Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story

by Raphael Honigstein

  The message, Schwarz explains, was believable because the messenger was. ‘That day, you saw who Kloppo is as a person. He’s a fighter. You felt that he was truly committed to his words himself. I suspect that he felt from the first day onwards all these things were part of life’s trials and tribulations, that we could master it all by doing the right thing, by focusing on the here and now, and by disregarding the past. That, in my view, is the essence of Kloppo. He was convincing because he was convinced. He never feigned anything in front of us. He’d ask: “What’s the alternative? We can’t dissolve the football club.” It was obvious that we had to go on, and obvious to him that the next attempt would be successful. I still remember him saying: “We were a point short in 2002. We were a goal short in 2003. You know what comes next, don’t you?” And that’s how it happened.’

  It did. But not quite in the manner anticipated. Klopp’s third full season in charge was his worst, points-wise. Ukrainian star forward Andriy Voronin, who had become too prolific for the second division (twenty goals) and moved on to 1. FC Köln, had left a huge, pony-tailed gap up front. The performances were largely indifferent. Heidel warned that too many players were dreaming about life in the Bundesliga instead of concentrating on the hard slog ahead. Klopp defended his team vigorously against outside criticism (‘I can’t stand it when managers take credit for wins but blame players for defeats’) but inconsistency degenerated into a full-blown crisis. Between mid-December and mid-April, FSV won only two league games. They were eighth, six points adrift of third place with five games to go.

  ‘The season was over for us,’ says Kramny. ‘There was talk about changing the team. After three failures, you couldn’t see the same faces in the dressing room any more. Quite a few players were told they could leave. I guess the idea was to try once more with a new squad.’ Mainz also had to cut costs, urgently. The club had lost money over the last two campaigns and needed to generate funds to plug higher than anticipated costs for the stadium rebuild.

  That spring, Kramny adds, Klopp seemed ‘a little bereft of answers for the first time’. The manager conducted a changing-room survey, asking players to anonymously write down their explanations for the malaise. No one came up with anything useful. In a subsequent team meeting, Klopp told his men to stop ruminating on the negatives; they alone were responsible for changing the mood and drawing fresh spirit. ‘That’s our mission for the last five games,’ he decreed.

  Luckily for Mainz, Duisburg provided less than feeble opposition in the next game, going down 4-1 at the Bruchweg. In Lübeck, Mainz won 4-1 again. Then 2-0 at home against Unterhaching. But away to Bavarian minnows Regensburg, Klopp’s team failed to get on the score-sheet. The 0-0 draw left Mainz in fourth place. They could only go up if they beat Eintracht Trier at home and Alemannia Aachen (third) didn’t win at Karlsruher SC on the final day.

  Klopp put up a banner in the changing room: ‘Jaaaaaaaa!’ it read. ‘He wanted to take the huge pressure off the team, by creating a sense of anticipation,’ write Rehberg and Karn, ‘the prospect of experiencing a moment of joy was supposed to take centre-stage, in place of the need to win.’ Mainz did win in front of a sell-out crowd, 2-0. But once again, they were reliant on a result going their way elsewhere. The game in Karlsruhe was still going on after the final whistle at the Bruchweg. Aachen were 1-0 down. A couple of tense minutes later, Mainz had finally done it.

  Their tally of fifty-four points marked them out as the worst team to ever win promotion to the Bundesliga. It didn’t matter. ‘The whole city exploded,’ Heidel says. ‘It’s an emotional town, because of carnival, they love to party and are very proud. What went down on that Sunday, however, no one had ever experienced.’ Mainz, a town without any significant footballing background, had fallen in love with the game and their team ninety-nine years after FSV’s inception. ‘It was chaos. People everywhere.’ The team bus took an eternity to travel the short distance from the stadium to Gutenbergplatz through an ocean of smiling, delirious faces. Players and staff went up on the Staatstheater balcony to address the crowd, and of course it was Klopp who took the mic, drenched in champagne and tears. He screamed out one word only: ‘Jaaaaaaaa!’

  One celebration was not enough after two heartbreaks, Heidel and the coach spontaneously decided. ‘We announced that we would all meet again the next day for another promotion party at the same place. Thirty thousand turned up. On a Monday! The city was packed. The face of it all, you have to say, was Kloppo. Without a doubt. But he never, to this day, was vain enough to take much credit for himself. People who don’t know him at all will tell you that he’s a straight-up guy, that he’s authentic. Because he really is.’

  Klopp’s speech in the city centre ‘brought tears to everyone’s eyes and had mothers holding up their babies, yelling that they would name them after him’, Doehling says, with only a hint of exaggeration.

  ‘Going up in the third year was the biggest miracle of all,’ says Strutz. His father had been president of the club before him. Mainz’s first-ever promotion to the top flight was the crowning achievement of more than one person’s life’s work. ‘Usually, teams in our situation break apart after two setbacks of such magnitude. In hindsight, not going up earlier was the best thing that could have happened to us. You know why? Everyone passionate about football was happy for us. Because we were likeable. Because we said: “We won’t give up, we’ll pick ourselves up again from the floor.” No one had really looked at us before. But now we were Mainz 05.’ The dwarf-sized club who wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, the serial losers who yelled ‘yes’ into fate’s ugly face. ‘That was only possible because of the special relationship between Klopp and his players. To this day, no one feels indifferent about playing for us. Players love playing here and those who played here ten years ago love coming back.’

  It’s a truism that football teams tend to resemble their coaches after a while but at Mainz the similarities were more blindingly obvious than elsewhere. ‘They were limited players, there was no one outstanding in the squad, [centre-back] Manuel Friedrich excepted,’ says Quast. ‘Many reminded me of Kloppo. There was Toni da Silva, ‘the only Brazilian who can’t play football’, Kloppo once said. He made him a star. There were all these journeymen, quite average players with no chance to do anything special elsewhere. A guy like Marco Rose. He got out of the team bus yelling “Marco Rose is a Bundesliga player. Any objections?” into the camera. He wouldn’t have been able to play in the first division in any other city on the planet. Only in Mainz. They all had that mentality that Kloppo himself had. They went for it, they gave their all. They would go for drinks at the Ballplatzcafé together, players and coach. Tell me one coach who does that.’

  Promotion for Mainz doubled the club’s budget to €20m per season and eased financial concerns about the stadium building works. Long-serving players such as Sandro Schwarz and Jürgen Kramny were offered new contracts after all. But there still wasn’t any money for stars.

  ‘Mainz will be in competition with SC Freiburg for being the nicest club in the Bundesliga,’ wrote Süddeutsche Zeitung, ‘but no one should overlook the fact that it’ll be very difficult for them. This is a team who work hard but aren’t suspected of committing artistry. They slave away while the fans sing carnival songs in the stands, and their game betrays the coach’s love of the English style of playing football.’

  ‘The Bundesliga can look forward to having us,’ Klopp pronounced. ‘We are up for it.’

  In June 2004, German football was down and out, disorientated and demoralised. The national team of Rudi Völler had just crashed out of the European championship at the group stage without a win for the second time running, having embarrassed themselves with painfully slow, negative performances that were dubbed ‘sleeper train football’ and Rumpelfußball (from rumpeln: to stutter and stumble) by aghast pundits and papers.

  The game played by the country’s finest had looked so hopelessly behind the times that not one experienced
coach wanted to take over the side two years ahead of the World Cup on home soil. Bereft of any mainstream choices, the German FA reluctantly entrusted the task to Jürgen Klinsmann, the California-based reformist who preached the need for more speed and an aggressive, youthful repositioning of the national team’s brand. ‘Germany has always been a doer nation but we had stopped playing doer football,’ he recalled a decade later.

  It would take until the end of the competition two years later before the former striker’s widely mistrusted ways were formally vindicated. But in the Bundesliga, change came a bit quicker. 2004–05 was the season that Germany’s dull, plodding, tactically antiquated league got a move on. Three young Swabian coaches who had learnt in the second division that small teams could get bigger and better courtesy of ingenious strategy and dedicated execution were finding that their formula worked just as well against the traditional giants of the domestic game. ‘There’s a surge in the Bundesliga,’ wrote Frankfurter Allgemeine. ‘Risky football, defending from the front, pressing and a general sense of acceleration: these are the characteristics of a movement epitomised by these “poor” underdogs.’ Sweepers and lazy playmakers had no place in a systemic approach in which the emphasis on the collective pierced the commonly held conviction that individuals made the difference at that level. ‘They play concept football, not hero football,’ Berliner Zeitung noted of the new wave of ‘improvement managers’ shaking up the status quo.

  At Schalke 04, Ralf Rangnick outlawed the back-pass in training and stipulated a maximum of two contacts on the ball. Arminia Bielefeld’s Uwe Rapolder, who had led the East-Westphalians to promotion ahead of Mainz, won a surprising amount of games with a well-below-average but perfectly drilled squad that overpowered and outsmarted much more skilful opponents. And Mainz coach Jürgen Klopp, the third and by far loudest part of this triumvirate of south-western football auteurs, oversaw an exhilarating debut campaign that soon disabused cynics of the idea that FSV were set to party all the way to certain relegation. Five wins and three draws in the first ten games proved that the cash-strapped novices could prevail in the big time.

  Despite the weighty theoretical underpinnings of their game, Schalke, Bielefeld and Mainz were admired as Spaßmannschaften, as fun teams. Their coaches didn’t just play a good, modern game. They talked one, too. Klopp, in particular, sparkled in the spotlight, wooing the public with elaborate descriptions of his team’s strategies and eulogies to their fighting spirit, stressing that the best scheme was nothing without the legs and the passion to bring it to bear. Two big interviews with Der Spiegel and taz provided enough interesting quotes to last a decade. They didn’t read like regular question-and-answer sessions, more like a manifesto: for a different kind of football, and a different kind of coaching, based on the principles of humanity and respect.

  ‘We want to dominate the game,’ the second-youngest coach in the league after Matthias Sammer said about his game plan. ‘Especially when we don’t have the ball. We want the opponent to play the ball into precisely the areas we want him to play it into. The opponent having the ball is our build-up for scoring a goal. We want to win back the ball so quickly that we’ll only need one pass to get in front of goal. We don’t run more than others, but we run without taking breaks. Why should we [take breaks]? We train all week to be sharp for ninety minutes. And we have a well-defined system. We don’t sting everything in sight like a swarm of hornets. We lure the opponent and then sting him.’

  ‘The experience,’ he added, ‘is more important than the result. We play Erlebnisfußball [football that provides an experience], exactly the kind of football that I want to watch. We want to run incessantly. That’s our code of arms. We are the vanguard of the regular guys in the pub. They want us to run and fight. Our entry ticket is well-defined, week after week: passion, willingness to run, will. If one guy leaves the stadium thinking, “they should have run and fought more today”, we got it wrong completely. I love this game because it’s about power, because it stirs up the dust. You can only get in touch with the game’s emotionality via pace and action. A win alone is never emotional. A good game makes the hairs at the back of your neck stand up until Monday or Tuesday. Football is theatre. If we don’t put on a superb performance, only two guys will be sitting there at the end.’

  Mainz’s elevated levels of coherence on the pitch were underwritten by a special bond off it, Klopp explained. Two years earlier, he had taken his team to a remote Black Forest hut where they had to cook and clean for themselves. Ahead of their first Bundesliga season, an extremely unpleasant survival trip to Sweden had yielded four days of almost non-stop rain, plenty of mosquito bites, a near-mutiny by the squad (‘they wanted to charter a helicopter to get us out of there’) but also a new-found closeness as a result of the shared experience. Klopp asked the players to write a letter to themselves in the glow of the campfire, detailing their impressions and feelings about the journey to the heart of the Scandinavian wilderness. The letters were put in envelopes and collected by Klopp, who told his men they’d be kept, to be revisited in case the team experienced a crisis in the months ahead. ‘Each of them could then read what he had written down at that time, sitting around the fire with his teammates, and remember those special and invigorating emotions.’

  The Mainz players were also shown a documentary on the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team. Klopp asked his men how they felt about calling themselves the All Reds. Would they feel embarrassed? Or could they put on the 05 shirt and vow to themselves that they would push to the very limits as long they wore it? Mainz never performed the haka in the changing room. But Maori chants were played on the team bus stereo driving into stadiums.

  Since the club couldn’t afford to buy players that didn’t fit the footballing and psychological profile, Heidel and Klopp conducted extensive job interviews with prospective recruits. If possible, the player was invited to Mainz with his wife or girlfriend. Klopp would speak to him alone at first, for three, four, five hours, talking football while Heidel was showing off Mainz’s most beautiful spots to the wife or girlfriend. Afterwards, Heidel would talk to the player. ‘I wanted to find out about his background and his family, I wanted to get an impression of him as a person,’ he says. ‘And I told him many things about Jürgen Klopp. It would have been silly to do that with him in the room. I said to the player that he would eventually love this coach. That kind of stuff.

  ‘There were two key questions. “Do you like to train?” If somebody said: “Well, not really, but I’m at my best at the weekend”–goodbye. No chance. And: “Do you like running?” If somebody said: “I prefer doing it with my technique,” or “I don’t need that”, we didn’t take them. I always said to them: “If you think you’ll score three goals at the weekend without training hard please tell me now. Because you’ll never play here. Regardless of your name.” Players responded to such honesty. There were many we didn’t take because we felt they couldn’t deliver what was needed. Also if someone said: “It’s only Mainz…” We sent him away. Kloppo always said: “I want to get the feeling that you can only imagine playing for one club right now: Mainz. If you don’t have that feeling, if you think you have to talk to others first, leave it. If you haven’t caught fire after I told you about the club, you shouldn’t come here. And be honest, because it won’t work.” The players were impressed by that. And then we sent him home, without a concrete offer. We said: “Think about it. Can you imagine playing here?” We told him that we would also deliberate. “We will tell you if we want you. If it doesn’t work out because of money, so be it.” But it almost always worked. The players we hooked we got. We knocked them out. Once they signed, Kloppo and I high-fived each other. It was clockwork.’

  Egyptian striker Mohamed Zidan was a good case in point. His agent dismissed a move to 05 from Werder Bremen, saying ‘Mainz? What does he want in Mainz?’ Heidel remembers. ‘But after we had talked to him, he was as keen as can be. He only wanted to join us, no one else.’ Apart from
a functioning system that made the most of everybody’s qualities and thus increased the players’ marketability (‘whoever performs in Mainz will, at some stage, get the chance to earn what others are earning,’ Klopp predicted), the club also offered an appealing work–life balance. Heidel: ‘There are worse cities to live in. You can live a normal life as a footballer there. In Cologne, you can’t go on the street. In Mainz, that’s still possible. You will hardly find a player who didn’t enjoy playing for us. We never had to penalise people for indiscretions. It wasn’t necessary.’

  That is not to say that the usual rules didn’t apply. Late arrivals for training were sanctioned with a couple of hundred euros fee. There was also a tariff for the coach himself being tardy: 500 euros. One day, when Mainz were still in the second division and Klopp was still living in Frankfurt’s lower middle-class Gallusviertel area, he arrived at Michael Thurk’s apartment in the same neighbourhood to pick up the striker for their daily commute down the notoriously congested A66 Autobahn. Repeated rings of the doorbell brought no answer. Klopp rang all the bells until someone let him in, then knocked on Thurk’s door. After a while the door opened: Thurk, in pants. ‘Oh, Coach, sorry…’

  ‘I’ll give you exactly two minutes, otherwise I’ll drive off without you.’

  A good ninety seconds later, Thurk was down at the car, wearing a jumble of thrown-together clothes. The drive to Mainz was ‘pretty stressful’, says Quast, who shared the ride. ‘Traffic jams, everything blocked. Kloppo was sweating because he wasn’t on much money then. Five hundred euros was a lot. Thurk also started sweating–Klopp told him he’d have to pay if they were late. They somehow made it with two seconds to spare.’

  Klopp made a point of treating his players the way he wished former coaches had treated him as a player. Midfielder Fabian Gerber was given a day off training to celebrate his mother’s birthday–a newsworthy, fiercely debated event in the machismo-infused Bundesliga. ‘I wasn’t allowed to be with my son for his first day of school ten years ago and still ask myself why I was stupid enough to heed that order from the coach,’ Klopp explained his leniency. ‘I want people around me to do well. That’s what life is about. Okay, we play football, there’s rough language and sometimes more. But I don’t have to step on people’s toes. I don’t have to threaten punishment to get them to perform. I have to show players targets in a way that they automatically want to achieve them. That’s what I believe in.’