Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story

by Raphael Honigstein

  Mainz’s improbable escape was confirmed with a 2-2 home draw against LR Ahlen on the penultimate matchday. ‘Jürgen, Jürgen, Jürgen,’ the fans were shouting as he ran towards them, locking arms with his players. ‘I felt uneasy,’ he said later, ‘I hadn’t played.’

  There was nothing left to play for away to Waldhof Mannheim but Klopp and Heidel felt a special celebration with the supporters was in order. The club hired around sixty buses for the away fans and then chartered ‘the biggest boat allowed on the Rhine’ (Heidel) to take them, the team, and the entire staff upstream back to Mainz. ‘Flares were still legal then,’ says Heidel. ‘The whole boat was in flames. An incredible scene. A wall of fire, floating down river in the evening twilight.’

  Heidel and Klopp learned an important lesson in those weeks. Little old Mainz could only grow as a club if the supporters were on board. They had to feel truly involved, feel that they were an important part of Mainz’s success. ‘You have to get people onside at an emotional level,’ says Heidel. ‘We had to be one big unit. That was the programme and there was no other way. You have to explain what it is you want, and you have to make sure they take part in the success. You can only do that with someone like Klopp leading the way. He could go into the hardcore section at the stadium and tell them: “You’re all mad.” They accept that, coming from him. He always pushed for getting the supporters involved. He’s a Menschenfänger [literally somebody who captures people, and wins them round]. That’s clear. He works with emotions but also with a plan. We bounced off each other in that respect.’

  The gamble had paid off. Klopp’s tenure on the bench was made permanent, he signed a two-year deal, after asking for a bit of advice from fellow manager Ralf Rangnick on the phone. Klopp was officially declared Teamchef, team boss, since he lacked the pro licence necessary to coach a Bundesliga or Bundesliga 2 team. He was able to satisfy the German FA’s strict criteria for coaching a professional side by upgrading his badge a couple of years later. ‘We noticed that the team accepted their former player as coach. It wasn’t a huge change because he already had a special status as a player, he was the intellectual leader, or perhaps I should say he was the team’s brains,’ says Strutz. ‘He saw the bigger picture. You have to appreciate we weren’t the club we are today. People either took pity on us or found it funny that we wanted to get promoted. They smirked and said: “You’ll never make it.” But I never doubted that Klopp would work out. Not one minute of doubt. Not one second. He was predestined to be a coach.’

  Quast isn’t so sure. ‘Strutz told me the same thing one day. I said to him: “Nonsense. If you really hadn’t had any doubts, why didn’t you appoint Klopp back in the autumn, before getting Krautzun in?” With hindsight, everybody knew. It’s the same with the old coaches. They tell you how amazing Klopp was in training. “He always had the vision,” etc. It’s their way of skimming off a bit of the glory. Bullshit. The reality is that you needed somebody as nuts as Kloppo to take such a risk: Christian Heidel. It was like poker, when you move all-in with nothing.’

  Klopp himself told Oliver Trust of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in December 2001 that he had been ‘more prepared [for coaching] than for anything else in life, as strange as that sounds. I have more confidence in my abilities as a coach than I had in myself as a player.’ Years later, he admitted that wasn’t perhaps 100 per cent accurate at the time. ‘I had a thousand questions but no one to give me any help,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t even ask the questions at first because I had to pretend I knew everything already.’ Klopp was aware he needed a confidant. Only one man was in the running: Zeljko Buvac, his former Mainz teammate. ‘He was my first choice, and he would have been my second and third choice as well,’ Klopp said of the tight-lipped Serbian, who is six years older. ‘He is football knowledge incarnate.’

  The ex-playmaker, at the Bruchweg from 1992 to 1995, had the ability ‘to read the game, to know what the opponent was aiming to do, and to do the right thing, intuitively’, as Ansgar Brinkmann, put it. ‘Klopp wanted only him,’ says Heidel. ‘They had spent many hours talking tactics as players in the three years they played together, they put their heads together to find how they could best get this poor team through the season.’

  The Serbian had left Mainz to play for Borussia Neunkirchen (third/fourth division) in 1995 and start his coaching career there. ‘Klopp and him had made a pact,’ says Mainz-based TV editor Jan Doehling. ‘They said: whoever became a coach and had a big job first would bring in the other one. In theory, Buvac could have been the Mainz coach and Klopp the assistant. But when you think about it, it had to be this way: Klopp is the salesman, Buvac is the guy for detail in the background. He never talks. In all those years in Mainz, he never said a word to anyone outside the club. Not a word. I remember once standing near the changing room with goalkeeper Péter Disztl, the Hungarian international. He had played alongside Buvac at RW Erfurt. We knocked. Buvac opened a window near the showers and said: “Ah, it’s you.” Then he closed the window again. I was shocked: he actually talked! That was the only thing I ever heard from him.’

  ‘Chucky’, as Buvac was known to the players, was more vocal on the training ground. He also joined in sometimes, earning the respect of the squad with his excellent technique. Most importantly, however, he was the new coach’s theoretical sparring partner, ‘a brother in spirit’ (Klopp). Conveniently, he also had the necessary pro licence to coach in Bundesliga 2, unlike his superior.

  ‘Everybody thought they were always in each other’s arms but no: they had big arguments,’ reveals Heidel about the duo’s dynamics. ‘It was always about football, though. Buvac is very emotional: “Kiss my ass! Shit!” He’d leave the room and slam the door. And five minutes later, they’d be in each other’s arms again.’

  Their training sessions were all open to the public, but few came to take a closer look. Doehling and budding football coach Kosta Runjaic were two of the regulars at the Bruchweg and at the barracks of the state riot police, where Mainz trained if their own pitch was waterlogged. They witnessed a set-up that contained different elements woven into one all-action exercise. Everyone was moving, all the time. ‘There’s nothing worse for players than to stand around waiting while others do an exercise,’ Doehling says. ‘Most practice sessions bear no relation to the constant movement and shifts in pace during matches.’ Buvac’s idea was to simulate precisely that. He had the Mainz players running through obstacle courses, getting their pulse racing before shooting on goal. But there was more. Walls and poles were put up to make the ball ricochet unpredictably once the goalkeeper had made a save, a chance to react and score again. The same randomness that players encountered on the pitch became part of the programme. Doehling: ‘They did train to make certain moves second nature, automatisms. But Buvac ensured they never knew what would happen next.’

  Klopp later described Zeljko as ‘the best transfer I have ever made and will ever make’. Heidel says the appointment proved that Klopp ‘doesn’t just listen to his gut instincts; he thinks things through, and considers the bigger picture.’ In 2001, the 34-year-old rookie was honest enough to admit to himself that he needed help. ‘It’s one of the biggest strengths in a game that teems with egomaniacs and people high on their own self-importance: to know what you can and can’t do,’ Doehling says. ‘And his ability to learn and absorb knowledge quickly. That’s a great advantage.’

  The team instantly responded to the more refined set-up, as Mainz transformed their 4-4-2 into a more fluid 4-3-3 going forward. A few weeks into the new season, the inexpensive squad of ‘players that nobody else wanted’ (Klopp) were leading the Bundesliga 2 table, playing a football that was ‘qualitatively and tactically superior than the majority in the division’, as Süddeutsche Zeitung noted. National newspaper reporters despatched to the Bruchweg to examine this ugly duckling story came back with startling quotes. Klopp professed that Mainz played their game ‘independent of the opposition, dead-balls aside’ and that ‘winnin
g and losing should be explainable, not a question of coincidence or a lost tackle somewhere.’ Careful not to come across like a swotty know-it-all in his steel-rimmed glasses and suffer the same fate as Rangnick–who had been widely mocked as ‘the professor’ after extolling the virtues of a back four on state television in 1998–Klopp seasoned his theoretical utterances with hearty changing-room speak: His ‘only problem’ he said, was a ‘lack of distance’ from his former teammates.

  Mainz had spent the grand sum of nil on new transfers. Six leavers had brought in the same amount of money in revenue: nothing. The playing budget for the year was DM14m, €7m, and the stadium was still a crumbling heap of steel and wood, two-thirds empty. After barely surviving the drop in May, supporters greeted the series of wins with self-mocking humour. ‘We’re only a carnival club,’ they were singing in the stands. Klopp’s mysterious accomplishments and vague physical resemblance to a certain apprentice wizard had tabloid Bild nickname him ‘the Harry Potter of the second division’. ‘People want explanations for why we’re up there,’ he shrugged. From the second matchday onwards, Mainz were in the promotion places. A glorious 4-1 home win against rivals Arminia Bielefeld in front of 14,700 fans in mid-April 2002 opened the door to the Bundesliga. Mainz needed just three points from the remaining three games to cap the most extraordinary season in the history of the club. They drew 1-1 against Duisburg. They drew 1-1 at home to bogey team Greuther Fürth. Only a defeat at 1. FC Union Berlin on the final day, coupled with wins for both Bochum and Bielefeld, could see them slip to fourth spot. ‘We will go to Berlin, do our job and return as a first division team,’ Heidel prophesied.

  Mainz travelled to the Alten Försterei stadium–and straight into an ambush. Many neutrals had taken a liking to the high-flying minnows and their entertaining football, but in the eastern suburb of the German capital, the air was heavy with politically-charged rancour. ‘It was a very aggressive atmosphere, brutal,’ says Heidel. ‘Even though they had nothing to play for at all, there was raw hatred. They attacked the team bus, they spat at us, they called us arrogant West Germans. Inside the stadium, it felt as if the home team were contesting the World Cup final.’ Mainz weren’t ready for this pressure cooker.

  The atmosphere had been poisoned by some ‘creative’ writing from a tabloid reporter in Berlin’s Kurier. (‘An idiot,’ Strutz bristles.) Some very innocuous lines from Klopp from December about Union’s penchant for full-blooded football were heavily spun, making it sound as if Klopp was denigrating the well-supported side from the former GDR as a ‘gang of thugs’ (Kloppertruppe). In addition, Klopp was portrayed as a smart-arse, a self-proclaimed football innovator à la Rangnick and as the loudmouth darling of DSF, the Bundesliga 2 broadcasters.

  Union played with a knife between their teeth and took the lead in the fifty-eighth minute. Swiss striker Blaise Nkufo came on, his leg heavily strapped, and scored the equaliser twenty minutes before the end. ‘We thought we had made it,’ says Heidel. ‘But then we conceded in the eighty-second minute, threw everyone forward and conceded a third. The teams below us had won. We were fourth. The whole stadium sang sardonic songs about Klopp’s failure. It was his worst defeat ever. He’d always been the Sonnyboy, the guy who everybody wanted to interview because of his silly jokes, the guy who made everybody laugh. He’d never tasted such disappointment before.’

  Klopp cried bitter tears in the dressing room. ‘Our life’s dream has been destroyed,’ he said, ashen-faced. Heidel, too, was distraught, certain that Mainz would never get a chance to play in the top flight again: ‘A few good players were sure to go, I was afraid the whole team might fall apart. I thought, that’s it. It felt like the end of the world for us. Little did we know that next year would be much, much worse.’

  In Berlin, the Mainz players and coaching stuff drowned their non-promotion sorrows in the team hotel ‘until the sun came up’, Sandro Schwarz says. ‘We said that we somehow had to turn the mood on its head, to transform the sadness into some kind of euphoria for the next season.’ Schwarz remembers arriving at the Mainz train station and being surprised that there were a couple of hundred fans there, greeting the team with flags and banners: ‘You used to be able to walk through the city with nobody caring. It was only then that we realised that the supporters were really behind us. The day after, that deep sadness was gone, replaced by a real fighting spirit, with Klopp leading from the front.’

  But picking up momentum wasn’t that easy the second time around. Mainz had to rebuild. Three important players (striker Nkufo, centre-back Manuel Friedrich and left-back Markus Schuler) had all left, and two terraces of the stadium were being reconstructed in anticipation of a first-ever Bundesliga season that had failed to materialise. (The federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate paid for the €5.75m refurbishment, the city council gifted the property to the club and stopped charging them €100,000 for the annual lease.) Injuries to some key personnel made life difficult, too.

  Following a win in the opening game away to Union Berlin, of all places, Klopp’s team spent the entire season just below the three promotion places. The club were by now thoroughly persuaded that the Swabian (still without his pro licence at that point) was the right man to take them forward. ‘He didn’t just coach the team, he also understood and accepted the financial framework we were operating in,’ says Strutz, implying that the situation had been different with previous coaches.

  Klopp’s contract was extended by two more years in October 2002, despite a lean spell without a home win that would stretch to two months. ‘My interest to extend was as big as that of the club,’ he told Frankfurter Rundschau. ‘It’s still a pleasure to work here and to be allowed to develop as a coach. Besides, you don’t often have the opportunity in life to be exactly who you are where you are. That’s possible here. I don’t think I would even have the right clothes [to work] for another club.’

  Three games before the end of the season, a dramatic 3-2 win in the derby against big neighbours Eintracht Frankfurt lifted FSV to third spot. ‘Nothing in me cries “yippie” or “that’s almost it”,’ Klopp warned. The remaining fixtures were kind. Relegation-threatened Ahlen away, minnows Lübeck at home, relegation-threatened Braunschweig away. ‘We want this electrifying football all the time now,’ Strutz said.

  Sparks certainly did fly at the tiny Wersestadion in Ahlen. Mainz fell 2-0 down before going up 3-2 with ninety minutes gone, but still managed to lose. Two goals from the home side in injury-time saw them drop down to fifth place. Klopp and keeper Dimo Wache nearly came to blows after the final whistle. But just as they thought they were down and out, they were back in. A 5-1 win over Lübeck paved the way for another final, this time at Braunschweig. Mainz had to outscore third-placed Eintracht Frankfurt (at home to Reutlingen) by one goal to quench their Bundesliga desire at last. Klopp took his men to a mini training camp to clear their heads, aware that further failure might turn the erstwhile popular underdog into a bit of a laughing stock. Some had taken to calling them ‘a Bayer Leverkusen of Bundesliga 2’, a reference to the perennial runners-up from the first division.

  On the day, there are no signs of any jitters. Mainz are 2-0 ahead within twenty minutes and leading 4-0 before Braunschweig score a consolation goal in the eightieth minute. Game over in Lower Saxony. As things stand, Mainz are up! Frankfurt are only leading 4-3 against Reutlingen. Klopp moves his hands up and down, as if to suppress the flames of joy. Because the match in Frankfurt is still… ongoing. The home side have just scored a fifth goal to make it 5-3. The coach and his players lock arms and form a circle around Axel Schuster, the team manager, who’s on the phone to a journalist in Frankfurt. There are less than three minutes of injury-time left to play at the Waldstadion. Two and a half minutes of anxiety and prayers later, the inconceivable happens. Eintracht score to make it 6-3 at the final whistle. Mainz are fourth and in tears for a second year running. ‘We thought, is this Candid Camera?’ says Sandro Schwarz. ‘We had enough chances to win 5-0, 6-0. I
get goosebumps thinking about it. We were all looking at Axel Schuster’s face. Everyone was completely gone after that, not really in this world for a few minutes. It simply beggared belief.’

  ‘Die Meister der Schmerzen’, the champions of pain, Frankfurter Rundschau called them with heartfelt pity. Others were sneering that Mainz should be known as ‘The Unpromotables’. ‘A horrific experience, what else can you say?’ Strutz recalls. He sobbed uncontrollably on the pitch alongside Heidel. Klopp had quickly run inside to escape the media attention and gleeful chants from the home side. Strutz: ‘He had a cigarette and didn’t say a word. I know because I did the same. You would have thought that it couldn’t get any crueller after Berlin.’

  Klopp cried when his son Marc, thirteen, asked him whether there’d be school the next day. But on the whole, he kept his composure remarkably well. ‘I believe that everything in life happens for a good reason. One day, we’ll find out why today happened…’ he said.

  The next day, 8,000 people turned up at the Gutenbergplatz central square in Mainz (named after Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press) to welcome the team back in a spirit of defiance. Mainz had been ‘smacked in the face twice’, says Heidel, ‘but Klopp got on the stage and gave these roaring speeches that got everybody going. He emotionalised and inspired people in an incredible way.’

  ‘We will pick ourselves up,’ the coach said. ‘We are all still young, nobody has to give up just yet. We’re determined to do so much more for this city and our fans. I know that people say “Mainz will never do it.” But they have a problem. We’ll be back. Anyone who writes us off is making a serious mistake.’