Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story

by Raphael Honigstein

  Thurk’s brace on the final day of the 2003–04 season against Eintracht Trier had lifted Mainz to the Bundesliga, but he had cast a solitary, distraught figure amidst the ecstatic festivities. Thurk had agreed to move to Energie Cottbus for the coming season, in anticipation of the East German club’s promotion to the top division. But in Energie’s place, Mainz had gone up. ‘I feel like shit. Do I really have to go there?’ Thurk muttered throughout the party in the city centre, crying inconsolably.

  Heidel had promised the forward that he’d be welcome to return if his transfer to Cottbus didn’t work out. When it didn’t, Thurk paid part of his transfer fee to facilitate his return in January 2005. ‘In Mainz’s history, we have made two incredibly [good] personnel decisions,’ Strutz said later, ‘One is Klopp. The other one was to take back Thurk from Cottbus. What this guy is on the pitch is incredible.’

  In July 2006, Thurk learned of interest from Eintracht Frankfurt. The move to his hometown was hugely attractive to him, emotionally and financially. Mainz wanted him to stay. Thurk provoked a falling-out with Heidel and Klopp to force through his sale. He professed himself disappointed that the Mainz general manager had not informed him of Eintracht’s enquiries, then attacked Klopp for not backing him enough in relation to a possible call-up by the national team. ‘I have to think about that,’ the Mainz coach had–truthfully–answered when someone had asked him about Thurk’s prospects with Klinsmann. ‘That’s not simply a negative statement about a player,’ Thurk complained, ‘I felt as if he was making fun of me.’ But the thirty-year-old went further, much further. Klopp, Thurk said, was some kind of ‘super guru’ whose man-management prowess was vastly overrated: ‘This constant cheerfulness, always a funny quip. The stuff he says in the team meetings, his way of motivating. I switch off, because I’ve heard it a thousand times before. It’s worn thin. Many of the things he says, I can’t hear any more.’

  There was no going back after that. Mainz sold him to their local rivals. The switch didn’t work out for Thurk, however. He only scored four goals in thirty-six games before moving on to FC Augsburg. ‘The stuff Thurk said was unforgivable, it was scorched-earth stuff,’ says Quast. ‘Kloppo was God in Mainz, you can’t do that. It got very personal. After their many car journeys together to and from Frankfurt, they had become very close, like Topf und Arsch [pot and bum]. It was calculated by Micha. He knew the club had to sell him. But how do you deal with a guy like that? For a while, their relationship was very tense. I was sure Kloppo would break off all contact. But then, 2015–16, Augsburg are playing at Liverpool. And who’s there, sitting in the VIP box next to Ulla [Klopp’s wife]? Michael Thurk! Kloppo had invited him as a guest of honour. Thurk had played for Augsburg, so it was his game, too, in a way. There was no grudge, no ill-feeling at all. That’s cool. I respect people who can let bygones be bygones like that.’

  The start to the 2006–07 season was spectacular. Rafael Benítez’s Liverpool were demolished 5-0 in a friendly at the Bruchweg. Mainz beat VfL Bochum 2-1 in the first Bundesliga game of the season. But that was it, as far as wins were concerned. The newly built team couldn’t make the demanding system work. Eight draws and eight defeats left them propping up the table at the halfway mark.

  Thurk’s attack supplied an easy explanation for Mainz’s terrible results: Klopp could no longer inspire the dressing room. Maybe he was too busy analysing the national team’s games for ZDF to pay attention to mundane Bundesliga matters, the tabloids wondered.

  Strutz says that wasn’t the problem. ‘Before one game, against Schalke 04, Klopp made an unbelievable speech in the press conference. He just talked and talked, and at the end, I was sure that we would go and win. I asked one of the cameramen to give me the tape.’ ‘We will keep our naive belief,’ Klopp had said, ‘we won’t go to Schalke feeling small with our backs bowed or broken. Whoever stays the course, never gives up, never stops working will be rewarded at the end. That’s my fundamental belief. We will keep on fighting until someone tells us: “You can stop now, the season’s over.”’ Mainz lost the game, 4-0.

  The match before the winter break, at home to FC Bayern, brought the same scoreline. A Mexican wave swept through the sold-out Bruchweg, one part defiance, two parts gallows humour. Strutz didn’t like it. ‘I would have preferred if the crowd had really jeered the players instead.’ The club bosses agreed that the team, especially some of the new recruits, lacked ability and application. There would be some changes during the holidays, but not on the bench. Heidel declared Klopp unsackable. ‘We would jump for joy if he extended his contract beyond 2008 with us,’ he told the press.

  Klopp denied that his team had been afraid of the Bavarians’ visit–‘we didn’t shit ourselves, I had a look before’–and stayed stoically upbeat. The break would offer a chance to make the requisite changes. In any case, he told reporters, finishing the year bottom of the Bundesliga wasn’t his worst-ever Christmas: ‘When I was five years old, I wanted a Bonanza bike. I got one but our neighbour Franz, who played Santa Claus, sat down on it as a joke. The wheel rim was bent like an “eight”. I couldn’t ride it and was very upset.’

  ‘It didn’t feel as if the house was on fire,’ says Neven Subotić, sitting in the quaint Tasty Pasty Company, an exposed brick café run by a very chatty British expat in Cologne. ‘That season, it wasn’t pure chaos or anarchy. It was business as usual. We trained hard and played with a clear plan at the weekend, knowing that winning a point would be great. That was our focus. There was no sense of grave frustration, it didn’t feel as if nothing was working for us. I think everybody knew that we didn’t have the quality of the bigger sides, that we basically belonged down there. As a young player, I was very preoccupied with myself anyway.’

  Heidel spent money to stem the tide. Mohamed ‘Little Pharaoh’ Zidan, a happy-go-lucky striker who–like Thurk–only ever fulfilled his potential under Klopp, was brought back from Werder Bremen for €2.8m in January, a record signing for Mainz. Danish midfielder Leon Andreasen (also from Werder) came in on a six-month loan to shore up the centre, Colombian winger Elkin Soto was plucked from utter obscurity (he was out of contract after a spell at CD Once Caldas). The supporters, too, got a move on. They started a campaign called ‘Mission Possible 15’ to save Mainz 05 from relegation. (Fifteenth place was enough for survival.) The Mainz ultras promised themselves to make the Bruchwegstadion, where FSV had become a bit of a pushover, a noisy cauldron once more.

  Klopp, described as ‘a young, unshaven man forever jumping up and down on an imaginary bouncy castle’ in the Guardian, made the most of the restart. Zidan, Andreasen and, to a lesser extent, the soon to be injured Soto, were key factors in winning five of their first six games in the Rückrunde. Mainz were tenth. There was talk about reaching the UEFA Cup for a second time. ‘My teammates fight as if the opponents are threatening to take away their children,’ Andreasen said admiringly. Strutz hailed the team ‘the Bravehearts of the Bundesliga’. Any similarities with Scottish insurgents proved superficial, however. Underneath Mainz’s kilts, there wasn’t that much going on.

  Refereeing mistakes, injuries, goal-scoring opportunities wasted, silly goals conceded. The familiar litany of relegated sides since time eternal. All of it true, all of it was to blame, to an extent, for Mainz losing seven of the following nine games. More importantly, the disastrous first half of the season had made the margin for error too small for a side of 05’s limited capabilities. A home win on the penultimate day of the season, 3-0 v Gladbach, came too late. Mainz would have had to beat FC Bayern 7-0 away to have had a shot of staying up. There was no realistic prospect of achieving such a result on a PlayStation, let alone in the Allianz Arena. The Bundesliga adventure was over. FSV were going down after 102 games at the top.

  For Subotić, it was relegation in his first season as a professional football player but, surprisingly, not that painful. ‘The mood in the dressing room was good until the very end,’ he says. ‘We stayed a team, we stayed togethe
r. That was a very important experience for me. It helped me to grow as a player. It didn’t get significantly worse or louder towards the end. Maybe a little, but not by much.’

  The Bruchweg certainly didn’t lose its voice. Standing ovations accompanied a lap of honour after the final whistle in the Gladbach game. ‘We want to see the team’ chants forced the squad to come out of the dressing room for a second round. They sang ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ again. ‘My handkerchiefs are wet,’ German FA president Dr Theo Zwanziger admitted. ‘Football can’t achieve more than it has here, with us,’ Strutz said about the emotional farewell.

  Klopp took the microphone. Once again, a cartoon figure provided the impulse for his speech. Paraphrasing the end credits of the German version of the animated Pink Panther show, he promised that ‘this is not the end of all days, we’ll be back, without doubt–like the pink philosopher said.’ Klopp ‘almost sounded happy about the relegation, for bringing out the true football soul of Mainz’, Frankfurter Allgemeine felt. The drop down wasn’t treated as a catastrophe but accepted as a rather inevitable setback. ‘All that has happened is what everybody had always expected,’ the broadsheet wrote. Klopp: ‘It’s amazing to see how people deal with relegation. That’s what life is about. If you’ve given it your all and have failed, you can deal with the situation. People and the club have reacted in a classy manner. Here, players will never be idiots for losing a game.’ In Munich, FSV players and officials wore red top hats before kick-off and held up a banner in front of their travelling supporters. ‘We take our hats off to you,’ it read.

  Klopp confessed to a spell of introspection (‘I questioned myself. If I had found I was 90 per cent responsible for relegation, I would have had to draw the necessary conclusions. That’s not the case.’) but pledged his allegiance. ‘I don’t have the right to stop now. I want to make sure I can live in Mainz after I retire or get fired somewhere, without there being any open questions.’ He accepted that some players wanted to leave for other Bundesliga clubs, he added, but the situation was different for him. ‘I’m nearly forty, I can do my job for a few more years. I’m not running out of time. Players have less time, they have to do these things. For me, it’s about living up to my responsibility. I’m happy to do that.’

  11. ONE, TWO AND ALMOST THREE

  Dortmund 2010–2013

  Nuri Şahin, Mats Hummels, Marcel Schmelzer, Neven Subotić and Sven Bender looked at each other and started giggling in disbelief, like schoolboys who had just pulled off the most elaborate prank on their teacher. The moment lasted only ‘two seconds’, says Hummels, ‘but it felt like two hours’. The 80,000 punch-drunk, screaming supporters on the terraces were shaking the Signal Iduna Park so hard that time itself became unstuck.

  Stadium announcer Norbert Dickel had set off the earthquake, crying out that Köln were 2-0 up at Leverkusen, Dortmund’s last remaining rival for the top spot. BVB were leading 2-0 against 1. FC Nürnberg, only twenty minutes away from winning the Bundesliga title, with two games to spare. ‘We knew then that he had done it but couldn’t quite comprehend it,’ says Hummels of that unforgettable day in April 2011. Subotić : ‘We were babies, most of us weren’t even twenty-three yet. We had no idea what was happening to us. We knew we were there. But we didn’t quite know how we got there and what being there actually meant.’ Bender: ‘I had goosebumps like never before in my life. It was a brutally emotional moment, a realisation: we, a bunch of kids, had done it. Looking back I’m almost sad I couldn’t enjoy it more. But it was just too unreal and over too quickly to take in in its entirety.’ Klopp was equally unable to fully appreciate the occasion. ‘I thought it would feel better, more euphoric,’ he said, almost apologetically. ‘Perhaps the pressure on us was a little stronger than we were prepared to admit.’

  For everyone else, the minutes, hours and days afterwards were a blur. Kevin Großkreutz, running around with a partially shaved head like a madman (the batteries of the electric razor had run out). Keeper Roman Weidenfeller, telling an Al-Jazeera reporter in a hilarious mix of German and English ‘we have a grandios saison gespielt’. ‘Fans hugging, crying. Five hundred thousand people in the streets of Dortmund. Beer. Champagne’ (Subotić). ‘Two weeks of emergency rule’ (BVB president Reinhard Rauball). ‘It was total ecstasy, impossible to put into words,’ Hummels says. ‘You had a town mad about football, a club mad about football, and a coach in Kloppo who always put the supporters at the heart of things in a very extreme manner. The combination of all of that created an energy that people still talk about today and will never stop talking about.’

  Sebastian Kehl, one of a handful of players over thirty, had experienced winning the title with Dortmund before, in 2002, as had Weidenfeller. Borussia’s financial near-death experience in the intervening years made the 2010–11 league win more special still, he explains. ‘To see the joy in people’s eyes after they had been worried for so long about the future of their club and had wished for the glory days to return… we felt so incredibly happy for them. We were able to give something in return to them after all those difficult years. I think people there have never forgotten and will never forget it either.’

  Nothing had prepared anyone of a Black and Yellow disposition for this triumph. ‘No disrespect to the guys from the 1950s but in my view this is the biggest success in the history of the club,’ said Michael Zorc. The sporting director had won the Champions League with Borussia as a player in 1997 but felt that this side, the youngest-ever Bundesliga champions, had achieved more. ‘No one expected us to have a chance, let alone dominate the league to such an extent,’ he said. ‘When we won previous titles, we were at least among the favourites.’ Another Europa League spot had been seen as a realistic target for a team without expensive stars–striker Robert Lewandowski commanding the only significant outlay–and a coach who had never come near a trophy as player or manager before.

  Klopp’s guidance was ‘the essential factor’ in making Borussia great again, Hans-Joachim Watzke says, but the club also benefited from Zorc firing magic bullets in the transfer market ahead of the campaign. ‘We got very lucky with quite a few of the signings Zorc made, in close cooperation with Jürgen and me,’ Dortmund’s CEO admits. In that respect, the summer of 2010 was probably the luckiest of all. The arrival of Lewandowski, a muscular but very mobile centre-forward, reduced Klopp’s reliance on the less technically gifted Lucas Barrios, and increased his tactical options. The unknown Pole, a future world-class number 9, was often deployed as second striker or number 10 behind his Argentinian teammate in his debut Bundesliga season. In attacking midfield, Shinji Kagawa (twenty-one), bought from Japanese second division side Cerezo Osaka for the bargain-basement sum of €350,000, added agility and guile next to another de-facto new addition, eighteen-year-old Mario Götze. The son of an IT professor and product of Borussia’s youth system effortlessly fizzed past opponents to inject even more speed into Borussia’s offensive game. Matthias Sammer, the German FA sporting director, hailed ‘Super Mario’ (Bild) as ‘one of the greatest talents we ever had’.

  The trio’s interlocking moves gave Dortmund another dimension in the final third, ‘they opened up our game’, says Subotić . The biggest improvement stemmed from the squad’s tactical progress, however. After two full seasons, Klopp’s Jagdfußball (hunting football) was becoming second nature, a collective ritual, accepted and practised without hesitation.

  ‘We kept the core of the team, most of us, very young,’ says Subotić . ‘We didn’t get in players who were already at the height of their powers and perhaps on their way down again. Our guys hadn’t fulfilled their potential yet; they wanted to do anything to get there. That was hugely important, as was the fact that we had people who had completely bought into the system. They believed in it, they lived it.’ They had signed up to it, too. Ahead of the campaign, Klopp asked his players to put their name to ‘a promise’, containing seven rules. BVB players agreed to: ‘unconditional dedication’, ‘passionate
devotion’, ‘a determination [to win], independent of the scoreline’, a readiness ‘to support everybody’, a readiness ‘to accept help’, a readiness ‘to put [their] quality wholly at the service of the team’, a readiness ‘to take on individual responsibility’.

  ‘It might sound stupid but when things go like clockwork, you’re happy to run,’ says Bender. ‘You don’t even feel it any more. We were so united in our purpose, so clear, eager to help each other. We were blood brothers.’ ‘We stopped asking questions,’ adds Hummels. ‘We knew exactly what the coach wanted us to do, and it was actually fun to play that way, almost addictive. His classic phrase was: “Run like there is no tomorrow.” It came easily to us.’

  The team could see itself grow, says Subotić : ‘Many were on the way up. That was fun. We had this confidence, we felt that we would play everybody off the park. When we didn’t, we simply said, “Okay, lesson learned, we’ll smash them next time.” The first two years were like that. And in the third year, we did smash everybody.’

  Any remnants of inhibition were discarded when Dortmund racked up seven consecutive wins after a 2-0 opening day defeat in the Signal Iduna Park to Bayer 04 Leverkusen. The irresistible run included a 3-1 win in the derby at Schalke, an edgy 2-0 home triumph over FC Bayern in October–Klopp’s first league success against the Bavarians–and a fortuitous 2-1 over 1. FC Köln that showed that even the team’s deficiencies could work in their favour. Klopp had worked in pre-season on toning down the wildness, to make Dortmund’s game a bit more rational, especially in possession. But ‘full throttle [was] what they do best’, Watzke remarked after the win against the Billy Goats, ‘they’re not good at winding down a game’. Instead of settling for a respectable 1-1 draw at the RheinEnergieStadion, Dortmund pushed forward with abandon in the final minutes, propelled by a will to win that was much greater than the fear of losing. ‘None of us had won any significant titles, of course we were hungry,’ Hummels said. Nuri Şahin popped up with a last-second strike that secured three points–and top place in the table for the very first time under Klopp. Borussia hadn’t occupied first place since winning the Meisterschaft in 2002.