Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story

by Raphael Honigstein

  Müller is convinced that those days–or rather nights–prepared Klopp for dealing with young players as a manager later on. ‘He knows exactly what young men are like at that age. You’re still a child, really. You go off the rails sometimes. You have to. He can relate to that, because he was the same.’

  At Frankfurt, Klopp got his first taste of coaching. Together with Amateure teammate Michael Gabriel, he took charge of the under-11s–‘for DM400, a winter coat and an Eintracht season ticket’, as he told the Sunday Times’ Jonathan Northcroft in January 2017. ‘We, the two coaches and the players, had a lot of fun together,’ Gabriel said. Klopp enjoyed the experience so much that he continued coaching the same squad of players in the following season, after he had left to play for Viktoria Sindlingen in the city’s periphery. ‘It was my first real decision as a coach to keep all of these guys,’ he said, ‘the club wanted to change them for younger kids.’ Klopp won that particular battle but eventually found he had too much on his plate to keep instructing the youngsters. Right-sided midfielder Patrick Glöckner was the only one of Kloppo’s kids to make it into the Bundesliga (fourteen games for Eintracht Frankfurt and Stuttgarter Kickers in 1997–98).

  The friendship between Müller and Klopp lasted well beyond that one year at Frankfurt’s second team. Müller, an event organiser and PR expert, arranged the festivities for Klopp’s beach wedding to Ulla, his second wife, in 2006. (They had earlier married civilly at the registrar’s office in Mainz-Gonsenheim. Klopp wore bleached-out jeans, a striped blazer and an untucked striped shirt, and Christian Heidel had arranged for singer Thomas Neger and his band to perform ‘Im Schatten des Doms’, ‘In the shadow of the cathedral’, a Mainz anthem that had become part of the stadium DJ’s repertoire on direct orders of the FSV coach.) ‘Jürgen is just a great guy,’ Müller says. ‘Funny, authentic, and a good man who knows what’s important in life, hasn’t forgotten where he came from and values a good friendship. He’s the cool boy next door.’

  Unless he’s involved in any kind of football game. Then all coolness goes out of the window. On a family holiday in Turkey a couple of years ago, Müller was playing in a five-a-side team with Klopp’s sons, Marc and Dennis. Klopp himself was injured but coached the team with real passion, giving detailed instructions from the sidelines. ‘I had to go off because it was extremely hot and I’m quite old,’ Müller recalls. ‘I think we were narrowly in the lead. Kloppo, in his inimitable style, came up to me and slapped me softly across the face. ‘You will score one more goal, you’ll score one more!’ he told me. I went back on and did indeed score one more. He’s got this doggedness when it comes to winning football games. Even when it’s just for fun on a beach somewhere. He cannot help himself.’

  But as far as his Eintracht Frankfurt career was concerned, no help from the men in charge was forthcoming. Hubert Neu’s designated successor as Amateure coach, Jürgen Sparwasser–the famous goal-scorer in East Germany’s 1-0 win over World Cup winners West Germany in 1974–told Klopp in the spring of 1988 that he didn’t feature in his plans for the subsequent season. ‘Jürgen was basically pushed out,’ says Müller.

  Dietrich Weise still felt the young Swabian had potential, however. Weise was by now coaching Al Ahly in Cairo, Egypt and had set up the first regional training centre for talented youngsters in the Frankfurt area, ten years before the German FA would accept his blueprint for youth development and roll out these ‘Stützpunkte’ all across the nation. Weise, too, acted as a consultant for Viktoria Sindlingen, a third division part-timer team unglamorously situated right next to the Hoechst chemical plant in a westerly suburb of Frankfurt. Norbert Neuhaus remembers Weise’s sales pitch. ‘He came up to me and said: “I have brought in this player from Pforzheim–he doesn’t really get on at Eintracht. But I believe he’s got something, I believe that he has something to give to football. Maybe it’ll work if he takes a detour via Sindlingen…”’

  Neuhaus’ diary shows that he met Klopp at the ground of FC Homburg on 16 April 1988 for a first talk. By May, they had an agreement. Sindlingen bought the striker from Eintracht for DM8,000 (€4,000), and he was paid DM1,200 (€600) per month, in cash–but only during the season. Little more than pocket money.

  Sindlingen were in the relegation zone for most of the campaign. Teammate Axel Schubert sensed Klopp’s frustration. ‘He hadn’t made the sort of progress as a player he had hoped for. He probably found it hard concentrating on football in those days, what with his sports science studies in Frankfurt and a heavily pregnant girlfriend.’ (His son Marc was born in December 1988.) The year wasn’t without some sweet moments, however. Away to his former team Eintracht Amateure, Klopp scored four goals in a 6-0 win. ‘It was horrible for us and great for him,’ says Müller. ‘He sent a nice message to Sparwasser that day: look at what you’re missing.’

  Neuhaus, seventy-one, has proudly kept a match report of Sindlingen’s 2-0 defeat away to Rot-Weiß Frankfurt from November 1988. He was in charge of the team as caretaker that day, after coach Günter Dutiné (an ex-Mainz 05 captain) had been fired. ‘I’ve told my grandchildren that I managed the great Jürgen Klopp for one game,’ he laughs. ‘He wasn’t a Rakete [rocket], to be honest, but always involved and present for every training session.’

  Sindlingen’s new boss, Ramon Berndroth, had the team play a game in his first training session, to learn about his players’ strengths and weaknesses. Less than thirty minutes in, Berndroth stopped the session and singled out one player for a bollocking: Klopp. ‘Klopp enjoyed revisiting that story in front of everyone in the VIP room of Dortmund’s youth team stadium, Rote Erde, when he spotted Berndroth watching a game there years later,’ says Neuhaus. Berndroth, who has been working as a youth team coach in recent years, told Neuhaus that he had never before come across a Bundesliga coach who didn’t just know all his youth team players, down to the reserves, but also all of their backgrounds and biographical information.

  As a player, ‘Klopp was ambitious and knew how to look after himself on the pitch, he was no snowflake,’ Schubert reports. ‘He also had no qualms telling his older teammates how they could improve technically. After the game, he would think about the team’s performance. I’d say there were small hints that he could read a game.’

  Klopp’s aerial prowess saw Berndroth devise a set-play routine. It came off at the crucial moment of Sindlingen’s season. They were playing FC Erbach in a one-game relegation play-off at a neutral ground, and were tied 2-2 with twenty minutes to go when Walter Braun floated in a corner towards the near post. Schubert headed the ball on towards the second post, where Klopp rose to power it into the net. Sindlingen won 4-2.

  In 2009, Neuhaus sent Klopp a DVD with shaky home video footage of the game. ‘You don’t make a bad impression at all,’ he wrote, adding that he had seen the trick replicated by Klopp’s Mainz team. Klopp phoned and thanked him profusely. He and Schubert met on the pitch at Mainz again, but not as players. ‘I was working as a groundsman for the city of Mainz and looked after the pitch of the Bruchwegstadion [which was owned by the municipality then],’ Schubert says. ‘The first day on the job, Mainz were training in the stadium. Klopp was very surprised to see me. He was on the other side of the pitch, where his team were stretching, and ran across to hug me, full of joy. “What are you doing here?” and so on. We spoke for a long time and the stretching exercises lasted a little longer… He has always had time for former players and coaches. For their coach Helmut Jakob’s birthday, the Sindlingen team organised for him to do a coaching session with Klopp in Mainz. He agreed straightaway. Jakob came back buzzing, with a poster showing him and Klopp next to each other on the training pitch.’

  Klopp’s total of fourteen goals in 1987–88 had played a part in saving Sindlingen from the drop but the club had ‘expected more’, Neuhaus says. ‘By our standards, the wages were very high.’ Fortunately for Klopp, another team, stuck in the same lowly division but with deeper pockets and much bigger ambitions, had shown an intere
st: Rot-Weiss Frankfurt.

  ‘A friend of mine had told me: there’s this right-winger at Sindlingen that you’ll like,’ Dragoslav ‘Stepi’ Stepanović says. Stepanović, a former international for Yugoslavia, had moved to Germany in the late seventies, playing for Eintracht Frankfurt before an outing at Manchester City (1979–1981). After retirement, he opened a well-frequented pub (Stepi’s Treff) in Frankfurt city centre and became friends with many of the city’s influential people. Eintracht Frankfurt’s general manager Bernd Hölzenbein, his former teammate, appointed Stepanović as coach in 1991 and his young side–featuring luminaries such as Uwe Bein, Andy Möller and Anthony Yeboah–very nearly won the Bundesliga with football so fast and exciting that it was dubbed ‘Fußball 2000’ by the German media. Stepanović, a cigar-smoking natural showman with a Mexican bandit’s moustache, an idiomatic Hessian-Serbian dialect and a liking for salmon-coloured blazers, was the nascent commercial TV stations’ darling. He once sang Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ on a football programme.

  A couple of years earlier Stepi had been entrusted to take Eintracht’s much smaller neighbours Rot-Weiss Frankfurt from the semi-amateur division three into Bundesliga 2. RW had a bit of money courtesy of benefactor Wolfgang Steubing. ‘The champagne club,’ the local media dubbed them. ‘We were the Bayern Munich of the Hessenliga,’ Stepanović says.

  Stepanović went to see a Sindlingen game to check out that tip-off. The right-winger turned out to be Jürgen Klopp. ‘In that match, he played like a god,’ the 68-year-old says. ‘He went past his man on the flank a thousand times and put in great crosses. I would have never guessed from watching him that he had technical deficiencies. I liked players who were fast and wanted to have very attacking players on the flanks.’ RW Frankfurt paid a transfer fee of DM8,000 (€4,000) to Sindlingen.

  Klopp was ‘perhaps himself surprised’ to get a contract with RW, Stepanović says. Pre-season brought disillusion for both men. Klopp clearly wasn’t the player Stepanović thought he’d bought. ‘After three, four league games, I sent him to the second team. I got into trouble with people at the club; they wondered why I had got him in the first place and called him a failure. He even sat on the bench in the second team. He simply didn’t have enough to play in the starting eleven. I thought, is it possible that I got it so wrong?’

  ‘Stepi told me that I was his wife and daughter’s favourite player but that he could not play me, regardless,’ Klopp said in a talk with Ruhrnachrichten in 2014. ‘I think I could have sat in my jeans on the bench for half a year, he wouldn’t have noticed it at all.’

  The RW coach resolved to give the forward another chance after the winter break. He brought him back into the fold with the first team, and changed his role to a ‘9’. As a target man, Klopp suddenly started scoring goals in industrial quantities. ‘Three, six, ten–he hit the net in every training session. In the air, nobody got near him. His headers were sensational. He got fourteen in the second half of the season for us, to take us to the Hessenliga title in 1989–90. His goals won us the championship.’

  Stepanović believed that Klopp was predestined for a career in football without boots. ‘I always thought, this guy is such a good talker at such a young age; he’ll probably become a general manager or sporting director one day. I never thought he’d be a coach. That came as a great surprise to me. He always spoke his mind, never hid his thoughts. After the ups and downs we had, we weren’t the best of friends, but I liked that he never gave up.’

  Legend has it that Mainz coach Robert Jung signed Klopp after Rot-Weiss Frankfurt twice played (and lost) against Mainz in the Bundesliga 2 play-off round in the summer of 1990, but Stepanović reveals that the striker had already signed for FSV at the end of the regular season, a few weeks earlier. ‘When we celebrated winning the division, I saw Jürgen sit in the dressing room, smoking a cigarette. I was a smoker myself and had to laugh. I said to him: “If I had known you smoked, I would have played you more often.” That day, he told us that he was off to Mainz. We were disappointed but for him it was a logical step.’

  Aged twenty-three, Jürgen Klopp had become a real professional at last.

  On the other end of the phone line, you can hear Hermann Hummels chuckle before he’s even started the sentence. ‘With Kloppo, it was hard to tell,’ he says, pausing for effect. ‘Was it a first touch or a shot at goal?’

  Jürgen Klopp, by his own admission, was not a short-trousered magician. He described himself as ‘an aggressive arsehole on the pitch’ (taz, 2004), as ‘a mentality and fighting machine, extremely good in the air and very fast’ (Der Tagesspiegel, 2012). But ‘technically’, he conceded, he ‘wasn’t good enough’; ‘I realised my own limits before others did. To sum it up: in my head, I was Bundesliga, and my feet were Landesliga [fourth division]. The result was Bundesliga 2. I quickly accepted it. To be upset would have been a waste of time.’ He was far too thrilled to dwell on his deficits. ‘I couldn’t believe that I was a professional footballer,’ he said. ‘I would have paid for being allowed to play football at the time!’

  At Christian Heidel’s twentieth anniversary party as Mainz sporting director in 2012, Klopp recalled the time Heidel saw a Homburg player mis-control the ball horribly in a game and exclaim: ‘Look, they also have a Kloppo!’

  His ineptitude as a player might have become exaggerated a bit, by himself and others, for good effect. His former Mainz 05 teammate Guido Schäfer, now a football journalist based in Leipzig, has a more nuanced take. ‘Jürgen was well aware of his strengths and weaknesses,’ he says. ‘He didn’t attempt to dribble, because he couldn’t. But he was incredibly fast. He didn’t look that quick over the first few metres but once he got going, you could hardly keep up with him. His time over 100m was very good. He certainly wasn’t a total disaster. You don’t get to play 325 league games in the second division if you can’t kick a ball. He was a very important player for the team for many years, due to his performances and his exemplary attitude.’

  Starting out as a centre-forward, Klopp scored a respectable ten goals in his first season at the Bruchweg (1990–91) and notched up another eight by February in his second campaign, which included his most glorious moment as a professional: a four-goal outing away to RW Erfurt. (Mainz won 5-0). ‘That was his shining hour,’ says Martin Quast, who reported on the match for a local paper. ‘Kloppo mounted the fence to celebrate with the two-dozen Mainz supporters who had made the trip. The photo I took has been printed hundreds of times since. Klopp, times four. In a white shirt with a big four on the back. Fantastic.’

  Soon after that feat, the lanky but mobile forward was contacted by a veritable Bundesliga giant: Hamburger SV. ‘They had the hots for him,’ says Schäfer. ‘But they couldn’t get him, for whatever reason. Years later, they missed out on appointing him as their coach, too. One club, two dramatic mistakes.’ Klopp was understandably desperate for the switch, trading the tough second division slog for a much more financially rewarding shot at the big time. But according to Mainz president Harald Strutz, FSV coach Robert Jung vetoed the move. He threatened to resign if the club let his first-choice attacker go.

  ‘Klopp was very angry at the time. You don’t get a chance like that every day,’ Strutz says. ‘But he accepted it. He understood that we were struggling to stay up with the players we had and couldn’t afford anyone leaving. You have to say, we got very lucky that it panned out this way.’

  At first, however, the effect was entirely negative. In the wake of HSV’s failed attempt to take him north, Klopp scored only three more times over the course of the next eighteen months. He was moved back into defence, and Mainz’s goals dried up altogether as their relative illiquidity began to bite. ‘Year after year, the only aim was to somehow stay up,’ says Hummels, who coached the team for a six-month spell in 1994–95 after a couple of years as assistant manager. ‘Come April and May, the bosses would go and light a candle in church, praying for salvation.’

  ‘We had been promoted in 1
988 after twelve years as amateurs, then gone down and come up again. In truth, we didn’t really belong in the second division at all,’ says Christian Heidel. ‘When I arrived in 1992, we were in the relegation zone and went into the last game of the season, at Darmstadt, knowing we could only afford to lose by one goal. And we lost by one goal. We had no training ground, no proper stadium, and no money. In 1994, our budget was DM3.5m (€1.75m). That included all the youth teams as well.’

  It wasn’t until 1998 that FSV had their first player, Michael Müller, on DM10,000 (€5,000). Per month, not per week. Klopp’s salary was significantly smaller, in the low thousands, as was Schäfer’s. ‘In 1988–89, our first Bundesliga 2 season, we had three basic tiers,’ he says. ‘DM1,500 [€750] a month for the blind; DM2,500 [€1,250] a month for the one-eyed; and DM3,500 [€1,750] for those who could see. I was with the one-eyed. Harald Strutz, the president, said to me: “Guido, it’ll be great, because you’ll get DM2,000 for every win as a bonus on top.” The problem was: we never won.’

  Klopp jokingly said to his wife Ulla that Heidel didn’t warrant a present for his twentieth anniversary in charge at Mainz: ‘I already played for free for him for ten years.’ Signing his player contracts at Heidel’s BMW car dealership, the de-facto club offices at the time, had brought his modest wages into sharp focus early on. ‘With the money he paid me, I could never afford the cars he was selling,’ Klopp laughed later.