Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story

by Raphael Honigstein

  Viewers felt emancipated. They were given the tools to think about football in a far less abstract manner. By championing insight over status and experience, ZDF’s coverage democratised the public discourse about the game. If a second division coach could persuade Beckenbauer to take note, maybe everybody could.

  But it went much further than that. Klopp’s success on the World Cup touchscreen changed age-old perceptions about the basic requirements of coaching, Doehling believes. ‘If you had played first division football, you were meant to be a first division coach. If you had played second division, you were a second division coach. That’s how it used to be. What Klopp did was to demonstrate–in front of millions of people–that knowledge could be gathered, that coaching was a trade that could be learned. You serve your apprenticeship, you graduate, you get to the next level, you take another exam. You develop, step by step, until you become a coach; by virtue of what you can do on the sidelines, not what you have done on the pitch. A whole generation of young managers who had never made it to the highest levels as players was inspired by that.’

  Klopp’s results with Mainz and his triumphant stint as the ‘Fernseh-Bundestrainer’ (Gruschwitz), TV’s national manager, opened the door for even more anonymous coaches to succeed in the Bundesliga. Men like Thomas Tuchel and Julian Nagelsmann realised that their limited practical skills were not necessarily a bar to progress. Clubs, too, felt emboldened to look past prior playing experience.

  On the whole, the World Cup shook German football out of its staidness and strengthened the hand of reformers. Within weeks, many of Jürgen Klinsmann’s most controversial methods–more proactive goalkeepers who enabled a higher defensive line, core-stability exercises with American fitness coaches, a strong emphasis on personality development and help from sports psychologists–became accepted practice in the top flight.

  For Klopp, working with ZDF offered an opportunity to closely study the games of international teams who were rarely seen on German screens. The time on stage also delivered a couple of other valuable lessons to him. Firstly, he recognised the potential of the new visual aid and was quick to utilise the touchscreen technology for his own work at Mainz. ‘That was his second question in 2005: “Can I use that on my laptop in the changing room?”’ says Doehling. ‘The first question was: “Where is the loo?” Klopp’s clever like that. He thinks about things. He’s not one of these coaches concerned with lining his pockets as much as possible in a short space of time. He cared about making things work, about getting the maximum out of it. Maximum fun, maximum use. He wanted to learn. No one really knew the possibilities of that system at the time, no one was working with anything like that in the Bundesliga. We made it possible for him, and it was great for us that he used it during the season, because that made him better when it came to doing it on TV at the World Cup. It was Peter Krawietz’s job to put together the clips for use at half-time or in pre-match team-talks at Mainz.’

  A second realisation concerned the power of the crowd to push a team to its limits and beyond. Like many experts, Klopp had been sceptical about the Nationalmannschaft’s chances at both competitions, Doehling says. ‘Everyone knew that Klinsmann wasn’t the world’s best tactician, and we all underestimated the influence of [his assistant] Löw. Germany’s success came as a surprise. I suspect that Klopp picked up on the difference motivation made. Motivation had carried the team past the odd tactical weakness and the odd deficiency in tradecraft. Klopp had always played with the support of the crowd, but at the World Cup he saw how the crowd could really play the game. That’s what happened against Poland. [Substitute] David Odonkor, surfing on a wave of euphoria, put in the cross of his life [to decide the game]. Pure spirit. You could see the same thing when Klopp whipped up the crowd for Liverpool’s game against Borussia Dortmund. The Anfield crowd carried the inferior team that night. They even scored the decisive goal for them.’

  Gruschwitz sounds as if he’s about to well up reminiscing about those summers working with Klopp. ‘He was an incredible team player,’ he says. ‘He didn’t just turn up shortly before we went on air but got involved hours before, giving his thoughts. There were long discussions about what should be shown; he left nothing to chance. On days off, we went out to eat together. He wanted to be a genuine part of the team. He truly was one of us. There’s no other way to put it.’

  That is not to say that there wasn’t the occasional ill-tempered outburst. The day before the World Cup, an angry Klopp kicked a hole in one of the paper walls at the studio reception and shouted at people as the system had failed. ‘But that was okay, no problem,’ says Doehling. ‘He did that once because he wanted things to work well. Outstandingly well. He always said: “Let us put something together that works outstandingly well tomorrow.” He was interested in the job, not in looking good on television. So he lost it once, and everybody ran a bit quicker as a result, and the damn thing worked, and everybody had a good time. And Klopp mentioned these people’s name on air, the ones who worked behind the scenes, to make them feel part of it. “Mike, roll the tape,” he’d say. The bosses told him that wasn’t the done thing on TV. But Klopp didn’t care.’

  His popularity approached the levels of the national team and their coaches in those days. People stopped to take pictures with him and asked for autographs outside the stadium in Berlin. German FA president Dr Theo Zwanziger joked at a get-together of Bavarian coaches that his aunt had told him to appoint Klopp–the guest of honour at the event–as the next Bundestrainer.

  At Mainz’s first off-season friendly after the tournament, the stadium announcer in the minuscule Bad Göging ground introduced Klopp as ‘that famous guy from television’ and asked him whether he’d continue working in football. The Mainz coach warily acknowledged that people needed ‘a mug’ to represent and symbolise the club but railed against being the sole focus of attention. Eyewitnesses at the game reported that many fans wanted Klopp’s autograph. But nobody asked any of the Mainz players for theirs.

  The ZDF coverage of the World Cup won the German TV award for best sports programme in November 2006. Klopp’s contract with the channel was extended to Euro 2008. Two years later, he won the German TV award again, for his punditry at the 2010 World Cup for RTL. More coveted trophies would follow not long after.

  14. 60,000 TEARS

  Mainz 2007–08

  In May 2007, a few weeks after Jürgen Klopp’s first relegation as player or manager, he was running a youth hostel in rural Thuringia, right in the former ‘death strip’ of the inner-German border. Temporarily. Klopp had taken the Mainz 05 squad to a similar, no-mod-cons hut for a team-building exercise four years earlier, in the run-up to the promotion-winning 2003–04 season. The back-to-the-woods trip with the 2007–08 players was supposed to have the same positive effect and outcome.

  Thirty men were sleeping on bunkbeds in one room. The days started at six in the morning, with Klopp blaring out German Schlager classic ‘Guten Morgen, Sonnenschein’ on a boom box. ‘I’ll never forget that,’ says Neven Subotić, even though he can’t remember quite whether that aural pleasure consisted of the original acoustic version by Greek singer Nana Mouskouri or Ireen Sheer’s cover from 1989. ‘We were totally shot every morning. But we had to get up, make our own breakfast; prepare lunch and dinner. Peel the carrots, that sort of thing. [Midfielder] Milorad Pekovic was injured. He couldn’t join in the exercises–games in the woods where we had to cooperate to achieve a common goal–so he was the “mother” of the group: he stirred the gigantic soup pot for a few hours until everybody came back in for lunch.’

  A stone’s throw from the modest lodgings, a section of the wired fence, a guard tower and a museum reminded the visitors of Germany’s division. ‘The players, as much as they’re susceptible to such associations, could understand the choice of the team base as symbolic: Mainz 05 are keen to cross the same border that they recently had crossed in the opposite direction due to relegation,’ wrote Die Welt. In physical terms, K
lopp joked, they had already ‘crossed the line’ during the training camp.

  The forty-year-old saw the step back down as an opportunity to hone his tradecraft. ‘In the second division, the playing style–the work of the coaching staff–has a much bigger influence on success and failure than in the Bundesliga, where individual quality by the opposition can ruin the best plan,’ he said. A good run, Die Welt suspected, ‘might enable Klopp to cross a personal line [to a new club] afterwards’.

  The city of Mainz kept the faith. All 15,000 season tickets were sold, and locally based credit company Coface agreed to buy the naming rights to the modern, first-class football stadium (cost €60m, capacity 35,000) that the council were planning to build on a brownfield site, a five-minute drive outside town, not far from Klopp’s domicile in Gonsenheim.

  Three of last season’s best performers–Manuel Friedrich, Leon Andreasen, Mohamed Zidan–did not go down with Mainz. There was an almost entirely new midfield in Miroslav Karhan, the Slovakian international and former VfL Wolfsburg stalwart, Tim Hoogland (Schalke) and Daniel Gunkel (Energie Cottbus), and a teenage centre-back who by playing with the coolness of a much older head quickly made himself indispensable: Subotić . Having had a taster of first-team action in the Bundesliga denouement against Bayern, the Serbian rapidly improved to play thirty-three out of thirty-four games in the second division, making very few mistakes. He credits Klopp’s careful but not always gentle handling of him for his good performances.

  ‘Klopp has a very broad spectrum,’ he says. ‘He could be very harsh. I thought: “Hey, this guy is screaming at me. Chill, dude.” But I probably needed it then. He’d be better placed to judge that. That side of him was old school. A hard school. But there were also these moments where he came up to me and asked: “Everything okay? If there’s anything you need, let us know. We want to help. We’re there for you. We want you to play well.” He was like a colleague in that sense, not like a superior. I felt I could approach him. That took away a lot of my insecurities. I was a teenager, on my own on a different continent, in a flat, getting paid to play football. Ridiculous, really. It was a very strange situation. The last thing you need is a coach telling you: “You have to perform now, otherwise you’ll be gone next year.” I was given time to grow.’

  The decibel levels might have gone up from time to time at the training ground, but Klopp’s censure would always be directed at the player, not the person, Subotić explains. ‘Getting shouted at was always like hearing an alarm bell for me. I knew I had made a mistake then; that I could have done better. It was always respectful, never the kind of insults you’d sometimes hear from Bundesliga 2 coaches. That stuff made you piss yourself with laughter.’

  Watching many training sessions from the sidelines, Doehling didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary in the way Klopp addressed his players. ‘But if you saw how they reacted to him during the game, you immediately realised that he had found a way to communicate with them in the dressing room. You cannot treat everybody the same way. That’s social intelligence: you have to gauge how you have to talk to somebody. I’m sure he sometimes hit the wrong note but, mostly, he got it spot on. These stories that you hear of some other top coaches–they don’t talk to players for weeks or kill them in front of the group–you never heard of Kloppo. He didn’t play those games.’

  ‘With Klopp, it was all very humane,’ Subotić confirms. ‘I knew these things were said for a reason, for motivation, as a means to an end to get to the top. Klopp had it both: the rough and the smooth.’

  There were two different sides to his Mainz team, too, that year. 05 started the season well, with a 4-1 win against Koblenz. Three defeats against the league’s better teams–bogey side Greuther Fürth (3-0), Kickers Offenbach (2-0), coached by Klopp’s mentor Wolfgang Frank, and TSG Hoffenheim (1-0), an expensive ensemble under the expert direction of Ralf Rangnick–in the following seven matches offered a glimpse of possible shortcomings, however. They went into the winter break in second place on thirty-one points, a whisker ahead of Köln, Freiburg (both on thirty), Fürth (twenty-nine) and 1860 (twenty-eight).

  On 9 January 2008, Klopp’s mobile phone rang. Unknown number. Heidel, sitting next to him at the winter training camp hotel in Costa Ballena, Spain, immediately knew it was important: ‘Klopp sat up straight, nodding “yes, yes” like a good boy.’ Bayern’s general manager Uli Hoeness was on the line. The most powerful man in German football was calling Mainz 05, was calling Klopp. The record title-holders were in the market for a new manager to succeed veteran Ottmar Hitzfeld for the next season. Hoeness: ‘We’re looking at a big, international option, and at a smaller, German one. You are the German option. Can you see yourself coming here in the case we decide to go for the German option?’ ‘We can talk about it,’ Klopp replied demurely.

  ‘I told him he had to go for it,’ Heidel says. ‘I said: you’re absolutely crazy if you don’t do it.’ Their relationship was so close, he adds, that Klopp always confided in him about approaches from other clubs. Bayern’s advances were hugely alluring. Klopp was aware he was only second choice for the Allianz Arena role, a back-up contender if the Bavarians’ complex, highly secret negotiations with the unknown international heavyweight were to fail. But that didn’t do much to lessen his disappointment when Hoeness phoned again with bad news two days later. ‘We have decided to go with the other Jürgen,’ the Bayern patriarch declared. ‘What other Jürgen?’ Klopp replied, dumbfounded for a moment. He had thought Germany’s biggest club had worked on reeling in a foreign super-coach. But ‘the big, international option’, it now transpired, was California-based Jürgen Klinsmann, the former German national team manager. Heidel: ‘Hoeness added that Bayern’s choice was ‘quite similar to you, Mr Klopp’. He didn’t really admit it but I could see that it was a blow for him. He was a little hurt.’ Mainz reporter Reinhard Rehberg later recalled Klopp taking training in a bad mood that day. ‘But he quickly got over it,’ Heidel says. ‘Klopp’s very good at overcoming setbacks.’

  As much as the Mainz coach was irked by losing out to his namesake and fellow Swabian, this was a defeat that turned into a win before too long. Hoeness’ public confirmation that Klopp, the second division coach who had presided over relegation seven months earlier, had been a very serious alternative for the most glamorous job in German club football ‘amounted to his beatification’, Frankfurter Rundschau wrote. ‘He wrongly used to get reduced to being a motivational guru, with talent for PR honed as a TV expert. His selection as a contender to succeed Hitzfeld, by itself, has directed attention towards other qualities [of his].’ ‘Bayern thinking about me was an honour,’ Klopp said.

  In Heidel’s view, ‘Bayern didn’t have the balls’ to opt for a coach without a top football background, ignoring the fact that Klopp was a much more experienced manager than Klinsmann at the time. ‘I was talked into trying out the Klinsmann adventure,’ a rueful Hoeness later admitted, ‘we signed up the wrong Jürgen. We all know that was a big mistake.’ Klinsmann’s reformist agenda, while ‘convincing on paper’ (Hoeness), failed to win over the team and the club due to a severe lack of tactical detail. The former VfB Stuttgart striker was fired ten months into his first season, with Bayern in danger of missing out on the Champions League.

  In the second half of the season, Mainz’s results continued to be decent, without ever building up any real momentum. Klopp’s men were easily the best footballing side behind Borussia Mönchengladbach and Hoffenheim, patient on the ball and technically much more sophisticated than the vast majority of opponents. That superiority, unfortunately, translated into a bit of complacency. Games that should have been won were drawn. Games that should have been drawn were lost.

  But Mainz never lost touch with the promotion places. And Klopp’s marketability was not damaged by his team’s underwhelming run either. On the contrary: encouraged by Bayern’s earlier enquiry, a number of Bundesliga clubs thought that FSV’s uncertain prospects might make it easier for th
em to prise Klopp away from his natural habitat at the Bruchweg. 1. FC Köln, coached by the idiosyncratic Christoph Daum–who had missed out on getting appointed as Germany’s national team coach after failing a drugs test in October 2000–got in touch. Heidel: ‘Things were always open and transparent between us. Kloppo said to me: “I’m going to meet with [Köln sporting director Michael] Meier. I don’t really want to go there but I want to hear what they’ll say. I want you to know that.” I said, “No problem. Go, and listen to him. You’re only going to find out how good life is for you at Mainz. But please make sure no one finds out.”’ Just like Heidel predicted, the secret rendezvous at one of Meier’s relatives’ homes in Frankfurt came to nothing. Klopp had left the meeting deeply unimpressed. (Köln, a promotion rival, later brazenly complained that Mainz were trying to seed discord by falsely claiming that Meier had contacted Klopp, which led to Heidel making the failed approach public.)