Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story

by Raphael Honigstein

  The Belgian striker’s goal shortly after the restart did bring some hope but Dortmund struck back to win the tie a second time when Marco Reus completed another fine combination on fifty-seven minutes. Liverpool’s heads dropped. Anfield was ready to accept the inevitable.

  One man, dressed in all white, was not. Klopp said he could ‘smell, hear and sense the sensation’. He egged on the crowd to scream until the hopelessness was drowned out by defiance. ‘It felt as if he had brought himself on, as a twelfth factor, as an instigator and motivator for the players and the fans,’ wrote Die Welt.

  ‘He cooked up a storm on the touchline, he’s good like that,’ says Watzke. ‘Using the power of the crowd against us was legitimate, it was his job in retrospect, just as it had been my job in the first leg. But it was nevertheless strange for us. I have rarely seen something like that, at that level of severity.’ Norbert Dickel, too, felt somehow hurt that Klopp turned the stadium against them. ‘I didn’t like the fact he whipped up the fans like that,’ says the former BVB striker. ‘It was professional, from his point of view; it was the right thing in his eyes, but not in ours. He could have done without doing that. I know he’ll never admit that. But I’m not upset with him any more.’

  Philippe Coutinho scored to make it 2-3 on sixty-six minutes. Liverpool had clawed their way back to a two-goal deficit. The Germans continued to play really impressively, technically far ahead of their hosts. But this was one of those nights when the noise at Anfield becomes a weapon and opposition hearts wilt in the floodlight. A mythical force grabbed hold of the contest and pulled it into the realm of fantasy, or nightmares, depending on your viewpoint. ‘We started shitting ourselves,’ Mats Hummels said later. Dortmund were so shaken that ‘different parts of the teams were playing different systems.’

  As soon as Mamadou Sakho headed in the Reds’ third goal twelve minutes from time, Watzke knew it was all over. ‘I resigned myself to losing at that point,’ he says. ‘We knew how much power Jürgen could generate on the touchline. It’s no coincidence we scored many goals in the eighty-ninth minute. Against Malaga, he had been the only guy in the stadium believing we could still do it and we did it. At 3-3, it was only a question of time before we would concede again. And then the whole stadium…’ He doesn’t finish the sentence, overcome by horror and admiration. ‘Karl-Heinz Riedle and Nuri S ahin had both played at Anfield. But they told me, they had never seen anything like that. That’s Jürgen’s doing.’

  Dejan Lovren made the madness a reality, two minutes into injury-time. Klopp could not believe the ball had actually crossed the line at first. Anfield was shouting his name at the final whistle, over and over again. ‘The German manager departed the arena like a gladiator exiting the Coliseum following the slaying of a formidable beast,’ wrote the Independent. His vanquished opponent, Tuchel, found it impossible to come to terms with the result. ‘I can’t explain it because there are no logical explanations. Emotions won the day,’ he said, staring into the middle distance in utter desolation. Unlike the experienced miracle-worker Klopp, he hadn’t been able to anticipate the approaching insanity. Such an irrational turn of events was beyond the realms of his imagination. He had no means to intervene effectively.

  ‘It was one of the worst defeats during my twelve years at Dortmund,’ says Watzke. ‘Not because of Jürgen–I was even pleased for him at the end. No. We were so close to winning an international trophy. I think we would have won it. We got knocked out in Liverpool. But actually, we had already lost the tie in Dortmund, I feel.’ It took a month before his relationship with the former Borussia coach recovered, he adds. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever experience something similar. But our friendship is strong enough to endure.’

  ‘I know it might sound funny but if I’m being completely honest, I thought he deserved it,’ says former BVB midfielder Ilkay Gündogˇan, now at Manchester City. ‘Even though we got knocked out and were really hurt, I was pleased for him.’ Lünschermann had noticed the same signs of involuntary fraternisation. ‘His former players still feel a strong emotional bond with him. You could see it when Sven Bender went to high-five him while warming up. I don’t think everybody liked it. But it’s understandable.’

  Liverpool’s owners FSG had seen enough. That April, they approached him and his staff with an offer to extend their contracts to 2022. ‘When you have an individual of Jürgen’s quality in the building it makes perfect sense to secure that person for the long term,’ principal owner John Henry, chairman Tom Werner and FSG president Mike Gordon declared after the new deal was signed in July. ‘To not do so would be irresponsible.’ In exchange for the board’s commitment to him, Klopp pledged eternal loyalty. ‘I will never go to another Premier League club,’ he assured the Americans.

  Both FSG and the coaching staff agreed that the team’s limited resources were best focused on winning the Europa League during the last two months of the season. Liverpool still tried to make headway in the league, of course, but the emphasis had firmly shifted to winning the final in Basel.

  Villarreal were duly brushed aside without too much trouble in the penultimate round but holders Seville were made from sterner stuff. Unai Emery’s team were unimpressed by Daniel Sturridge’s wonderful angled opening goal (thirty-five minutes) and staged a powerful comeback after the break, scoring three times to claim the trophy for a third consecutive time.

  Reflecting on the defeat, Krawietz puts Liverpool’s second-half collapse down to ‘a mixture of physical exhaustion and getting it in the neck, mentally’–by conceding Kevin Gameiro’s equaliser one minute after the restart. ‘The stability was missing. The first half was all right, without being all that good. In retrospect, I feel that the spell after the break was Seville’s last chance. They went for it in a clever way. They picked up momentum and managed the turnaround. We were mentally prepared that they would go for it and that we would get chances to counter-attack, on the basis of being 1-0 up, the plan was to wait for them to lose their nerve. But they kick off and the ball’s in the net. They were like: hurrah. We were like: aargh. We couldn’t come back from that and also had nothing left in the tank, physically.’

  ‘I know from my own experience how difficult it is to win a European trophy,’ says former LFC defender Jamie Carragher. ‘That’s why losing the final was a big disappointment. But you think of the journey and the legendary nights along the way: Manchester, Villarreal. Borussia Dortmund–the big one…’

  Happy memories can never quite fill up that empty space in the trophy cabinet. But if you’re lucky, they’ll stay with you for ever, just like the silverware would have done.

  9. STARTS AND STOPS

  Ergenzingen, Frankfurt, Mainz 1983–2001

  Word of the fifteen-year-old village Wunderkind swept through the region like the cool Black Forest mountain wind. Gracious under pressure, always ahead of the game by about two seconds, blessed with silky feet, he was evidently special, and Jürgen was his name. Jürgen Haug.

  The teenage prodigy played in Ulrich Rath’s SV Glatten youth team with Hartmut ‘Hardy’ Rath and Jürgen Klopp, and he was so good that TuS Ergenzingen, the area’s most renowned club for budding footballers, agreed to take him on. But Haug’s parents were reluctant to drive the 60km round-trip to take their son to training and games in the suburb of Rottenburg. Walter Baur, the much-respected Ergenzingen coach, had to think on his feet. He extended his offer to Klopp, on the understanding that his mother Lisbeth would give Haug a lift three times a week.

  That’s how Klopp, ever eager to belittle his own football abilities in retrospect, told the story. The late Baur (he passed away in 2012) admitted to Die Zeit that Haug was ‘clearly the greater talent’ but Klopp and Rath, who also made the move east, must have been able to play a bit too. ‘Ergenzingen was as far away as FC Barcelona for us,’ Klopp said in an interview with Der Tagesspiegel in 2012. ‘If you were considered good enough by Walter Baur, you had made it.’ Ulrich Rath says some people in Glatten are stil
l upset with him, over thirty years later, for letting the three boys go. ‘They don’t realise that Ergenzingen was a huge opportunity for them, a real chance to get ahead,’ he says. His son Hartmut ultimately proved too slow to make it into professional football, and Haug’s progress, too, came to a halt. ‘We had at least five players with similar basic skills,’ Baur said. ‘But that’s not everything. If Klopp put his mind to something, he made it happen.’

  Supported by his parents, who thought nothing of getting up well before six in the morning to drive him to games, Klopp duly established himself as Ergenzingen’s captain and a regular goal-scorer. Baur’s approach–far ahead of its time–was key for the youngster’s development. The Ergenzingen coach wanted his players to spend as much time with the ball as possible rather than clock up hours on endurance runs around the pitch. He had travelled to Brazil, met Pelé there, and been inspired by Futsal, a five-a-side version of the game that forced players to hone their skills and creativity. ‘We had to juggle the ball for thirty minutes before every training session,’ Klopp recalled. ‘After six months, we could have starred as performing seals at Christmas parties.’

  Baur had been diagnosed with cancer of the stomach in 1977 but refused to give up. He was one of those men whose limitless love for football makes it possible for six million registered players to kick a ball around in Germany.

  Hermann Bauer (no relation), the team’s general manager, has a fine collection of photos and press clippings from TuS Ergenzingen under-19s’ exploits in 1984–85. They only finished third in the league but picked up a number of other trophies. Ergenzingen came third in an indoor tournament with teams from the Soviet bloc in Katowice, Poland, in March 1985. The Germans, hailed as ‘great ambassadors for their country’ in a local newspaper report, visited Auschwitz (‘It was very moving,’ Klopp was quoted as saying) and gave their hosts a set of football kits and five balls. They received a vase made from coal in return. ‘It was a real coming together of East and West,’ said the article. The cold war was still ongoing.

  Later that year, Klopp, Haug and teammate Ralf Scheurenbrand travelled to Hamburg to pick up the second prize in a competition sponsored by aftershave brand Hattric. Ergenzingen’s strike force had notched up ten hat-tricks at under-19 level that season; only Chemie Wirges had done better, with thirteen. In Hamburg, a selection of the competition winners, including 1990 World Cup winner Bodo Illgner in goal, lined up against an HSV legends team featuring Uwe Seeler. The iconic striker handed Klopp the second-place award at the festive banquet at the Plaza hotel. Klopp had scored the winner in the exhibition match.

  Walter Baur’s team went on to win the annual International Pentecost Day tournament he had been organising in his hometown since the early seventies. Vítkovice Ostrava of Czechoslovakia had been the better side in the final and Baur was minded to let them win on penalties after the 120 minutes had ended goalless. Klopp told his coach he was mad. ‘We will convert every single kick now,’ he vowed. The home side won 3-2.

  Klopp admired Baur so much that he threatened the club he would leave if the coach wasn’t allowed to take over the first team, where he would be playing in the 1986–87 season. Ergenzingen relented. In one of his first games with the seniors, the nineteen-year-old Klopp came up against Bundesliga club Eintracht Frankfurt, who had decamped to the Black Forest for their pre-season training. ‘Die launische Diva’ (the temperamental diva), as they were colloquially known, weren’t in a forgiving mood. Dietrich Weise’s side hammered their hosts, despite missing seven regulars and not trying too hard.

  Being on the wrong end of a humiliating 9-1 scoreline might have persuaded one or two of the Ergenzingen amateurs to try their hand at a different sport, but for TuS forward Jürgen Klopp, the match on 21 July 1986 was a breakthrough of sorts. ‘That summer day, when Dietrich Weise visited the Black Forest, many decisive things for my life were set in motion,’ he acknowledged in an interview with Tagesspiegel in 2012. ‘He took me to the Frankfurt region–a much bigger stage for football than the Black Forest.’

  Klopp had scored Ergenzingen’s consolation goal and, the story goes, nearly added a second, sprinting past elegant Frankfurt defender Thomas Berthold, the Germany international who had just come back a runner-up from the World Cup in Mexico. Weise was impressed. As a former national youth team coach, he had an expert’s eye for up-and-coming talent and would play a key role in the reformation of Germany’s grassroots system at the turn of the millennium.

  Berthold can still vividly remember the training camp in the Black Forest (‘it was very beautiful’) and how he had gone back into full training with barely a break after the final against Diego Maradona’s Argentina at the Azteca stadium. But the former AS Roma and Bayern Munich defender admits he has no recollection of the game versus Ergenzingen itself, let alone Klopp as an opponent. He finds the suggestion that he was outrun by a lanky amateur incongruous, verging on offensive. ‘He did what? He dashed past me? Never!’ he laughs. ‘I ran 100m in less than 11 seconds at that time. Maybe I let him go [to gift them a goal]?’

  What is certain is that Weise approached Klopp about a move to Frankfurt after the game. ‘I was so excited that I broke my Spezi glass,’ Klopp said. (A Spezi is a mixture of Coke and Fanta, the non-alcoholic cocktail of choice in mid-1980s West Germany.) Nevertheless, he had to politely turn down the offer. ‘Jürgen told me that he had to finish his Abitur [A levels] first,’ Weise, eighty-two, says. ‘We agreed that we would speak again in a year’s time.’ Weise’s friend Walter Baur promised to send regular updates about the forward’s progress.

  Frankfurt, almost three hours away by car from Glatten, was not a viable destination as long as Klopp was still in school. But Oberliga (fourth division) club 1. FC Pforzheim were a different proposition. Situated in a 120,000-inhabitant town seventy minutes to the north of the Black Forest, the side coached by Bernd Hoffmann, a former Bundesliga 2 striker for Heilbronn and Karlsruhe (no relation to the Hamburger SV CEO), offered a useful step up for Klopp. ‘He was well known in the area as a young and dangerous attacker,’ says Hoffmann. ‘I had watched him in many games for Ergenzingen and saw how many goals he scored. His presence in the box, due to his height, and also his pace, was impressive.’

  Pforzheim and Ergenzingen officials met at a service station halfway, where DM12,000 (€6,000) in cash was handed over in exchange for Klopp’s signature. He spent six months driving there and back for games and training, in his sister Stefanie’s yellow Golf.

  Between 3,000 and 5,000 people turned up at the Stadion im Brötzinger Tal for the games. Klopp was largely a spectator, too. He featured only four times and drew blanks in front of goal. ‘He couldn’t make the transition to Oberliga,’ Hoffmann says. ‘He was frustrated, as you can imagine. But he respected that there were people in the team that were tough to displace. His attitude in training, apart from the odd, quick outburst, was always spot on.’

  Pforzheim was a dead end. But Eintracht Frankfurt hadn’t forgotten about him.

  ‘Jürgen, me and a few schoolmates were on a post-Abitur trip, travelling around southern Europe by train in the summer of 1987,’ says Hartmut Rath. ‘About ten days in, we had reached a very remote spot on the island of Crete. Jürgen hadn’t spoken with his parents in a while but there were no mobile phones then. A tiny fisherman’s boat took him to a post station. “Good of you to call,” his mother Lisbeth said. “You have to go to Frankfurt for a trial.” Jürgen thought about it for a couple of days, then took a train by himself from Athens–a 48-hour ride to Stuttgart.’

  Norbert Klopp, Isolde Reich adds, agreed for Klopp to move to Frankfurt only if they arranged a place at the Goethe University in Frankfurt for him to study sports science.

  Klopp did well enough at the footballing casting session with the Eagles to get a contract, but it was with Eintracht Frankfurt Amateure, the B team made up of reserves and young talents who played competitive football in the regional third division (Oberliga Hessen) and weren’t al
lowed to be promoted into the proper professional football of the Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2. Klopp’s mentor Weise had been relieved of his duties six months earlier. Karl-Heinz Feldkamp, an altogether more old-fashioned coach, had no use for the teenage prospect in the first team.

  ‘This blond, tall, very tanned guy with a moustache and steel-framed glasses showed up, speaking in a very strong Swabian dialect,’ says Eintracht Amateure striker Sven Müller. ‘He was supposed to be my partner in attack, so I thought I’d better take a closer look. Jürgen told me he had just been on holiday in Greece and that it had been so hot that he’d sweated driving a scooter.’ He imitates the Swabian inflection, a high-pitched melody composed of ‘sh’ sounds that grates a little in the ear of non-locals: ‘You shhit on the shcooter and shweat.’ (‘Da schitscht auf der Veschpa und schwitscht.’)

  Müller, two years Klopp’s senior, was technically more accomplished and a much better finisher. Klopp hardly got any starts under coach Hubert Neu, who–perhaps predictably–disliked the fact the twenty-year-old was working late shifts in a bar in Frankfurt’s nightlife district, Sachsenhausen, to supplement his meagre income.

  His substitute appearances for Amateure didn’t leave the best of impressions either. Klopp’s most noticeable moment in a barren season, Müller says, came in a game against SG Hoechst. ‘The match was tied 1-1 or 0-0 with only a couple of minutes to go. Klopp was brought on. We were awarded a free-kick. One of our players stepped up… and smashed it into the corner! We started celebrating wildly but then the referee blew his whistle and chalked it off. Klopp had pushed over two opponents in the wall. The team were not best pleased.’

  Football aside, the Black Forest lad had a very good time in the big city. Müller had been instructed by Norbert Neu, the general manager of the Oberliga Hessen side, to look after Klopp and teammate Armin Bohn, who were both new in town and living in student digs. He took his task very seriously. ‘We went out in Sachsenhausen at night, drinking cider. Never the night before games–we were too professional for that–but after, and during the week sometimes. We were rivals but we bonded due to a similar love for life and sense of humour. We rocked the city, we went everywhere they had some nice, shining lights. Luckily, there were no camera phones then. Nobody caught us out.’