Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story

by Raphael Honigstein

  The new arrival’s strife in the first half of the season coincided with Dortmund’s failure to make their mark on the Champions League. History repeated itself on the international stage. Having got knocked out in the Europa League group stage in the previous year, when Paris Saint-Germain, Sevilla and Karpaty Lviv had proved too strong and Dortmund too gung-ho, Klopp’s men finished last in a group with Arsenal, Marseille and Olympiacos. ‘We lacked experience,’ says Watzke. ‘Neither the team nor the coach had been in the Champions League before. We turned up in Athens, Marseille and London and played the way we played in the Bundesliga, but the level is beyond compare. In the Champions League, every little mistake gets punished. We pressed really high up the pitch, that didn’t work. Every game was the same. We were the better team, we created good chances, we didn’t score; we lost 2-0 or 3-0. The year after that, we changed our style of playing. We were up against Real Madrid and Manchester City in the group stage then, and we went through.’

  It was a learning process for the team, Gündogˇan says. ‘We were all quite young and naive, these European teams were a little too street-smart for us. But we heeded the lessons, just as I did for my game.’ Introspection came by way of an involuntary spell in the stands. ‘Klopp took me aside one day and said: “This won’t be easy for you, but you won’t be involved at the weekend.” There was no explanation. He had never criticised me or told me “you’re playing shit”, or stuff like that. But he’s a clever guy. You knew he had his reasons for not including me in the squad. It was like a riddle that I had to solve. What was I supposed to do? What am I doing here? I had a thousand questions in my head but after a while I cracked it. I deciphered the code.’

  Gündogˇan came on nine minutes into the game against Hannover in February 2012, after Sven Bender had picked up one of his many injuries. He was a revelation. ‘It kind of clicked. The shackles were off. I became part of the first team and everything kind of just happened, it all flowed naturally. My football, the relationship with my teammates and with Jürgen.’

  One awkward incident in training sealed their bond. Gündogˇan had been due to play in the first team against the reserves in the important Wednesday session, when the weekend’s match was simulated. Getting up in the morning, he felt a tightness in his hamstring. Players with injury concerns were supposed to come in ninety minutes to two hours early, to get assessed by the physio and enable the coaching staff to find a replacement from the amateur team or under-19s if need be. Gündogˇan thought he could train but decided to seek out the physio thirty minutes before the session started. ‘He looked at it and said: “I have to tell the coach, there’s a danger you might get injured.” I said: “Okay, but please tell him that I can play.” A few minutes later, the door opened and Jürgen walks in. This giant of a man, looking at me angrily. “What the hell are you playing at?” he shouted. “It’s okay, Coach, I can play, I just wanted to make sure…” He reminded me about coming in an hour and a half early. He was quite upset with me. “Do whatever you want!” he said and left. I thought: “Shit. What do I do now?”’ Gündogˇan was the first man out on the pitch. Klopp called him over. ‘He walks a few steps with me, away from the boys, and goes: “My friend, you can understand me, right?” “Yes, I do. I just wanted to—” “No. You don’t understand. The next time you have any problems, even if it’s just a little twinge, or your bum is itchy, or whatever, you call the doctor, or the physio. You can even call me first thing in the morning and break my balls. Just tell us.” “Okay, Coach.” “You’ll join in the warm-up, but then you go off before the game starts.” “But I want to train.” “Be quiet. You’ll go off.” Then he laughed and hugged me. I asked once more if I shouldn’t stay for training, but he sent me back in after another hug. He became more than a coach for me after that. We had a special connection, and a very successful one.’

  Dortmund’s European woes had no negative impact on their form in the league. On the contrary: from October 2011 onwards, they went on a domestic rampage of twenty-eight games without defeat. Once more, a win over Bayern, Dortmund’s fourth successive defeat of the Bavarians, decided the title race. The home side’s perfect midfield positioning created a ‘kill zone’ near the halfway line where most Bayern attacking moves went to die in the first half. Bayern did a little better after the break as the Black and Yellows tired but Arjen Robben missed a penalty and Lewandowski’s goal secured all three points in the heaving Signal Iduna Park. Dortmund moved six points clear at the top with four games to go. ‘We can hardly play any better,’ Klopp exclaimed. The 44-year-old was reluctant to acknowledge the true importance of the win as far as the title race was concerned. ‘A lot can happen before the end of the season,’ he cautioned. ‘But we’ll have three days to celebrate and enjoy tonight’s extraordinary event.’

  A few players took that declaration perhaps too seriously. Gündogˇan: ‘That Wednesday after the Bayern game, five of us went out partying. We didn’t drink but stayed in a club until two or three.’ The problem was: they had a game against Schalke on Saturday. The derby. Schalke went 1-0 up but Dortmund won 2-1. The players went partying again. The next morning, Klopp addressed the team at the training ground: ‘Somebody told me a few of you went out during the week… I don’t know who, I don’t want to know. But I can tell you: these players should be happy we won yesterday. Otherwise we would have seen the biggest punishment in the history of club football.’ ‘The players looked at each other and thought: “Fuck, thank God we turned that game around!” We went out quite often as a team then, eight or ten people at a time, there were a lot of singles in the squad. Sometimes, you could see the after-effects in training on Sunday morning. But I don’t think we ever overdid it. It made us more of a unit, I believe.’

  Klopp’s ambition to win every game did not diminish after Dortmund were confirmed as champions again. His team duly went on to set a new points record for the Bundesliga: eighty-one. ‘Generally speaking, all our games that year were amazing,’ Gündogˇan smiles. ‘We dominated the opposition, Klopp-style. They didn’t know what hit them. We basically mugged them, they couldn’t deal with it. That gave us an extra-good feeling. We didn’t steal the points, we knew: they have no chance against us. One game, against Köln, we were 1-0 down at half-time, no one knew why. We won 6-1. We were so good that it didn’t matter if the opposition took the lead.’

  ‘In those years, we played a new kind of football in Germany,’ Kehl adds. ‘We simply swamped or overwhelmed other teams. They were completely helpless.’

  Borussia’s appetite was not yet satisfied. Four weeks after winning the league, they had the chance to achieve the club’s first-ever double. Jupp Heynckes’ Bayern stood in their way in the final in Berlin. It would, as Watzke puts it, turn into ‘a game of fundamental importance for both clubs’.

  Throughout his first successful cup run as a coach, Klopp had shown the team edited highlights from previous wins, underlaid with dramatic music. The night before the final, a motivational video comprising historic achievements, such as the moon landing, Boris Becker’s win at Wimbledon in 1985, and Muhammad Ali’s ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, ramped up the emotional temperature. ‘We told the boys: our own film is not over yet,’ Klopp said in an interview with RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland. ‘You have to wait for the right moment with these things, then they’re great.’

  Twenty-three years had passed since Dortmund’s last win in the cup. Less than three minutes into the match, Dortmund were 1-0 up through Shinji Kagawa. Robben and Hummels both converted penalties, then Lewandowski scored BVB’s third on the stroke of half-time. The 3-1 lead enabled the Black and Yellows to play on the counter-attack after the break, setting up traps that the Bavarians stumbled into like a pack of doddering bears. ‘Dortmund played more defensively, more sneakily, more calculatedly,’ Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote, full of admiration. ‘They aren’t just German champions but also cup winners in the forcing of opposition errors.’

  The mighty Bayern were dismant
led, humiliated, as Klopp’s men romped to victory in the Olympic stadium. Lewandowski ended up with a hat-trick in the 5-2 win. ‘This was not coincidence,’ Bayern CEO Karl-Heinz Rummenigge conceded in front of sponsors and VIP guests at the midnight banquet. ‘This was an embarrassment. Every goal was like a slap in the face for us.’ On the pitch, Watzke and Zorc had quietly shed tears of joy, on ‘the most extraordinary moment in [Borussia’s] history’, as Klopp acknowledged. He had ‘danced in the dressing room with a beer in his hand, like one of us’, Gündogˇan smiles. The coach told reporters that Norbert Dickel, goal-scorer in the 1989 final, had given him his right shoe as a good luck token the night before. ‘It had been in his basement for more than twenty years and smelt a bit,’ he laughed. But supernatural powers or good luck didn’t come into it, neutral experts noted. Dortmund beating Bayern for the fifth time running was a feat both unparalleled and well deserved. Their superior system, application and transfer policy had negated the giants’ array of star individualists and huge financial advantage. It’s ‘a power shift’, Die Welt attested. ‘Dortmund have replaced Bayern at the top of the German football food chain.’

  ‘The system that Jürgen, Zeljko and Pete played dominated German football for two years,’ says Dickel. ‘Nobody had the faintest idea how to deal with our aggressive pressing, and our doubling-up, or tripling-up, on players. Even Bayern didn’t know what was going on. It was a wonderful time, more spectacular than the wins in the mid-nineties. We were carried along on this wave, we went into every game knowing we would destroy the other team. We were drunk on euphoria, we had all gone BVB-crazy. It was a trip.’

  That night in Berlin, Klopp was Mr Big, a shell-suit pusher, delivering a (legal) high of almost unbearable potency to millions of Borussia loyalists. The name of his drug was: love. ‘I relish the total intensification, when bangs go off everywhere,’ he told Die Zeit a few months later, ‘that phase of “all or nothing”, when it feels as if people don’t dare to breathe.’

  Martin Quast had watched the cup final in an old Jürgen Kohler shirt in the stadium. Afterwards, he saw Klopp and his team singing songs in the little tent that broadcasters ZDF had put up behind the Marathon Gate. At the end of the live programme, as Klopp was carrying the golden cup and silver championship trophy–affectionately known as the Salad Bowl–Quast shouted ‘Gude’, the traditional Mainz greeting, at his friend and told him that his shoelaces had come untied. ‘He was laughing his head off. Then he gives me the bowl and the cup and goes: “Hold this for a second.” And then he ties his laces. A quick high-five, and then he says: “It’s a shame, but I have to go,” picking up the cup and the bowl again. Cool, isn’t it? It could have been a bottle of wine and a ring of sausages, he didn’t think about it for one moment. Cup, championship trophy–so what? That’s him. What normal person would do such a thing?’

  Alex Ferguson was another observer who had enjoyed the show in Berlin. The Manchester United coach had travelled to Germany to cast an eye over Kagawa and Lewandowski. ‘He sat four places to the left of me,’ Watzke says. ‘I told him he could have one–Kagawa–but not the other. He looked at me a little dumbfounded.’ The Japanese midfielder would leave for the Premier League at the end of the season. Barrios, now surplus to requirements, was sold to Guangzhou Evergrande. All the other regulars stayed, plenty of attractive bids notwithstanding.

  Watzke was under no illusions about the size of the challenge that awaited him and Zorc, however. The Bavarian empire was poised to strike back. ‘We were intoxicated. It was an epochal evening for us but also the high point, the best day in the job for me–I felt it. I remember lying awake in bed at 4 a.m., staring at the Brandenburg Gate. You just knew it would get difficult from now on, that there would be a reaction, that Bayern would be out for revenge and start targeting our players. They had played forty finals before, I think, but never conceded five goals. They felt humiliated. That moment, they radically changed policy. They went all in, investing money like never before in the squad. And it paid off for them.’ Dortmund’s trick of being much bigger than the sum of their parts–a feat of football alchemy conjured up by grand wizard Klopp–had, to some extent at least, relied on the biggest team failing to make the most of their potential.

  Bayern broke their own transfer record to buy holding midfielder Javi Martínez from Athletic Bilbao (€40m), as well as Mario Mandžukić (€11m, VfL Wolfsburg), winger Xherdan Shaqiri (€11.8m, FC Basel) and defender Danté (€4.7m, Borussia Mönchengladbach). The increase in individual quality, especially at the back, had a very welcome tactical knock-on effect, Bayern’s former sporting director Matthias Sammer explains: ‘More stability in defence made it possible for midfield and attack to press higher. Bayern’s game became more flexible, more dynamic.’

  Klopp wasn’t the only one who found the Bavarian new direction eerily familiar. ‘They have done to us what the Chinese do in industry,’ he complained. ‘They see what others are doing, copy it, and then go down the same route with more money than other players.’

  ‘Bayern have taken on elements of Dortmund’s game and become more like Dortmund than Dortmund themselves,’ Ralf Rangnick observed. Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery but that was scant consolation to Klopp, whose careful, four-year building work was put in the shade by a shiny, super-expensive skyscraper next door, partially using his own blueprint.

  Bayern’s novel sense of humility without the ball, their much improved intensity and tactical awakening made for a devastating combination. Heynckes’ men won the Bundesliga with a new points record (ninety-one), notching up ten more than Dortmund in the previous season, before adding the DFB Pokal to their trophy cabinet.

  After two seasons of ‘dragging Bayern down to our level’ (Klopp), Borussia’s excellence had inadvertently raised the Reds’ game. The effect on the rest of the league was similar. Taking inspiration from the double-winners, more and more teams started to include pressing and Gegenpressing in their tactical repertoire, fighting fire with fire. ‘Suddenly, everybody did it. That’s when we realised how brutally difficult it is to play against a team like that,’ Subotić says.

  Opponents also adopted a second counter-measure. Since Dortmund’s game was built on rapid moments of transition after winning the ball, teams happily ceded both the ball and space, forcing BVB to play a slower, possession game. Klopp’s racing car of a side now frequently got stuck in traffic. ‘Our way of playing had encouraged all smaller teams,’ says Gündogˇan. ‘They thought: we can beat teams who are actually better than us by adopting these tactics and getting it right.’

  Dortmund picked up fifteen points fewer than in the previous season, but second place was not seen as failure. They needed to grow as a club; Champions League qualification was more important than defending their trophies.

  The slight domestic setback was more than compensated by a thrilling international adventure. Klopp’s men, dubbed ‘the hottest team in Europe’ by FourFourTwo magazine, outsmarted a number of sides ill-prepared for the ferocity of their finely honed drive-by-shooting approach. An early indication of Borussia’s greater maturity in matches against the Continent’s elite came in the second game of the group stage, away to Manchester City.

  The visitors, spurred on by their fanatical travelling support, played the world’s most expensively assembled team off the pitch at the Etihad; ‘they were in charge for most of the game, flowing forward in yellow-and-black waves like New York taxicabs rushing to collect wealthy fares on Wall Street,’ gushed the Daily Telegraph. Dortmund took the lead through Marco Reus and had enough chances to score three more. A last-minute penalty, converted by Man City substitute striker Mario Balotelli, made a mockery of their dominance–‘they were different class tonight, starting with their fans,’ City keeper Joe Hart admitted–but the manner of the 1-1 draw left Klopp ‘satisfied, verging on proud’. The BVB coach was more unnerved by the questions about the penalty decisions than the two dropped points. ‘Such a fantastic game, and the
first question is about the penalty?’ he grumbled. His poor results in previous years had clearly irked him, but now ‘an important step to represent Borussia Dortmund differently in the Champions League’ had been made. ‘It was one of the best games I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a few,’ Klopp told FourFourTwo a few weeks later, ‘we were almost terrified out there at how perfectly our plan came together.’ ‘Maybe one day, this night will be remembered as the team’s European birth,’ wondered Die Welt. Klopp’s football had been proven feasible outside German borders, too, at last.

  ‘To be honest, Manchester City were shit that year, not very strong,’ Watzke shrugs. ‘Their team was slow, overweight, I don’t know.’ But Dortmund also took four points from two games v Real Madrid and qualified for the last 16 as group leaders. They truly had arrived. ‘We’re a little surprised that everybody else is surprised about that,’ Zorc said, a little indignantly.

  Subotić puts the improvement in 2012–13 down to greater collective intuition. ‘You can practise being ready to counter-press and win back the ball, the mindset. But you can’t train the exact movement because you don’t know where you’ll lose the ball on the pitch. Everybody had both the power and responsibility to act as the trigger; then everybody had to join in. Getting the right feel for it took a couple of years. Then it became a natural reaction, a reflex.’

  Dortmund had little trouble dispatching a leggy Shakhtar Donetsk in the next round–‘it’s always good to get Russians or Ukrainians then, they’re still on a winter break,’ Watzke says–but Málaga in the quarter-finals was a very different story. Borussia were 2-1 down on aggregate at home in the second leg after ninety minutes. What happened next would go down as the ‘miracle of Dortmund’ (Klopp): the Black and Yellows scored twice in injury-time, the second from an offside position, to edge the Spaniards 3-2. The Signal Iduna Park erupted, spewing out happiness like molten lava. ‘I ran on to the pitch, hugged Marco [Reus] and never wanted to let go again,’ Gündogˇan remembers. ‘It was the craziest moment of my football history for sure,’ Subotić says. ‘That was something straight out of a Hollywood movie. We knew we could get one goal, and then just push and see if we can get lucky. Luck was on our side that day.’ ‘It’s crazy, just crazy what happened in this stadium,’ Klopp shook his head, bewildered by the turn of events, before he hugged Marcel Schmelzer in the mixed zone. ‘Rarely has a football team been seen as so united and enthralled with themselves,’ Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote. Dortmund were in the semi-finals of the Champions League. ‘It’s phenomenal–people here are as happy as if they had a second hole in their backside,’ Klopp diagnosed.