Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story

by Raphael Honigstein

  The club’s only employee, an administrator, was a part-timer, showing up every other day to sort through the mail in a container. Mainz stadium announcer Klaus Hafner worked for free as the club’s CEO. He sold tickets to the games at weekends, and another volunteer provided the stadium catering: homemade butter sandwiches. Quast remembers Hafner stalking fans in the city centre with a collection box at Christmas time, asking for funds to pay for tracksuits for the under-17s. Their old set was worn out.

  ‘The only club merchandising they sold in 1995 were towels,’ Hummels says. ‘I think they sold four. I still have mine. If anyone had said to me Mainz would be in the Bundesliga in five, seven or eight years’ time, I would have bet everything I had against that. I even would have taken out a loan to bet more. It was simply unforeseeable.’

  Mainz’s reserve team (the under-21s), who Heidel had agreed to look after, were the worst in all of German professional football, playing in Kreisklasse C, at the lowest level of the organised game. ‘They didn’t even have a complete set of shirts, and came up against teams who couldn’t actually play football at all,’ he smiles.

  Training for the first team, who were split up into VW mini vans, was only possible if the groundsman of the publicly owned playing field agreed. The changing room inside the stadium was a mould-ridden ‘wetland biotope’, Schäfer bristles. ‘You were afraid to hang your towel up in there. There was one rusty big bathtub in there, with room for four or five players, and if you spent too much time in there you contracted all sorts of diseases. To never get relegated, at that club, with those players, really was a tremendous achievement.’

  Mainz’s perma-desperation chewed up coaches. In Klopp’s eleven years as an 05 player, he was managed by fourteen different men. The instability at the top bred a certain lawlessness in the dressing room. ‘It was a horde of pretty wild players,’ says Hummels. ‘The police had to be called in a couple of times.’

  Attacking midfielder Ansgar Brinkmann (nickname: the White Brazilian), for example, had a well-deserved reputation for partying. Playing for Osnabrück, he had once been stopped for driving under the influence in his Porsche Boxster but managed to break out of the police car and run away on foot before they had checked his levels. He was let off. ‘Heidel and Strutz put me up with Kloppo in hotels for away games, for him to keep an eye on me,’ he says. ‘He always had his head in a book and I always watched a lot of television. He was like: “Turn that thing off, we have a game tomorrow.” “Kloppo,” I replied, “there’s a stop sign for you at the halfway line tomorrow. Just give me the ball, I’ll do the rest. Because you can’t play.” He’d chuck a pillow or other things at me. One night, I threw the TV out of the window from the eighth floor. He woke up from the bang. “Where’s the TV, Ansgar?” “I threw it out of the window.” “Why?” “The film had a shit ending.”’

  Schäfer, still rocking a marvellous peroxide mane at fifty-two, was a free spirit, too. He’d sometimes come late to training, or miss it altogether. ‘I had to pay a lot of fines thanks to Kloppo, who was on the players’ council. The coaches would usually let the council decide on the size of the fees, and Kloppo showed no mercy. Thank you, Kloppo. I once paid DM500 [€250]. I hadn’t overslept or been to a pub. I was late because my cat had gone missing. Obviously nobody believed me. Kloppo laughed: “Your cat? Pull the other one. DM500 it is for you.” Three days later, we lost a game at Chemnitz. Hermann Hummels said: “That was the first time a second division team has lost because of a cat.” Another time, they took DM1,000 [€500] off me for being out too long during a training camp.’

  In his early twenties, Klopp was a saint by comparison: a good-natured, pretty quiet, moustachioed lad, a husband and young father who prayed underneath a towel before matches. On the way home from away games, he and others would gather around the flamboyant Schäfer in the last row of the bus and listen to tales of his rowdy pub crawls and women. Schäfer: ‘He was the first one to sit there, he laughed as soon as I said the first sentence, and he was the last one to stop laughing. He caught fire easily. He always liked to listen, he wasn’t a loudmouth then. He once told me that he picked up some of the quick wit and charm from all those rides in the last row of the bus.’

  Klopp, Schäfer recalls, didn’t eat like a top athlete–‘grilled sausage and chips were his thing’–and he smoked the odd cigarette underneath the extractor fan in a hotel bathroom; but Brinkmann’s recollection of Klopp’s hotel rooms ‘being so full of smoke that you needed to hang up a disco globe to see anything’ are in all likelihood a little embellished. Both agree that Klopp very rarely drank any alcohol. Schäfer: ‘He always went straight home to Frankfurt after training; he didn’t have a chance to paint the town red with us. On the few occasions he did have a drink, on a team night during training camp, it didn’t much agree with him. He would have two long drinks and then throw up. He wasn’t capable of going the distance at all.’

  During the game, it was the opposite. Klopp’s passion and commitment took him far in the rough-hewn environs of Bundesliga 2, possibly too far at times. ‘No opponent has ever insulted me as much as he did, as my teammate,’ says Brinkmann. ‘That’s a fact. I played right in front of him. He constantly screamed at me: “Ansgar, you idiot, get back into the formation!” Or: “If you don’t come back right now, I’ll do you, you donkey! Get a move on!” I was more afraid of him than I was of my opponent. He was always the first pick in training games because nobody wanted to play against him. When his team was down, he started bending the coach’s ear until he forgot that the game should have already been over. Every one of those games lasted until Kloppo had won. You always wanted to be on his side. He wouldn’t and couldn’t lose.’

  Klopp’s desire to win, Schäfer concurs, was literally frightening. ‘It got uncomfortable at times. He was very impulsive, hysterical, you might say. Choleric. At one game, in Saarbrücken, he came right up to me and screamed in my face for half a minute. I had conceded a corner, I think. One minute later, it was forgotten again, and he was your mate again. He’s not always that smiling and hugging guy; he can be wild and he can be unfair. But he doesn’t bear a grudge. Which is just as well.’

  Jürgen Kramny, another Mainz alumni who had the pleasure–or misfortune–of playing directly in front of the highly-strung right-back, has similar tales to tell. ‘I was a good footballer, and it wasn’t easy for me to have Kloppo behind me. He was loud. If I didn’t help out enough, he moaned. Boy, could he moan. He used to lose it on the pitch. We would, shall we say, exchange frank views. I got in the odd bit of repartee. Things like: “If you played better passes, I wouldn’t have to run so much.” But using different language.’ He laughs. ‘We could both handle it. By and large, it worked well for the two of us.’ Striker Sven Demandt, too, had a good working relationship with Klopp, aided by a bit of distance: ‘Luckily, he was far away from me back in defence, I couldn’t hear him scream that much.’

  Kramny remembers one training ground incident that left Klopp a little angry, however. ‘He sat on a movable, small goal, and I stood before him over a ball. I pretended to take a shot. He jumped up, the goal toppled over and he fell badly on his lower back. He got up and chased me around the pitch until he had to give up because the pain was too bad. He might still feel it today.’

  In Bundesliga 2, a league made of mud, debt and fears, everybody hurt. Most of the time. Mainz, like the majority of clubs, fought a never-ending battle for survival, and aggression–on the pitch and in the stands–was considered a prerequisite. In a typically raucous affair at Waldhof Mannheim’s Carl-Benz-Stadion in April 1994, Klopp made the mistake of putting his head through the gaps in the terrace fence to fling insults back at some Mannheim supporters. ‘He was smacked in the face,’ says Schäfer. ‘That was the last time he ever put his head through any stadium fence.’

  Klopp’s essential problem was that of the division on the whole. He wanted to play better football, but he couldn’t. Schäfer: ‘He often said that he had ha
d the right idea–of where the pass or the cross should go–but sadly not the means.’ ‘He knew how things worked but his body was not able to make it happen,’ says Quast. ‘He once told me that he felt like a prisoner.’

  That type of incarceration ultimately proved liberating, as Klopp was pushed to overcome his shortcomings below the neck-line by thinking a lot harder about the game. Initially, his interest wasn’t so much in tactics as in the socio-dynamic aspects of a football team, Hummels observed. ‘He was curious about the social relations, inside the dressing room and the club. Jürgen had a strong feel for that. He didn’t say: “I couldn’t care less, I’m only here to do a job.” He always thought of the team as a group of people. He was never an egotistical arsehole. Never, never.’

  ‘The experience he had at Mainz 05 in terms of group dynamics under extreme pressure left a huge a mark on him,’ says Peter Krawietz, Klopp’s second assistant coach at Liverpool. ‘Mainz constantly had their asses to the wall, to put it bluntly. The house was on fire, all the time. They depended on everybody being prepared to put in everything. He learned an incredible amount about the things that make a football team tick in those years, and about the different characters you’ll find in the game. I believe he’s taken all these years in the dressing room, reflected on them and found that many things can be sorted with a bit of common sense. He has a feel for the situation, for saying the right thing at the right moment in the right manner.’

  Looking back at his sports science course at Frankfurt’s Goethe University–which he continued with until graduating with the equivalent of a Bachelor’s degree in 1995–Klopp believes his studies were just as beneficial, however. ‘They are the basis of everything I later did,’ he said in December 2013. He learned about training theory, ergotherapy and psychomotility, the connection between mental traits and bodily movement. ‘Without knowing it at the time, I was working on the thing I could do best and wanted to do most: coaching.’ Klopp added that studying also taught him ‘to work independently’, and the importance of effort: ‘You either benefit very directly or things blow up in your face, if you don’t put enough in. You can’t learn these things as easily at other places.’

  In an interview with Der Tagesspiegel in 2012, he admitted that he was ‘not a model student. I had a family and had to earn money playing football.’ But, he added, ‘dealing with educators, psychologists and sociologists, and knowing about methodology has perhaps helped me find solutions as a coach, without me realising. Studying possibly saved me from early failure [as a coach].’

  Despite his tight finances and even tighter schedule, he found being a student enjoyable. His only problems pertained to the course’s quaint practical modules. Swimming wasn’t his thing, nor was gymnastics, pole-vaulting even less so. But why did a man whose football is so concerned with running do his university thesis on walking?

  According to Klopp, he had at first wanted to write about Rückenschule (preventative back pain therapy). Professor Klaus Bös, his tutor, didn’t agree: there had been dozens of similar papers already. (That might have been part of the attraction for Klopp, in fact.) Bös instead pointed him to walking, a new ‘trend sport’ from the US that nobody had examined scientifically before in Germany. ‘Together with a fellow student, we conducted a proper study and collated statistics, it was cool,’ Klopp said.

  Klopp’s footballing higher education was provided by Mainz coach Wolfgang Frank. His first spell at the Bruchweg (1995–1997) was tantamount to a tactical awakening for Klopp. He suddenly understood that a game could be seen in structural terms, as a series of patterns that a well-drilled team could impose on the other side. But neither his nor Frank’s interest was driven by an abstract concern for artistic expression or aesthetics. Tactics, Professor Frank taught, were a means to an end. ‘I was never interested in re-inventing football,’ Klopp later said, ‘all I wanted was to find ways that made us win more often.’

  Having served as Frank’s ‘right-hand man on the pitch’ (Schäfer), Klopp had no tolerance for any of the inferior coaches who populated the FSV bench. Quast recalls an incident when the late Dirk Karkuth was in charge, shortly after Frank’s second spell at the Bruchweg had finished in April 2000. ‘Klopp was substituted three minutes from the end, Mainz were leading 2-0 against Stuttgarter Kickers. Machado, a Brazilian, was supposed to come on, and Karkuth was talking to him on the touchline. Klopp went over, pushed Karkuth out of the way and gave Machado a different pep talk, slapping his back and gesticulating, telling him what he was supposed to do on the pitch. Then Kloppo went off and kicked a bucket in frustration.’

  As the repurposed defender got older and slower, his game–‘in your face, strong challenges, good at headers, dangerous in the opposition box’, as former FSV midfielder Sandro Schwarz puts it–became a testament to the idea that application could trump ability. More naturally talented teams were shown that it was feasible to consistently play at the very limit or even beyond. ‘He made the impossible possible,’ Schwarz says. Aged nineteen, he had only just made the move up from the youth team, and frequently sought out Klopp, then thirty, for support and advice. Many players did. ‘He was the one guy you’d go to, as a player or as the coach, if you had any questions or problems,’ he says. ‘He was the absolute leader in the dressing room but also very socially-minded.’ When the teenage midfielder tore his cruciate ligament in 1998, Klopp became even more of a personal role model to him. ‘He had suffered the same injury [two years earlier] and come back in record time, in only three months. He really helped me through the rehabilitation process, making sure I stayed optimistic.’

  Professionals usually need a minimum of six months before playing again after a cruciate ligament tear. Klopp’s rush back on to the pitch underlined his extraordinary devotion to the team and his profession, but also reflected his precarious financial situation. German football clubs are legally required to the pay full salaries of injured players for only the first six weeks of their absence, after which national insurance pays out 80 per cent of the monthly wage. For Klopp, 20 per cent less of very little was more than he could afford. ‘As a second division player in the mid-nineties, he feared for his existence,’ says Krawietz. ‘He was on a few thousand DM a month, he had a small child at home and he knew that relegation could mean the end of the club and of him as a footballer.’ Klopp’s will to win went well beyond the sporting competitiveness he had inherited from his father. He wanted to win so badly because he had to. The life he was living depended on it.

  ‘We were often in extremely dire straits,’ says Schäfer. ‘A few weeks before the end of the campaign, we usually didn’t know whether we would still be professional footballers next season. Can I keep paying the rent for my flat? These were real, serious questions at our level. After ten years at Mainz, two in the third division and eight in the second, I had earned enough to buy half of a flat.’

  Klopp felt he owed it to himself to play his heart out, Krawietz says. ‘The ability to work towards the game for the whole week, to completely focus on the chance to win and stay alive, as it were, and then to put everything into it during those ninety minutes–that’s something he developed for himself at Mainz as a player. Today, he passes that notion on to his team as a manager.’

  10. FIRE ON THE RHINE

  Mainz 2001–2006

  Klopp’s 1-0 win over Duisburg in his debut game as coach earned him a second match. ‘Everybody wanted to know who we would appoint as “the real coach” after the Duisburg game, because I had sold him to the press as a caretaker manager,’ says Christian Heidel. ‘So I said: “Jürgen Klopp will stay until the weekend at least.”’ The weekend came and brought a 3-1 home win over Chemnitz. Mainz were still in the relegation zone (fifteenth) but only on goal difference. Klopp was appointed manager until the end of the season. He reluctantly emptied his team locker and moved into the small office of the coach. ‘It was hard for me,’ he told Reinhard Rehberg.

  ‘We had momentum,’ says Sandro Schwarz
. ‘We felt that the coach was one of us, that we were one big community, with one guy, our Kloppo, carrying the flag at the front. There was a sense that it was all in our hands, that it was all up to us. We had this indomitable belief, but also a good plan for winning. One thing led to another.’

  Klopp would watch the sessions on top of a little hill next to the council-owned pitch that Mainz used for training. ‘I didn’t have the eye then, to get a clear overview from the pitch,’ he said. ‘The team played eleven-v-eleven, and when I blew my whistle, everybody had to freeze, like in the “Mannequin Challenge” and wait for me to run down and show them where the distances [between the lines] had become too big.’

  ‘Klopp could not stand losing,’ Jürgen Kramny remembers of those early days. ‘That was a very important factor, the tactical changes aside. He would often join with the reserve players for a five-a-side the day after a match. Whoever was on his team did not have a nice life. He was driven by ambition. He could be very direct with people.’

  Schwarz recalls training sessions of ‘maximum intensity’, geared towards getting the team into shape for the upcoming final. There was a final every weekend. ‘We thought of nothing else but to perform in that next game. We were completely blinkered. We went on a run that took on a life of its own. It was a logical consequence of the way we treated each other and of our performances.’

  Mainz picked up eight points from the next four games to leave the relegation zone. After a 4-2 win at Hannover 96, where they’d been 2-0 down at half-time, they were as good as safe with one month to go. ‘Driving back from Hannover, we stopped at a service station and Christof Babatz’s parents gave us some drinks to take on the bus,’ Schwarz says. ‘We drove straight to a nightclub called Euro Palace outside Mainz. Kloppo was at the centre of the party. He wanted to be with us, his boys, not sit at home on the sofa. But the next day, 10 a.m., everyone was there and we carried on. Video analysis, looking at mistakes, ways to improve. He was our coach but he wanted to be there when it was time to celebrate. That was great.’