The smaller sides’ ability to import an element of chaos into the game with simple but hugely effective measures might also explain why Klopp’s Liverpool have found it easier, paradoxically, to play against the better teams. Their game follows more recognisable patterns, a code that the coaching staff are able to decipher and disrupt. Their programmes are hackable, because they are programmes. The much more random operating mode of the teams below the Champions League places, on the other hand, necessitate a much more spontaneous and muscular response that Liverpool have not always mustered.
‘As I said earlier: we are learning. All the time. It’s a process,’ Krawietz emphasises. ‘You might feel as if you’re in control but then the referee blows for a free-kick in the eighty-ninth minute and the stadium is on fire and the pitch becomes a sauna. You can’t ignore that. It’s a huge challenge for us but we are ready to deal with it, ready to prepare for it, ready to adjust to it. We know full well that we’ll fall flat on our faces if we don’t.’
13. SMALL-SCREEN TRIUMPHS
In the years after Germany’s win at the 1990 World Cup, commercial TV started taking an ever greater interest in the nation’s favourite sport. SAT1 revolutionised the way Bundesliga highlights were broadcast on Saturday evening by devoting as much airtime to the spectacle surrounding the pitch–players’ girlfriends in the VIP seats, angry club presidents, managers’ sweaty armpits–as to the matches themselves.
The docu-soap format of their ran show fed off the whole gamut of human emotions, providing storylines and entertainment that didn’t depend on the football being particularly riveting. ran’s emphasis on showbiz elements involuntarily impacted on the protagonists, and even more so on the way football was being talked and thought about in Germany. Winners won because they wanted it more, losers lost because… that’s what losers do, isn’t it? Players and coaches who didn’t bark grandiose, adrenalin-drenched statements into the SAT1 microphones after the final whistle were seen as weak and hapless. They obviously lacked the confidence and mettle needed to thrive in an alpha-male world.
The game’s transformation from the rather uncouth pastime of the proletariat and other undesirables into a mass-market-compatible commodity pumped millions of Deutsche Marks into a sport that had never been profitable before. The deliberate dumbing down of its presentation came at a heavy price, however: ran’s version of the Bundesliga had a hollow centre. This was football de-footballised, not concerned with the how, only with the wow. The wanton lack of any attempt at serious public analysis contributed to clubs and the national team getting left hopelessly behind over the following decade. It lacked the vocabulary and technical framework for introspection.
‘I ask myself if anyone really wants to get valid information about the game in Germany,’ Klopp told Der Spiegel in November 2004. ‘Does anyone want to hear, “They shouldn’t have run more, they should have run in a smarter way”? I doubt that. Maybe on [some niche channel], in a programme for exotics.’ The time was indeed ripe for a change by then. Within eighteen months, the Mainz coach would emerge as the main beneficiary of football’s analytical void and as a catalyst for a transformation, winning awards for his punditry and the acclaim of Franz Beckenbauer. But, unbeknown to most, his overnight success on the box had been a very long time in the making.
SAT1, the first privately owned TV station in Germany, had started broadcasting in 1985. Their regional office for the state of Rhineland-Palatinate was based in the capital, Mainz, and SAT1 CEO Jürgen Doetz was on the FSV board. When the club was once again struggling to pay their bills ahead of the 1990–91 season, the TV boss stepped in to help out. He made SAT1 Mainz’s shirt sponsor.
Not long later, one of the club’s players started an internship at the regional sports desk: Klopp. ‘He was already the loudest guy in the team, a world champion in talking,’ says Martin Quast. ‘Doetz said to him: “Kloppo, if this thing with football doesn’t work out for you, I’ll make you director of communications at SAT1. No problem.”’ Doetz was quite serious. SAT1 was still a small start-up channel at the time. Only a minority of people with cable connections were able to watch the programmes. Rhineland-Palatinate’s tiny regional sports department was housed in a couple of metal containers attached to an office building. It was staffed by a band of freelancers on fixed-term contracts, and a changing array of students and school-leavers eager to learn the trade. Klopp, who was always worried that his low-paying career could come to an end if Mainz were relegated to the semi-pro third division, jumped at the chance to test himself in the new medium after training and between his sports science lectures at Frankfurt University.
One day, the presenter of the ‘Wir im Südwesten’ Thursday evening sports section announced to viewers a feature on the Röschinger sisters from Bad Vilbel, the two most successful snowboarders from the Hesse region–‘by Jürgen Klopp’. He had interviewed them, done the voice over, and edited the piece. Quast remembers it as being quite good, packed with interesting details and asides. ‘He was talented, and he had fun. He later said: “If football hadn’t worked out, I probably would have ended up being a sports reporter.”’
On 15 May 1992, Klopp’s knack of talking himself into (and out of) tight spots delivered a genuine coup. One of the closest title races in the history of the Bundesliga had left league leaders Eintracht Frankfurt tied on points with VfB Stuttgart and Borussia Dortmund ahead of the final day of the 1991–92 season. Frankfurt’s much-admired ‘Fußball 2000’ team of Andy Möller, Uwe Bein and Anthony Yeboah had a superior goal difference to their rivals. A win at relegated Hansa Rostock would deliver their first league title since 1959.
Eintracht coach Dragoslav ‘Stepi’ Stepanović had ordered a media blackout on the day Frankfurt flew off to the north-east of the country. Everybody tried to speak to the immensely quotable Serbian ahead of the season’s dramatic conclusion, but Stepanović refused to do any interviews. SAT1 sent intern Klopp as their secret weapon, the guy who always got things done somehow. He had played under Stepanović at Rot-Weiß Frankfurt a few years earlier but his key contact proved to be Mainz 05 teammate Hendrik Weiß, whose mother worked as the press officer for Frankfurt airport. She allowed Klopp through security and all the way to the doors of the plane, where he intercepted Stepanović and obtained the only pre-match interview in the whole of Germany. ‘That was his outstanding journalistic achievement,’ says Quast. For Eintracht, the outcome was far less happy, however. They went on to lose 2-1 at Rostock in controversial circumstances the next day, opening the door for an unexpected triumph by VfB Stuttgart.
Everyday life inside the SAT1 container compound was not quite as stirring. As the youngest member of the editorial team, Klopp’s main task consisted of procuring a regular supply of cola-bottle sweets from the nearby wholesale store. ‘He was happy to do that, but he said that we should make it a game. Everything was a competition with Kloppo,’ says Quast, one of the sports editors on the desk. ‘We sat there and threw cola-bottles into each other’s mouths from three, four metres, best of ten. The loser had to buy everyone else a beer. These scenes come to my mind when I see him now, being the coach of Liverpool.’
After his formal internship of three months was up, Klopp kept returning to the containers to do the odd feature, or simply hang out with ex-colleagues who had become close friends. One of them was Martin Schwalb, a young handball player. He later won the handball Champions League in 2013 as coach of HSV Hamburg.
Klopp’s witticisms in the ‘flash interviews’ right after the final whistle as a player and coach at Mainz made him a favourite with the reporters from DSF, the commercial channel broadcasting Bundesliga 2 in Germany. In September 2001, Klopp and Ralf Rangnick–who were first and second in the second division with Mainz and Hannover 96 respectively–were invited to the station’s Viererkette talkshow to discuss the crisis in German football with 1974 World Cup winner Paul Breitner, one of the most prominent pundits. Following on from the excruciatingly bad Euro 2000 tournament,
the national team was in acute danger of missing out on the 2002 World Cup after a 0-0 draw in the first leg of their play-off against Ukraine.
Breitner at first was reluctant to share the stage with Klopp and Rangnick, says Viererkette’s producer Jörg Krause. They were second division coaches. What did they know about the national team’s problems? The former Bayern Munich and Real Madrid midfielder in the end agreed to sit down with these relative nobodies. Prompted by presenter Rudi Brückner, Breitner suggested a flurry of partially contradictory reasons for Germany’s fall from grace, including too much pressure from the German FA, an absence of long-term planning by the authorities, and a weak mentality in the Nationalmannschaft squad. Rangnick, bruised by his infamous appearance on ZDF Sportstudio three years earlier, when he had pontificated on the virtues of zonal marking and earned the scorn of Bundesliga colleagues and of the tabloid media in return, was careful not to contradict the authoritatively suited-and-booted Breitner too openly. Klopp, thirty-four, clean-shaven in a student’s uniform of a brown polo shirt, khaki trousers and trainers, could hardly fit his rangy frame into the leather armchairs. He was also deferential to begin with, even a little nervous. His voice, lightly charged with a Swabian lilt, betrayed a sense of unease in the opening exchanges.
Rangnick (in a grey shirt over a black T-shirt, like an off-duty graphic designer) and Klopp grew in confidence as the programme progressed. Between them, they quietly pinpointed the two most important reasons for German football’s problems: weaknesses in youth development and the failure to understand football as a collective game. ‘Young players get ten hours a week training, and the club caretaker decides if they’re allowed on the pitch during school holidays,’ said Rangnick. ‘We have to get them to train thirty, forty hours per week.’ He went on to explain that young professional players, too, expected to keep on learning their trade, instructed by coaches ‘who put on proper training sessions, treat them respectfully, point out mistakes and aim to develop them further’.
Breitner protested that Bundesliga pros were, by definition, so good that they didn’t need to be taught the ins and outs of the game–least of all by self-appointed modernisers and upstarts who had never played at the highest level themselves. ‘I don’t want to put anybody down here,’ he said, feigning diplomacy, ‘but the individual quality [of the best players] is so high that many coaches won’t be able to keep up. You learn from looking at your peers at this level, like I learned from looking at Franz [Beckenbauer] and Gerd [Müller] in training [at Bayern]. You don’t need a coach to explain to you why you only hit the outside of the post from twenty metres rather than the inside, or point out a small technical mistake.’
Klopp was moved to object forcefully, but an advertising break spared Breitner the ignominy of getting contradicted live on TV by a bespectacled, profusely side-burned coach from Mainz 05. When the cameras returned, Klopp smiled beatifically and joked that the shooting technique in Bundesliga 2 wasn’t ‘that bad’. ‘In any case,’ he added, ‘what’s much more interesting is improving the team as a whole, preparing each player so that the combination of them all functions well.’ Klopp readily admitted that he hadn’t been the best of players, more of a second division warhorse. But why should that disqualify him as a coach? ‘Yes: I teach them more than I ever knew,’ he cheerily agreed with Brückner.
Getting Mainz to the Bundesliga and to a mid-table position without significant investment in the squad and almost no first division experience within the team proved Klopp’s point a few years later. Ever the teacher, he seemed to enjoy talking about his ideas and methods in public almost as much as coaching the players. ‘Most things I learned in life I learned because somebody gave me the right advice in the right moment, without me asking,’ he would tell the Sunday Times years later. ‘I was a lucky guy. I met some nice people in the beginning: teachers, coaches. And of course my parents and all that stuff. I think that’s what life should be: that you make your own experiences and whether they’re good or bad you share them–so somebody else can avoid the same mistakes. That’s how I think football should work too.’
Unlike one or two of his young, iconoclastic contemporaries, he buffered his mission statements with self-lacerating humour, carefully downplaying his own importance and stressing that of his fellow travellers on the journey towards a faster, more joined-up game. Klopp’s enthusiastic dissemination of the new doctrine never crossed the line into self-aggrandisement or open disrespect to the establishment.
Dieter Gruschwitz, the former sports editor of state broadcaster ZDF, enjoyed talking football with Klopp over a beer in a pub not far from the FSV coach’s house in the suburb of Gonsenheim. ‘We would see each other all the time and started to become friendly,’ Gruschwitz says. ‘Klopp had this very winning, captivating way of talking to people. So I started thinking…’
ZDF owned the rights to the upcoming 2005 Confederations Cup, held in Germany as a test run for the 2006 World Cup. Their (friendly) rivals from ARD had the award-winning duo of presenter Gerhard Delling and expert Günter Netzer, the former Germany international playmaker, whose acerbic wit and sometimes toe-curling honesty had brought a measure of relief during the mostly inept performances of the national team at the turn of the century and beyond. Netzer, a youthful rebel turned aristocratic elder statesman–if he had lived in Britain, he’d long have been Lord Netzer or at least Sir Günter–served as a visual reminder of much better, glorious times and looked forever personally insulted by crude attempts at football that violated his heightened aesthetic sensibilities.
ZDF’s big name for the two major tournaments on German soil was Franz Beckenbauer. But as head of the organising committee, he would only be available for a few broadcasts. Gruschwitz: ‘Beckenbauer aside, we didn’t have anyone at Netzer’s level. And we couldn’t pretend to either. The only way out was to do things very differently. With a referee as an expert–Urs Meier. With Jürgen Klopp, as an analyst, on a new tool: a touchscreen that combined video images and the ability to draw on top of the frames. And to do everything in front of a live audience in Berlin.’
Klopp didn’t have to deliberate too long about the offer: ‘Gruschwitz came into my living room and asked whether I could see myself working as an analyst. All I thought was “I can watch World Cup games!” Then I asked whether my two sons could get free tickets. He said yes. That made the decision easy.’
The ZDF executive had one grave concern, however: ‘I knew he could analyse a game, there was no question of that. But would the TV viewers believe a second division coach talking about international football at the highest level? Was the gap between Mainz and Brazil not too wide?’
Beckenbauer seemed to think so. ‘Der Kaiser’ looked a little suspicious and bemused by Klopp’s studio deliberations at first. ‘But after the second and third time, he said: “Wow, it’s really great, the way he explains the game,”’ says Gruschwitz. ‘A couple of matches into the Confed Cup, Beckenbauer was totally in awe of Jürgen.’ ‘Beckenbauer’s approval was like getting knighted for Klopp. If the Kaiser thought he knew his stuff–he really knew his stuff,’ says Jan Doehling, who worked as an editor on the shows.
There had been no trial run. ‘Jürgen just got up and did it. He’s a natural,’ says Gruschwitz. ‘Straightaway no one was worried any more whether he would connect with the audience. He could tell you about football without being moralistic, or hurtful, or being too scientific. Even a grandma understood what he was on about. At a World Cup, you don’t just get the football supporters, entire families sit in front of the television, including many people who don’t really care that much about football in day-to-day life. He was perfect at getting the game’s intricacies across to those people, too, in an informative and entertaining way. That’s who he is. It’s a gift of his, his great talent.’
Klopp’s smart-casual attire befitted his choice of words. Interesting little observations–a left-back was too deep, a midfielder had switched off–were packaged into unfussy,
un-TV-like language that didn’t sound put on or patronising, but simply like a clued-up guy talking to his friends in the pub. Twenty-five million people were watching, but you wouldn’t have known it from Klopp’s demeanour. Gruschwitz: ‘He had a lightness, an assuredness and an authenticity that immediately won over everyone–including Pelé, who was an occasional guest on the World Cup shows. He took a shine to him as well.’
What came across best, Gruschwitz adds, was the young coach’s passion for the game. The combination of his antics on the touchline at Mainz and the enthusiasm with which he could talk about Costa Rica’s formation showed the viewer that ‘here was someone who really lived for the sport’.
Klopp’s relaxed yet substantive style of punditry ‘changed the way we looked at football in the [ZDF] office’, the former TV boss reveals. Doehling agrees: ‘He taught us how to analyse. The first and most important thing I learned from him was that there was not one absolute truth. You don’t look at a clip and only see one particular thing. It’s open to interpretation. He also said he had to see a game two or three times, that you couldn’t really see things clearly the first time around. You might see that there’s something wrong. But you won’t see what is wrong immediately. That helped me overcome my own fears. You can feel your way in. You can become skilled. You can adopt a routine, you can develop. It’s a process, a craft. Not a question of “you either can do it or you can’t”. That’s what I tell my colleagues today: video analysis is not wizardry. You won’t be able to do it straightaway. But you can learn it.’
ZDF’s compelling offering, the perfect complement to Germany’s unexpectedly exciting run to the semi-final, the fantastic weather and the nation-wide party atmosphere essentially taught viewers the same lesson. Decades of the kind of armchair psychology that involved vague musings about one team’s nervousness and another one’s mental strength, which had been the preserve of top footballers, was swept aside in favour of factual expositions of the little, tangible, readily identifiable things that could make all the difference. ‘Klopp continues something that didn’t exist before his debut at the Confederations Cup: he simply talks about what’s happening on the pitch,’ wrote Christoph Biermann, one of the first German football journalists to cover tactics extensively, in Süddeutsche Zeitung. Klopp’s focus on the machinations of a match closely reflected his footballing education under Wolfgang Frank. ‘Everybody used to play man marking,’ he said. ‘The question: “Would this goal have gone in if that guy hadn’t lost his one-v-one?” was relevant then. Today, there is zonal marking, but many questions still relate to the concept from back then. We should talk less about players, more about the game.’
Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story Page 22