Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story

by Raphael Honigstein

  The madness of Málaga, an unforgettable moment of otherworldliness, was ‘one of those stories that will still be told in twenty years’ time’, Klopp told author Christoph Biermann a few months later in his book Wenn wir vom Fußball träumen. ‘My motivation [as a coach] is to collect that kind of stuff, for people to tell and retell it. That’s what this club is about. Its most important pillar is made up from the stories it has written since its foundation. That’s also the reason why I love experiencing this time here so much: it gives us the chance to write such stories.’ Football, he added, was a shared collection of stories, a shared history, an identity. ‘You win and you lose, but you’re with people you like. You’re at home, you belong. That’s what we all want. Ten million people want to belong here.’

  The next chapter pitted the Black and Yellows against José Mourinho’s Real Madrid. Two nights before the first leg, on the stroke of midnight, Gündogˇan was on his mobile phone, looking at a headline that didn’t seem to make sense. ‘I had this routine, I would read Bild online before going to bed,’ he says. ‘Next day’s articles went live after 12 a.m., and there it was, in big, fat letters: Götze is moving to Bayern!’ I texted Marco Reus; him and Mario had the same agents and were best friends. “Can this be true?” “Yes, I’ve known since yesterday.” I had trouble believing it.’

  Götze, twenty, was the wonderkid of German football, ‘the talent of the century’ (Sammer). He had been with BVB since he was eight years old, a symbol both of their renaissance under Klopp and the promise of an even greater future. Dortmund had resigned themselves to losing the odd player each year, but not a true Dortmunder. Not Mario. Everybody was in shock. ‘Some of the players couldn’t sleep,’ Klopp told the Guardian. ‘It was like a heart attack. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t go out with my wife that night.’

  Bayern had exercised a €37m release clause, Bild reported, to make him the first big-name signing of the Pep Guardiola reign, which was to start later that summer. But who had leaked the story and why at such a sensitive time, forty-eight hours before the tie against the Spanish ensemble of superstars?

  Suspicions quickly fell on the Bayern hierarchy. Their signing of Götze was a classic Bayern powerplay. Why should they mind if news of the transfer further unsettled their domestic rivals ahead of a hugely important match? ‘Bayern tried to destroy us,’ Watzke later claimed. Whether the Bavarians were really the culprits is uncertain, however. Dortmund had known about Götze’s decision twelve days before, and it’s quite possible a third party–say an agent representing a player negotiating to join Bayern next season, or a thwarted club who had also shown an interest in Götze–spilled the beans without malice aforethought. Bayern had their own semi-final, against Barcelona, to contend with and could have done without the controversy. The forward’s release clause, in any case, had to be activated by 30 April.

  Either way, Klopp was left ‘emotionally the worse for wear’ by the prodigy’s defection south, Watzke says. ‘He found it hard to accept that Mario wanted to leave, that he wanted to join up with Guardiola. That turned out to be the mistake of the century, and Klopp had foreseen it. He knew, he was 100 per cent convinced, that the lad was making an error. It hurt him. The kid that he had brought through was leaving. He told him it was a mistake in a meeting, just the two of them. We met with him and his agent, too. Klopp repeated: “You’re making a mistake.” But the decision was made. That played a lot on Klopp’s mind. But in the sense that he was worried about Mario, not about the team.’

  Gündogˇan remembers a few ultras turning up at the training ground looking to make their displeasure known. Klopp played it cool. ‘He said that he regretted Mario’s decision, but that it was a normal thing in football, and okay, and that the show had to go on. Mario was still our player until the end of the season, and he was convinced that he’d do his best. And that was it.’

  ‘I explained to Mario that people will definitely not forget him moving to Bayern Munich,’ Klopp said after the final whistle. ‘But they will be busy with other things tonight, because the club is the most important thing. Fortunately, that’s what happened. The atmosphere put everything I’ve ever experienced in the shade.’

  Having sown passion for almost four years, Klopp reaped pandemonium that night. Madrid were buried under a deluge of screams and attacks, barely escaping with their footballing lives after an epic 4-1 drubbing. Neither Götze nor his teammates had been adversely affected by the Bild story, as Dortmund completed a hugely impressive Bundesliga double over La Liga: Bayern had beaten Barcelona 4-0 in their first leg. A showdown in the final in north London beckoned. More bad blood, too. Robert Lewandowski, scorer of all four goals against the Spaniards, had agreed terms with Bayern to accompany Götze on his move to the Allianz Arena, a piece in Der Spiegel had alleged just before kick-off. The Polish striker and his camp did nothing to quell the speculation. ‘We intend to change clubs this summer,’ agent Maik Barthel was quoted as saying. Lewandowski’s contract at Dortmund expired in the summer of 2014.

  Klopp defused the situation with self-deprecating humour, reminding reporters at the Signal Iduna Park that he, too, had scored four goals in a game once: ‘At Erfurt’. But deep down, he was much more troubled than he let on, Watzke reveals. ‘Robert Lewandowski was an issue that bugged him, in the extreme. We couldn’t quite agree, either: should we have sold him in 2013 or let him leave in 2014 for free? Jürgen was more of a mind to sell him. But Robert is a professional, like very few others. He’s not the emotional type, he’ll never kiss the badge, but to have him in your team is a gift. He’s like a machine. Nevertheless, Klopp was quite annoyed with the way things went down. All of us were angrier and more upset that we lost these players than we let on. Once you admit that, people immediately accuse you of moaning.’

  There was no time for that in May 2013. History beckoned. Dortmund v Bayern, a Bundesliga derby on the hallowed turf of Wembley. ‘German football has arrived in the present after learning from the past,’ cheered Süddeutsche Zeitung, outlining how both teams’ tactical sophistication, inspired by the great historical sides (Ajax, Milan, Barcelona) had taken them to a first-ever all-German final in the Champions League. Klopp’s injection of energy in particular, Frankfurter Rundschau claimed, informed ‘a new, German school of football. He has reinvented the old, physical game of German teams, feared and despised in equal measure, paired with strategic finesse and technical maturity.’

  There was another plotline. The final, Klopp explained to a world-wide audience via his Guardian interview, pitted ‘the most interesting football project in the world, the new story, the special story’ against a Bayern side behaving ‘like a James Bond villain’. Dortmund were rank outsiders in financial terms, football romantics fighting against aristocratic moneybags who didn’t just want to beat them but dismantle them altogether. Klopp, a huge sports film buff–‘I grew up on movies likes Major League’–firmly believed the underdog could carry the day. ‘We are not the best team in the world but we can beat the best team in the world,’ he predicted.

  Dortmund so nearly did at Wembley. A typically full-throttle Borussia hunted and harangued Bayern, took control and created decent goal-scoring opportunities. ‘I remember we should have been 2-0 or 3-0 up after thirty minutes,’ says Gündogˇan. Once Bayern had weathered the first storm, the game slowly drifted away from Dortmund. ‘I think it was impossible for us to keep the same pace after the first forty-five minutes, it had been incredibly high,’ Bender says. A Mario Mandžukić goal saw Jupp Heynckes’ team take a 1-0 lead on the hour mark.

  Eight minutes later, Gündogˇan equalised from the spot. Dortmund were in it again but felt aggrieved, too. Bayern defender Danté, already on a yellow card, was not sent off for fouling Marco Reus in the box. Gündogˇan: ‘Referee [Nicola] Rizzoli said: “What do you want? You got a penalty, didn’t you?”’ Bayern, unperturbed, had more energy and class towards the end of the tense nail-biter. Arjen Robben scored the winner in the eighty-ninth
minute.

  Klopp and his players were applauded off the pitch by the Dortmund fans. They were gracious losers. ‘We have to respect Bayern’s win,’ the coach said calmly. ‘We shouldn’t forget that many teams wanted to get to the final, and that Bayern shot half of Europe to pieces on the way here.’ Bayern were ‘that little bit better than us that year’, Watzke concedes. But Rizzoli’s lenience still rankles. ‘It was a catastrophically bad decision. Out of a hundred referees, ninety-nine would have probably sent him off. I would have liked to see how the game had gone then…’

  Immediately after the match, Klopp had vented his anger in the tunnel, shouting at Pierluigi Collina, UEFA’s head of referees. ‘One or two decisions certainly could have gone the other way,’ was all he said in the press conference, adding that the pride he felt for his team would soon take centre-stage again. In the dressing room, he consoled his tearful players by pointing at the bigger picture. ‘You know that on a different day, with a different referee, you beat them. But Klopp didn’t overdramatise it,’ says Subotić . ‘He said: “Remember where we were at the beginning of the season, how far we have come. Did anyone think we would make it to the Champions League final? It’s all good, boys. Enjoy the evening.” He’s the man who sets the mood. For the club, for the team, for everybody. Especially at such testing times, when everybody’s looking for a bit of direction.’ Klopp’s philosophical take paved the way for ‘a great post-match party’ at the Natural History Museum, Josef Schneck says. ‘After a while, nobody was thinking about the defeat any more. We’ve always been pretty good at partying.’

  Looking back, Kehl wonders if Dortmund winning at Wembley might have been ‘too much of a fairy-tale’. ‘Nobody would have liked to see that movie, it would have been unrealistic crap,’ Klopp told Biermann. A little later, in an interview for UEFA.com, he wasn’t so sure any more, however. ‘It would have been crazy if we had won the Champions League last season,’ he said. ‘I think we would have lost our minds, it would have been an incredible story–I would have loved to watch that story if it was a movie. A story like, I don’t know, the Cleveland Indians in Major League, the Dortmund Indians. But it really would have been very crazy. So that is why everything is OK, and still very special. And there is still a lot of time for us to win even more.’

  12. CHAOS AND THEORY

  Liverpool 2016–2017

  The Reds’ 2016 pre-season tour to the US offered a long-overdue chance to work on fundamentals. At least one of the daily double-sessions was devoted to detailed tactical drills. Members of the LFC press corps were so impressed by the complexity of some of the choreographed exercises on show on the Stanford University pitch that they questioned whether training should in fact be open to the public at all. The journalists were used to Premier League coaches hiding their trade secrets behind ten-foot walls, fearful of spies sent by rivals.

  Jürgen Klopp had no such qualms. When the German heard of the reporters’ concerns, he put on his best silent-movie-comic ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about’ face. ‘That? That’s kindergarten stuff,’ he said to an LFC staffer, waving away an imaginary fly. ‘I don’t think for a second that Arsène Wenger will be surprised by any of that.’ The Frenchman’s team, Arsenal, were Liverpool’s opponents on the opening day of the coming season, when LFC won 4-3.

  A critical appraisal of Klopp’s first eight months on Merseyside had earmarked three areas ripe for an upgrade. The first one–the obvious need for a much more thorough and systematic implementation of the coaching staff’s main idea of play–was at last addressed under the Californian sun. An absence of European engagements during the season would offer more time for match preparation.

  The squad, a mish-mash of genuine talent, loyal stalwarts and speculative investments that hadn’t quite come off, was added to by the arrival of Bundesliga centre-backs Joël Matip and Ragnar Klavan, goalkeeper Loris Karius from Klopp’s alma mater Mainz 05, all-action midfielder Georginio Wijnaldum (Newcastle United) and Southampton’s Sadio Mané, a Senegalese striker who had been offered to LFC two seasons earlier for a third of his £37m price tag but who had not been ranked highly enough in the club’s technical department’s player evaluation model.

  Thirdly, Klopp and his staff deemed that the Premier League’s physical exertions warranted improved conditioning. Andreas Kornmayer, a stubbly, bespectacled mini-Klopp (‘It’s funny how they look alike,’ Adam Lallana laughs) was brought in as head of fitness and Mona Nemmer was appointed head of nutrition. Lallana, unprompted, says the work of the two former Bayern Munich employees had a discernible positive effect on the 2016–17 season: ‘Putting Mona in there has been unbelievable. She has come and reached new levels with the food we’re eating. And Andreas, the fitness coach, comes in and we had a good pre-season under him. He got us fit for how the manager wants us to play, which is demanding.’

  A trip to Wembley in early August offered a glimpse of the exciting prospects ahead. European giants Barcelona, leggy and behind their English opponents in terms of preparation, were beaten 4-0 by the Reds in the International Champions Cup, a semi-competitive fixture, with Mané the star attraction. Twenty-four hours later, however, Klopp’s much-changed side crashed to a 4-0 friendly defeat at Mainz, of all places. Spectators at the Opel Arena, many thousands of whom had come to the ground early to welcome their former hero with standing ovations, sent Klopp home with another round of applause after the final whistle. The LFC coach professed himself grateful that his team had accompanied him on his slightly uneasy lap of honour. ‘It would have been hugely embarrassing for me to run about by myself there,’ he laughed. ‘That way, it was cool. My boys showed that they have good manners, even if they can’t play football. They showed their appreciation of the extraordinary atmosphere.’

  The two contrasting 4-0 scorelines, as well as another pair of wildly differing games–a breathless 4-3 win at Arsenal and a sorry 2-0 defeat at newly promoted Burnley–set the tone for the entire campaign, a riveting, exhausting ride that ended in relief rather than euphoria, just like any other overly long roller coaster. Liverpool were prone to stunning performances against some of the best sides that year and at the same time liable to suffer embarrassing defeats at the hands of the decidedly lesser lights. That unnerving pattern ultimately precluded a better finish than fourth spot, but in the run-up to Christmas, hope burned brightly on Merseyside that more than an inglorious quarter of a century without a league title might come to an end.

  Following on from the Burnley reversal, the Reds won against champions Leicester (4-1), future champions Chelsea at Stamford Bridge (2-1) and ten other sides in an unbeaten fifteen-match run that briefly took the club to the top of the table and ‘made Liverpool supporters enjoy, well, being Liverpool supporters again’, as the Liverpool Echo wrote. ‘The fans like watching their team. They can’t wait to come to Anfield, the sense of the new heightened by a redeveloped Main Stand that’s allowing the ground to rediscover a consistent volume not heard in four decades.’ Gone was the resigned, apathetic silence that had hung over the ground for much of the time since the failed championship challenge in 2014. ‘We were bulldozing teams,’ Lallana says. As promised, heavy metal football had arrived.

  ‘Klopp is the best coach in the world for the spectators, he creates teams that attack the back four,’ said Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola. Neither the Catalan nor his prominent colleagues José Mourinho (Manchester United), Arsène Wenger (Arsenal), Antonio Conte (Chelsea) and Mauricio Pochettino (Tottenham Hotspur) were able to inflict a single defeat on Liverpool that season.

  Mané’s inclusion gave the attack an extra level of pace and flexibility. The former Red Bull Salzburg winger and his two Brazilian teammates Philippe Coutinho and Roberto Firmino constantly switched positions in pre-programmed ways to find a path towards goal, even against ‘sides so deep that their last line of defence is right next to the terrace’, as Klopp’s chief scout Peter Krawietz puts it.

  In a celebrated ap
pearance on Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football in September, the Liverpool coach reiterated his mantra of Gegenpressing being ‘the best playmaker’. But at Melwood, the emphasis had quietly shifted from working against the ball to working with it. Liverpool, the coaches realised, needed better active solutions for those games where they were the dominant side.

  ‘After getting used to one another in the first season, there was a much bigger focus on possession football for the second year,’ Krawietz reveals. ‘The idea was to control the pace of the game with the ball, and to use the time between games to adopt a footballing idea that could–ideally–be reproduced in a flexible manner under pressure.’ To that end, the coaching staff spent many training hours getting the team to adhere to certain patterns of movement. While the routine never included precise, pre-determined runs, it consisted of ‘agreed procedures’ (Krawietz) for creating spaces in the specific areas where opposition teams were suspected to be most vulnerable. One such procedure, for example, entailed two players dragging their opponents away from the centre with dummy runs, thus clearing a channel for the third one to run through on goal unopposed. A simple enough move, but very effective if executed in perfect synchronicity.