocked out of the DFB Pokal by third division VfL Osnabrück in November, Berliner Zeitung fundamentally questioned Klopp’s ability to take Borussia forward. ‘It’s a regression,’ wrote the broadsheet. ‘Klopp has impressively shown at FSV Mainz that he can make a small club bigger. Whether he can make a not-so-big club big again remains unclear. This season can already be seen as a lost one in that respect.’
The Dortmund coach professed himself disappointed about the sharp change in perception (‘everything is a crisis these days, people’s competence gets doubted far too quickly’) and promised improvement. ‘We will pull ourselves out of it, I’m quite certain of that.’ Watzke maintains the club ‘had no doubt that he would come good. Zero point zero.’
Klopp’s aptitude for keeping the internal mood upbeat was vital at the time, says Bender. Some coaches take out their frustrations on players or lose faith in their own footballing principles. Not so Klopp. ‘Naturally, he would tell somebody in no uncertain terms if they didn’t run in the right direction or paused at the wrong moment,’ Bender says. ‘But he never made a player feel that they were dead to him, that they had blown it. On the contrary, he always made sure the player was given another chance if they wanted to take it. You
could prove to him that you were still there, ready to step on the gas.’
The BVB boss, too, treated every game as a new chance to get things right. Dortmund’s poor run in the autumn of 2009, he felt, was but an unavoidable by-product of a very young side adapting to a system that needed full-blooded commitment and detailed execution to work. Growing pains.
The answer was simple: more work. ‘We held a brief training camp and told the boys they would be getting an extra three days off over the festive season if they–as a team–could cover more than 118 kilometres in each of those ten games,’ he told FourFourTwo years later. They didn’t quite manage it, but Klopp granted them their extra holiday regardless. ‘I did that because the extra effort the team put in immediately translated into more liveliness on the pitch. We were instantly more assertive, we created superiority in numbers–all the things you associate with additional effort.’
‘He would stand on the sidelines and shout his head off that we should push forward,’ says Subotić. ‘As a player, especially as a defender, you’re often thinking: “Safety first, let’s stay back.” He had to make a lot of adjustments during matches in those early days. It was still a completely new system for almost everybody. Hoffenheim had played that way, but only in the first half [of 2008–09]. They couldn’t keep it up. For us, it was a continuous process, and we couldn’t look at any other team in the league as a role model for what we wanted to do.’
Dortmund had to set their own example. With each passing week, an ‘absurdly youthful team’ (Süddeutsche Zeitung), often with an average age of less than twenty-three years old, got a little closer to reconciling high-tempo ‘wildness’ with stability. By mid-December, they were in fifth place. Lucas Barrios’ goals, nineteen in total, kept them in touch with the Champions League places in the New Year, all the way to the penultimate game. The 2009 champions VfL Wolfsburg, who had just lost their title to Louis van Gaal’s Bayern, were the opponents on a day that ended in celebrations leaving even the former Mainz coach Klopp flummoxed. ‘I have never experienced such support in my life,’ he said, after the Yellow Wall and the rest of the stadium had saluted the team with chants and standing ovations that wouldn’t stop. It was impossible to tell from the across-the-board exaltation that Dortmund had only drawn the game 1-1. The result, coupled with Werder Bremen’s 2-0 away win at Schalke, meant that they could no longer finish in the top three and qualify for European club football’s most lucrative competition. But the supporters didn’t care. Their joy had its source in neighbours Schalke’s defeat–which ensured the Royal Blues would not, heaven forbid, win the league–and centred on fifth-placed Dortmund’s first direct qualification for the Europa League in seven years. Germany’s most passionate and most knowledgeable crowd were all too aware of how far the club had come in its first two seasons under Klopp to bemoan them falling a couple of points short of Champions League access. ‘Bombastic party: the team were hailed as if they had pulled off the biggest coup imaginable,’ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported incredulously.
Ahead of Klopp’s first day in office, Watzke and Zorc had given him a small winged rhinoceros figurine as a good-luck charm. Devised as a mascot for the newly opened concert hall in 2002, the chimera had become a symbol for the city, the embodiment of its thick-skinned pride and aspirations. In May, the Signal Iduna Park allowed itself to believe that this fantastical beast might actually… fly? The BVB rhino was pawing the ground, primed for take-off.
8. PUMP UP THE VOLUME
Liverpool 2015–16
It’s a beautiful early summer’s day in Liverpool, best enjoyed on the players’ terrace that stretches the entire length of Liverpool’s Melwood training complex, from Jürgen Klopp’s multiple-bay-window command centre on one corner past the dining hall to the other end, where club nutritionist Mona Nemmer, and Andreas Kornmayer, the head of fitness, have their glass-panelled offices.
You’d never know from the lazy afternoon vibes, the silence of the deserted training pitch and the laughter of Jordan Henderson on the next table, that Liverpool are due to play Southampton in a must-win game in three days, that THE PRESSURE IS ON! to come fourth. Adam Lallana, smiling and squinting in the sunlight like a tourist on the first day of his holiday, couldn’t look much more relaxed if he were sipping a pink cocktail with a paper umbrella instead of bottled mineral water.
The conversation is all about how hard it is to play Klopp’s brand of football, but the England midfielder is not doing a good job of conveying his and the team’s suffering. There’s a simple reason for that: he finds the pain pleasurable.
‘I was on international duty [when Klopp was appointed on 9 October 2015] and I remember how I couldn’t wait to get back,’ he says. ‘I looked up his history and the way his teams played. I saw the word ‘Gegenpressing’ everywhere, Gegenpressing style. ‘Heavy metal’ style. Ever since day one really, our first game against Tottenham, it was a very physically demanding game. But you embrace it, it’s a challenge to become fitter. You get fit, so you can do it. I look at [Philippe] Coutinho sometimes and how hard he works. He wants the ball back and he still has the ability and the strength to take a man on and put it in the top corner.’
Motion and motivation have the same Latin root. One cannot exist without the other. Klopp’s very first message to Liverpool supporters, that they had to turn ‘from doubters into believers’, was repeated to the players at Melwood ahead of the debut training session. ‘He talked a lot about the team trusting itself, about belief, and not fearing any other team,’ Lallana says. ‘He definitely had that confidence himself, that aura and belief that he is a top manager. He walked through the door and you could feel it. And I think that automatically filters through to his players.’
Before the German could have the players’ legs, he would have to get into their heads. There was no point joining in the public lament about the team’s poor defenders and general lack of quality in relation to the title contenders; Klopp had to work with the squad at his disposal and talk up its strengths instead. His trick was to stress the link between performance and effort, rather than with ability. Lallana: ‘He said, “Work hard for me.” That’s all he wants. He can handle mistakes, he can handle bad games. “Work hard for me and give me everything.” He’s convinced that technical ability and quality will come out as a result. That is what the boss has done for me since the Tottenham game.’
Two months into the 2015–16 season, there was no time to practise the new pressing style on the pitch, nor did the fixture list allow for additional fitness exercises. Klopp’s notorious double-training sessions, criticised as excessive and counter-productive by some pundits and experts as the odd muscle injury beset the team after Christmas, never took place. The ad-hoc introduction of pressing and Gegenpressing necessitated a firm collective commitment. ‘It’s an agreement a team makes with itself,’ says coaching assistant and chief scout Peter Krawietz. ‘A social contract. “Yes, we want to do that together.” One guy doing it by himself is nothing. He’ll try once, he’ll try again, but then he’ll turn around and say: “Where is everybody else? Come on. I’m running my socks off and you’re sitting back and enjoying the spectacle.” That’s why you need an agreement that’s binding for everybody. “We will do it together, as soon as we lose the ball in the final third, we will try to win it back.” There are a huge amount of advantages to doing that. You disrupt the opposition attack. You might catch out a team in the very moment they’re preparing an attack and change their positioning accordingly. The left-back might have started running up the pitch. You save energy that way, too. If you track back to protect yourself from the counter-attack with eight men, then eight men have to run a combined 80 metres, 640 in total. Or you play a proper Gegenpressing, with the right trigger and the right intensity, then you run 5 or 10 quick metres with three or four players. That’s why it’s not so much a question of your legs but of the mind. You have that moment where you have to overcome your inertia. Don’t switch off. Don’t
be disappointed. The attack isn’t over yet. It takes some work to drum that into players. There are special sessions and ways of training to make that happen. Video analysis. We showed the team: “Look, these guys are very compact, it’s terribly difficult [to get behind them] but winning the ball back from them is the one moment they’re vulnerable.” We tried to make that idea stick. Once you do that, and do it orderly, you save yourself a lot of metres [tracking back], too.’
Lallana, who had been exposed to a similar regime under Mauricio Pochettino at Southampton, reveals that concerted action comes with a feel-good factor that offsets any complaints: ‘It is mentally very demanding, but when you have ten other lads all operating like that, it is easy. You enjoy feeling that pain, because everyone else is feeling it. You want to keep going for your mate. He’s hurting, and you’re hurting, but it’s all right. That’s what the manager likes, that’s what he is like. He celebrates tackles like goals sometimes. Because he knows it hurts.’ He adds that Klopp’s tactics can’t really accommodate dissidents and egotists who won’t submit to the collective dictate. ‘Maybe you can carry one player, but that’s not how he wants to play. You can’t operate like that.’
How difficult was it for Klopp and his staff to get his players to think and play that way? Krawietz considers the question for a moment. ‘I believe that the team we encountered has been incredibly ready to take on things,’ he says. ‘They were ready and willing to try something new; they knew that there were reasons why things hadn’t worked out so well before and why we stood there now, wearing red-and-black tracksuits. We felt it from day one. They want to understand what we’re trying to get across to them.’ Complications didn’t stem so much from a lack of willingness as they did from the initial language barrier. Tactics brain Zeljko Buvac was reluctant to speak much English at first, Klopp translated for him. ‘A lot of the time, mainly when he’s angry, Klopp says: “I fucking wish I could speak German to you,”’ Lallana laughs. ‘His English is tremendous, actually. I understand whatever he needs and wants to say. But it does frustrate him at times.’
Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story Page 9