Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story

by Raphael Honigstein

  At Mainz and in the early months at Dortmund, Klopp’s watchword had been geil. Both an adjective or an adverb, it carries a faint whiff of 1980s pop culture and literally translates as ‘horny’, but it can also refer to something very inspiring or impressive. ‘Geil is the word that best describes my excitement,’ Klopp told taz in 2004. ‘The language I use is important, I need to get through to my players. But I don’t use geil to come across as young or cool. I simply don’t have a better word to describe something I happen to find exorbitantly beautiful.’

  Geil was complemented by Gier, greed, in Klopp’s phraseology in 2010–11. The team needed to be greedy in chasing the ball, in covering the pitch and in the pursuit of results, he stipulated. Traditionally sinful traits–lust, gluttony, avarice–were thus recast as footballing virtues. There was to be no distinction between work and play, pain and pleasure: self-sacrificial toiling could be a sensual, arousing experience. Klopp, feverishly saluting won tackles and clearances on the sidelines, was the physical manifestation of his teachings. ‘He said things like “I’m looking forward to this game with every fibre in my body” and it was so believable that one second later, you felt the same,’ Bender says. ‘We learned to be completely in the moment, to think only from game to game.’ The idea that big targets had to be clearly articulated in order to be achieved was dismissed as counter-productive. ‘Whoever says that has no idea,’ the coach explained. He set his men immediate, achievable targets. They had to win the next game. ‘A slalom skier would never throw his hands up in the air in celebration after clearing the first gate, would he?’ he asked.

  Klopp set ‘an example to the boys’ by behaving in accordance with his own convictions, says Fritz Lünschermann, the BVB team manager. ‘His style, his mentality… He’s quite a unit, too. He’s not a 1.75m man, he’s 1.93m. A demolition bomb, pure dynamite. You only have to light the fuse. He used to say: “Get on the wild ride.” Most of the time, that’s what happened. The other important advantage was the age of the team. It had become quite young, quite quickly. Neven, Mats, all these guys. They were all still kids and followed him like Jesus’ disciples. They had a very strong bond.’

  The extraordinary togetherness of the players wasn’t limited to football matters. ‘We used to get together, ten of us, and play online, for hours on end,’ says Subotić . ‘We knew that wouldn’t last for ever–you get older, you have other interests–but at the time, it was a hugely important tool for us that brought us together.’ Looking back, Hummels says, ‘it was a unique situation: a highly talented group, with world-class players, happy to hang out with each other like a gang. That special combination made everything possible.’ Dickel: ‘There’s an old saying in football: “You have to be eleven friends.” It’s not totally wrong. If there are eight friends in the team, that’s already quite good.’

  A united team, created in Klopp’s image, delivering a string of victories: there was no longer a need to deal with tactical dissidents because there weren’t any. Even if somebody did harbour private doubts, the intensity in training had ramped up so much that natural selection precluded any deviation from the course. Only the fittest, most devoted followers could survive life in the fast lane.

  ‘In the first year, it was rather normal football, with a pinch of Klopp tactics,’ says Subotić . ‘In the second year, it got spicier. In the third year: boom! We reached a whole new level, because all twenty-five players now truly got it. Training felt like war. The starting eleven playing v subs. By the middle of the week, you sort of knew the line-ups. You can’t imagine how difficult these games were. You were used to having a bit of space and air to breathe but that was all gone. Everyone attacked the ball, everyone defended. Everyone pressed. These games were as hard as the real ones, perhaps even harder.’

  The training week had a fixed pattern. Monday was a rest day. Tuesday: gym sessions, sprints, four-a-side games, tournament-style, the winner stays. (Subotić : ‘Fun to start your week that way but very demanding. You sprint all the time, challenge for the ball all the time. It’s a workout, but you don’t realise it.’) Wednesday: eleven-a-side. Two halves of ten minutes. Preceded by a warm-up with passing. Thursday: shooting on goal. For everybody, including defenders. ‘After two extremely tough days, you needed to have a bit of fun. We sometimes adjusted the sessions to concentrate on a particular weakness of the opponent, to cross the ball in a certain way, for example. But you could shoot on goal unobstructed. I think every pub player would have said: “I’ll be happy to join in that session!”’

  Fridays were devoted to dead-balls. Free-kicks, but mostly corners. The same two teams were always up against each other, and the ball was live–there would be counter-attacks, and counter-counter-attacks on a very small pitch, 30 metres long, with boards along the touchline to keep the ball in play. Subotić : ‘Short and sweet but tough as hell. Two hundred miles an hour for a few minutes. The score was kept throughout the season. The motivation was very high, nobody wanted to lose. No prisoners. It was also your last chance to show the coach: “I’m here, I’m ready.” A last short, sharp jolt.’ Saturday was game time. Sundays were spent regenerating and doing warm-downs. On top of these physical exertions, there were short and concise video analysis sessions. After a quick introduction by Klopp, Krawietz took over and showed the team clips of the next opponents, their dead-ball pieces, their basic defence and attacking shapes, where they had problems or gaps.

  The whole routine was ‘so brutal that there was no time to think at all’, Subotić recalls. Which is just as well, because Klopp mandated that his men should live only for the moment and never contemplate matters beyond the next game. Metre by metre, tackle by tackle, and goal by goal, Dortmund were running away with the league, racking up win after win, while champions Bayern were ignominiously stuck in mid-table, slowly self-destructing under the high-handed leadership of Louis van Gaal. Bayer Leverkusen were doing much better, but they were Leverkusen, weren’t they? A club with a well-deserved reputation for being bottlers. Three months into the campaign, it dawned on Klopp and his men that they could go all the way.

  To keep the pressure off the team, any mention of winning the league was strictly banned, from the very top down. ‘We are not talking about the Meisterschaft, I couldn’t care less about the table,’ Klopp kept insisting. ‘I have 0.0 per cent interest in the table. Anyone talking about winning the league now has no idea about football,’ said Zorc. Watzke, too, preached silence. ‘It’s totally unrealistic to talk about the championship. We are not ready to burden our seven, eight players who aren’t even twenty-three years old yet with that kind of baggage. Setbacks are guaranteed to happen.’

  A few weeks later indeed, Klopp found himself answering uncomfortable questions in a TV interview. ‘Why did the team play so poorly against Hannover?’ WDR’s Arnd Zeigler enquired. ‘We have problems, so many problems,’ Klopp said, rubbing his eyes underneath his glasses. ‘The boys don’t adhere to instructions, I can’t get through to them. I’m not sure I’m the right coach any more. We have to analyse the situation critically during the week. Maybe the players want to get rid of me. I’m a bit clueless at the moment, to be honest.’ The BVB coach also lamented that there were no alternatives to the 29-year-old Roman Weidenfeller in goal. ‘Today he was okay but in the morning, after getting up, he looks horrible. We have no choice other than to drink enough until he looks better in our eyes.’ It was all a very good joke, of course, a feature for Zeigler’s satirical football show. Dortmund had in fact won 4-0 at Hannover. And yet, the skit served a serious purpose, too, like many of Klopp’s funny lines. His comedic qualities helped to release tension inside the dressing room and also guaranteed that his players listened attentively. ‘His punchlines are perfect,’ says Watzke. ‘Jürgen is never monotonous or predictable. That keeps everybody’s concentration.’

  By January, BVB had opened up a twelve-point gap. Mario Götze performed so well in the 3-1 win at Leverkusen that Klopp was forced to substitute him
, to save him from even more media hype and potential retribution from humiliated opponents. He had played himself into a dream-like state where every flick and turn was coming off. ‘Playing this well was so much fun, more than winning itself,’ Subotić smiles. ‘Our system gave us a huge advantage over everybody else. It was like fishing with the best bait in the world. Or with a shotgun.’ True to Klopp’s maxim of ‘staying greedy’, the team’s physical output never dropped. They were to space what World Cup winner Takeru Kobayashi was to hot dogs: they ate it up until the opposition was blue in the face and going down with cramps. Subotić : ‘We ran our opponents into the ground, and they were totally shell-shocked.’ Their pressing game had by then become so refined that they were able to systematically direct the other team’s attacking moves into the most congested areas or dead-ends. ‘When there’s little pressure on the opposition defence and midfield, you can’t stay too close to an attacker as a defender,’ Subotić explains. ‘They can simply play a long ball over the top, and the attacker can run past me, and it’s a goal. But by pressurising their build-up play, you force them to play the ball early, under duress. Knowing that, I can anticipate where the ball is going to go, get really close to the attacker and get ready to tackle before the pass has even been made.’ ‘Gegenpressing is the world’s best playmaker,’ Klopp later said about his team’s propensity to win the ball when opponents were in total disarray, in areas on the pitch where only one or two clever moves were needed to get through on goal. In Şahin, they had the perfect man for those killer balls. ‘Sometimes it felt as if he was 90 per cent of the team,’ says Subotić . ‘It was like: get the ball to Nuri, he’ll do something. If you saw him without a shirt you thought, “what, this tiny guy?” But you couldn’t get the ball off him. He was the brain and the leader.’

  It was Şahin who effectively swung the game at Bayern on matchday 24 with a wonderfully executed free-kick, Dortmund’s second on the night. Borussia hadn’t won in Bavaria’s capital for nineteen years, ‘most of my boys were still being breast-fed then’, Klopp joked. Before the game, general manager Uli Hoeness had predicted ‘a win with two goals or more’, noting that ‘man for man’, the champions had the better side. As far as the teams went, there was no comparison, however. ‘Bayern were driftwood in a sea of Yellow and Black,’ wrote Süddeutsche Zeitung in view of the hosts’ helplessness against Dortmund’s targeted aggression. Wherever star winger Arjen Robben went, two BVB players were already there, stepping on his toes. So emphatic, definitive and hugely symbolic was the visitors’ 3-1 triumph that Bayern officials were queuing up to congratulate them on winning the title.

  Klopp lost a pair of glasses and a few drops of blood hugging his players a bit too forcefully after the final whistle. But that was a small price to pay for a result that knocked Bayern out of the title race and made the Meisterschaft Dortmund’s to lose. They were twelve points clear with ten games to go. ‘We’ve now come to a point where we can say: we can and want to be champions,’ Watzke declared, irrespective of Klopp’s protestations. ‘I couldn’t give a shit about the championship today, I’m too happy with the way we played,’ the coach insisted.

  Almost seven years later, Watzke recalls sitting in the team bus outside the Allianz Arena after the game. ‘I was sat next to Michael Zorc. I asked him: “Was that it?” He said: “Not yet, but it’s coming.” I’ll never forget that moment. We had been dead as a dodo a few years before. And here we were, on the verge of a league title. It was unfathomable.’

  Following a small wobble, with a defeat in Hoffenheim and a draw against Mainz, Bayern employed mind games one more time. ‘If I was wearing black-and-yellow pants, I wouldn’t sleep soundly,’ Hoeness said ahead of Dortmund’s home game against Hannover. But Germany’s most decorated club found that they weren’t even best in class in talking a good game any more. ‘I wonder what Hoeness’ pants looked like before he went to bed,’ Klopp responded. Borussia won the game 4-1. Seven points ahead of Leverkusen with five games to go, they were almost champions.

  Watzke was perhaps the last remaining pessimist. ‘I’m a born sceptic. That made for a good partnership with Klopp, because scepticism is completely alien to him. He once said to me: “I don’t think about defeats.” It’s true, he’s never spent a minute wondering what might happen if a game is lost. I’m the complete opposite. And I just could not believe that we could win the league with this team. One week before we won it, I doubted everything again. We had lost 1-0 at Gladbach.’ But Dortmund could not be denied. They were unstoppable.

  ‘With every game, Klopp’s team talks got clearer, louder and more precise,’ says Bender. ‘He explained that we were in charge now; it was all down to us. We hardly needed any motivation but his speeches were the icing on the cake. We went out and ran even more.’

  The team were so infused with the need to exert maximum effort each time that they hated themselves for meekly capitulating 2-0 at Werder Bremen a week after the title celebrations. Possibly still suffering from the after-effects of the party, Dortmund were a shadow of themselves. ‘We all sat in the bus in silence, ashamed,’ says Bender. ‘But thirty minutes in, we looked at each other and thought: “Have we lost our minds? Are we totally insane?” We were German champions! Who cares about losing that game. Let’s sing!’ They sang all the way back to Dortmund.

  Bayern’s unimaginative transfer dealings and discontinuity at a coaching level had let in outsiders before, VfB Stuttgart (2007) and VfL Wolfsburg (2009) seizing the crown had come as shocks as well. This was different, however, much bigger. Borussia’s Meisterschaft under Klopp opened up people’s eyes to the potency of a collectivist approach. Ingenious tactics, faithfully implemented, could lift a team of youngsters, cheap left-field foreigners and a handful of veterans to the point where they didn’t just upset the odds but set a new benchmark. The disruptive innovation underpinning their success was especially relevant to the Bundesliga, a league that had been steadily losing ground internationally due to financial restraints and a culture of passive coaching. Klopp’s Dortmund showed a way to increase productivity with purely natural, renewable resources: a blue-collar work ethic, humility, cleverness.

  Outside Germany, experts took note, too. Three months before the title win, the technical staff of Italy’s national team, coached by Cesare Prandelli, came to look at Borussia’s training. The team’s movement reminded them of Sacchi’s Milan, they told a beaming Klopp afterwards. Watzke: ‘The football we played was our unique selling point at the time. One shouldn’t forget that Bayern weren’t as good then, they didn’t have today’s quality and didn’t spend that much money yet. It was a bit easier for us, but we were on this unbelievable run. You could feel that this team was only at the beginning of its development.’

  Success brought its own trappings. Half the team received lucrative offers to switch clubs. But of the regulars, only Şahin moved on. José Mourinho’s Real Madrid exercised a €12m release clause to take the midfielder to the Bernabéu.

  Şahin’s successor was twenty-year-old İlkay Gündoǧan, from 1. FC Nürnberg. Sitting in a Spanish restaurant in Manchester’s city centre six years later, the Gelsenkirchen-born son of Turkish immigrants remembers meeting Zorc and Klopp in a Düsseldorf airport hotel in spring 2011. ‘I was playing for Nürnberg and the season was still going on, it was very hush-hush,’ he says. ‘I have to say I was a little intimidated by him at first. He was so tall. We talked for half an hour by ourselves and it was obvious to me that I wanted to go to Dortmund afterwards. He’s got this gift: he can totally captivate you, dazzle you, make you feel euphoric. I’ve never met any other coach like him. He asked me: “What would be your targets if you came to us?” I said: “To play as often and well as possible.” “You see, that’s already the first mistake,” he replied. “It’s not about playing often but making the most of your time on the pitch. I can’t promise that you’ll play often. That’s not possible. But I can promise that you will learn an incredible amount, and that we wil
l be extremely successful if you all bring your potential to bear.” I remember that clearly. That was the first time in football that somebody didn’t promise me the stars but was open and honest with me. I found that fascinating.’

  Gündogˇan found the step-up from Nürnberg very difficult, starting with the pre-season fitness regime. Players had to go on the notorious ‘Chucky runs’ set up by assistant coach Zeljko Buvac. Eleven runs back and forth, with and without the ball, on a parkour that stretched the entire length of the pitch. After the eleventh run, players had to hit the crossbar from the halfway line. Those who missed had to go on a twelfth run. ‘The hardest thing I had ever done. It was sick,’ Gündogˇan sighs, reliving the horror in his mind. ‘But it was important: surviving that session gave us plenty to talk about, it brought the team closer. You felt camaraderie with your fellow sufferers. Mats [Hummels] always complained. But he ran, too.’

  Gündogˇan’s problems extended into the first half of the season. He was introverted and immature, he says, spending a little too much time with family and friends, playing with the handbrake on, worried about making mistakes. ‘Klopp saw that,’ he says. ‘And he scared me a bit, to be honest. I sometimes didn’t immediately understand what it was he wanted me to do. It took time until the penny dropped for me.’

  For the legs and for the head, Dortmund’s specific way of playing was tough to adjust to, let alone the higher quality of his teammates. Gündogˇan: ‘We practised a lot of Gegenpressing. Klopp said the first one, two seconds after losing the ball were decisive. We shouldn’t be upset about losing the ball but actually be happy about being able to win it back. The idea was to attack the ball straight away, to surprise the opponent. They felt secure, they weren’t ready for that.’