That February, a senior delegation from Hamburger SV–sporting director Dietmar ‘Didi’ Beiersdorfer, CEO Bernd Hoffmann and marketing and communications director Katja Kraus–also visited the Klopps at their house in Gonsenheim. Over pizza, cake and coffee, the northerners probed the Mainz coach’s willingness and suitability to take over at one of the historic greats of the league for the next season. Hoffmann and Kraus were certain that they had found their man, a young, energetic manager who would make the fairly expensively put-together side a championship contender once more. Beiersdorfer was less sure. Could a club of HSV’s stature appoint a coach nicknamed ‘Kloppo’, the former defender wondered in Klopp’s presence. ‘You have a sporting director called Didi, don’t you?’ the Mainz coach shot back with a smile.
Scouts were instructed to discreetly watch Klopp (and other candidates for the post, such as Bruno Labbadia, and Dutchmen Fred Rutten and Martin Jol) at work. The results were collected in a dossier and presented at a board meeting. Klopp’s coaching and brand of football were much commended but HSV’s spies also noted that he had been unshaven, late for training, dressed in shabby jeans and talked rudely to the local sports reporters.
‘A typical Hamburg story,’ says Heidel, shaking his head. ‘Holes in his trousers, they said. This rumour that he was late for training? Jürgen Klopp was never late for training, not once in all those years. And they said he was brash with journalists. Yes, he was. He had known these guys for fifteen years, was on first-name terms with all of them. They had already slaughtered him as a player. They were like friends. When he said to them “you’ve fucking lost your mind” in a press conference, with no camera running, they knew exactly how to take that. But those guys from Hamburg were like: “Oh my God, he can’t go to Hamburg. Impossible.”’
Klopp was not pleased when the scout’s findings were relayed to him. ‘Those who work in football should have known how I work, and the way I look. You don’t have to put a scout on the touchline for that. That’s amateurish,’ he said to Bild am Sonntag in 2011. ‘It hurt me to hear I wasn’t punctual. There’s probably no one more punctual than me. Unshaven–only that much was true. I called Mr Beiersdorfer and said: “If you’re still interested in me–I decline. Please never call me again.”’
Hamburg’s failure to land Klopp, the most promising German coach of his generation, has become part of German football folklore, the Bundesliga’s version of Decca Records boss Dick Rowe turning down the Beatles. Whether Klopp’s casual demeanour really did tip the scales against him is somewhat doubtful, however. A former HSV official who was directly involved in the search privately insists that Jol–who had led Tottenham Hotspur to fifth place in 2006–07 and was out of contract–had simply been considered the better choice by a majority on the board, irrespective of Klopp’s sartorial shortcomings. Either way, after initial success under Jol, who made it to the UEFA Cup and the DFB Pokal semi-finals in 2008–09, HSV soon came to regret their decision. ‘We might not have reached the Champions League final with Klopp in charge but I’m sure the club would have been in a better position now,’ a mournful Hoffmann told Sport-Bild in 2014. Beiersdorfer, too, admitted to having ‘a few sleepless nights’ over missing out on Klopp. By the time he left Dortmund in 2015, Hamburger SV had appointed twelve different coaches (including Labbadia for two spells), traded stints in Europe for regular relegation battles and turned into a byword for serial incompetence.
Back in April 2008, media chatter about Klopp’s unresolved future–he was out of contract in June–was reaching a crescendo. Mainz ultras were so worried the coach might leave that they disobeyed a pre-season agreement not to call him over to their section for the customary ‘Humba’ singing session after the final whistle. Klopp had wanted the players to be the sole focus of the crowd’s praise. But after the 3-0 win in the derby against SV Wehen Wiesbaden on matchday 27, the chant ‘Jürgen to the fence’ went out, again and again, until finally the coach relented. The show of adulation from the terraces was an obvious attempt to sway Klopp’s decision. ‘I understand their cause, that’s why I agreed [to sing with them],’ he said, adding that he was well aware of the strength of feeling in the stadium.
A couple of days later, Klopp told reporters that he had made up his mind. He would sign a new contract with the club–if they were promoted back to the Bundesliga for the next season. ‘We’ve had plenty of emotional discussions and agreed that failure to go up would be a good time to part ways,’ he said. The newspapers recorded Klopp’s declaration as ‘a clear “Jein”’ to his club–it was both a ‘Ja’ and a ‘Nein’. The immediate outlook for Mainz, however, remained sunny, with a high chance of stubbles. With three games to go, FSV were second in the table, two points ahead of Hoffenheim.
Klopp demanded that the crowd at the Bruchweg made themselves heard in the home game against Alemannia Aachen. Mainz’s chief ‘propagandist’ (Süddeutsche Zeitung) got his wish. The atmosphere was crackling under the floodlights, the stadium ‘louder than it had been for a long time’, Rehberg and Karn wrote. But it was one of those games. 05 created plenty of opportunities and took none. An Aachen counter-attack fifteen minutes from time found the net. Mainz fell down to fourth spot. Three days hence, after the injury-ravaged team had slumped to a 2-0 defeat at 1. FC Köln, they were in the same place. There was still hope, still a possibility. Third-place Hoffenheim had to lose or draw against Greuther Fürth, Mainz had to beat St Pauli. Klopp’s last game as FSV coach finished with a 5-1 win over the self-styled punk football club from Hamburg. Hoffenheim had beaten Fürth 5-0. They went up to the Bundesliga, Mainz stayed down. Eighteen years of Jürgen Klopp at the Bruchweg–just under eleven as a player, just over seven as a manager–ended in silent desperation, football’s worst feeling: total powerlessness. Nothing he or his team could have done that day would have been enough to lift Mainz to the Bundesliga and prolong the liaison between club and coach.
Twenty thousand fans in the stadium stood up to serenade the sobbing manager with ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. Klopp only managed two thirds of the lap of honour before breaking down in tears. He escaped to the dressing room, sprinting across the pitch, away from the sadness. ‘For Mainz, it’s the beginning of a new world that we never wished for,’ Heidel said. ‘If it was up to me, we could have continued working together for another ten years.’
Thirty thousand people turned up on Gutenbergplatz the following Friday evening to give Klopp a second, happier, send-off. Earlier that day, he had been unveiled as the new Dortmund coach. Back in his football hometown, Klopp’s voice crumbled under the weight of tears. ‘Everything I am, everything I can do, you have made possible for me–everything,’ he stuttered on stage.
‘People were crying,’ says Subotić . ‘Grown-ups, women, children. Toddlers who didn’t understand what was going on were crying, too, because everybody was crying. The farewell do showed once more how many emotions he stirred up, how he brought people together. I had seen him celebrating, I had seen him lost in thoughts before. But this was a different side to him. It wasn’t sorrow, it was affirmative. His life’s work was being recognised. He was the star of the team, the main protagonist of an extraordinary story. That night, you could see how much he meant to the whole city. It was very touching, unforgettable.’
‘In terms of saying goodbye, Kloppo’s number one in the world ranking,’ Heidel says proudly. ‘I don’t know of any coach getting that kind of send-off, with a stage in the city centre, and 30,000 people, all there for one single person. Usually, coaches are fired at the end. Or they leave, somehow, with a bouquet of flowers in their hands. At Mainz, it was very dramatic, with a huge banner: “Thank you, Kloppo”. It was the most emotional farewell imaginable. And I don’t say that just because I organised it.’
Klopp assured the 05 faithful that he would never forget them and happily celebrate Mainz’s promotion in the city square–from a different vantage point–next season. He thanked Christian Heidel and Harald Strutz for ‘giving
me the chance to choose my dream vocation’, then castigated an unnamed local paper for printing critical statements ‘by some morons’ about his successor, Norwegian Jørn Andersen, and threatened that ‘they won’t get any interviews any more’. It might have sounded churlish and off-colour to the uninitiated, but the forty-year-old merely reiterated a point he had stressed over and over to reporters in the past. A club of Mainz’s stature and means, he lectured on stage, could only succeed ‘if everybody is pushing in the same direction, if everybody takes the giant heart of this city into their own hands when going into the stadium or watching Mainz at home to really cheer us on, to step on the gas and to support us with all their might. If we haven’t learned that lesson after these eighteen years here, I don’t know any more.’
Subotić remembers the evening well for a second, more personal reason. In the midst of the sentimental festivities, Klopp cornered him, to lay the groundwork for the defender’s move to Dortmund with him. ‘He had ten million things to think about that night, so I thought the last thing he needs is me to congratulate him [on his beautiful farewell] and ask: “How’s it going, how do you feel?” But he came up to me and said: “If you want to go somewhere else one day, call me before.” There were 30,000 people there, his family, friends, all the players he had ever coached and everybody’s grandmother on top of that but he took a few minutes to talk to me. That felt amazing. I will never forget that moment, especially under these circumstances. He had already had a drink. That’s fair to say. He deserved to. It wasn’t a memorial ceremony but a celebration. And it changed my life for ever.’
15. IN TIMES OF FADING LIGHT
Dortmund 2013–2015
Borussia Dortmund had pushed the best team in Europe extremely close in the 2013 Champions League final at Wembley. And yet, the twenty-five-point gap behind Bayern Munich at the end of the Bundesliga campaign posed an uncomfortable question. Why had Dortmund lost so much ground domestically? Two 1-1 draws in the league games against the treble winners suggested an inability to beat the lesser lights had been the main issue. Klopp and his coaching staff believed the answer was not change, but more of the same: better and faster. ‘We want to build a new pressing machine,’ he announced, before heading into the summer holidays.
Mario Götze joined up with Pep Guardiola, Robert Lewandowski didn’t just yet. Bayern’s unwillingness to make a suitable offer to sign the Polish forward before his contract at the Signal Iduna Park was due to expire in 2014 chilled relations between the clubs to well below freezing. Matthias Sammer, the former Borussia icon turned Bayern sporting director, attracted special opprobrium. ‘If I were him, I’d thank God that someone had the idea of hiring me every time I walked into the Bayern training ground,’ Klopp said. ‘I don’t know if Bayern would have got one fewer point without Sammer.’
‘Jürgen has got this ability to nail the head on the head,’ Dortmund’s CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke says. ‘When he said that thing about Sammer, 200 people told me: “Finally, somebody dared to say it.” Without fear of any recriminations. He doesn’t care, he’s fearless in these moments. He doesn’t care what others might say. Sometimes he goes too far, but that makes him even more likeable in my view.’
The unresolved Lewandowski situation did ‘zap some of our energy that year’, Watzke confesses, however, even if the player himself was scarcely affected by the unedifying tug of war. He would notch up twenty goals in the season, winning his first Torjägerkanone, the trophy for the leading goal-scorer.
An emphatic, brilliantly engineered counter-attack victory (4-2) over newly arrived Bayern coach Pep Guardiola in the German Super Cup held out hope for another exciting season. And Klopp’s pressing machine 2.0, with shiny add-ons Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Henrikh Mkhitaryan, was soon pumping out wins in the Bundesliga, too. Dortmund were only one point off the Bavarians at the top of the table eleven games in.
Then the mood darkened. A loss to Wolfsburg brought attention to a lengthy injury list. Was the Klopp team’s high-intensity, super-athletic playing style to blame, one journalist enquired in the pre-match press conference for Bayern’s visit to Westphalia. ‘A wretched question,’ the coach sneered on the podium, with barely controlled rage, ‘we are a team that gives their everything, you’ve all praised us for that countless times.’ Klopp pointed to a more convoluted fixture list–half a dozen of his players had become German internationals–as well as to increased pressure as reasons for the physical complaints. ‘Bayern have injuries, too, but they can compensate them better,’ he added. The harsh tone of his reply left little doubt that he was personally offended by the suggestion. It was also dangerous, threatening the team’s morale, he stressed: ‘The moment your coverage manages to take away the players’ appetite for movement, we’ll automatically face tough times.’
And the tough times were coming. Bayern’s 3-0 win at the Signal Iduna Park, a game that swung on the opener by substitute Mario Götze, of all people, ushered in a spell of poor results. Dortmund finished a ‘shit final third of the year’ (Klopp) in a disappointing fourth spot, twelve points behind leaders Bayern, who had a game in hand.
Dortmund missed too many chances and had problems creating openings against teams who were happy to sit deep. It became clearer than ever before that as tactical trailblazers, they had made a rod for their own back: even newly promoted teams who were individually not on the same page had learned to adopt smart counter-measures. ‘You play the same ball you’ve played the year before, but the opponents are there. You play the ball again. And they’re there again,’ Subotić recounts. ‘It’s always harder if you’re forced to play through opponents rather than to concentrate on the transition,’ says Hummels. ‘We found it tough going.’
An increasingly curt and irritated Klopp refused to believe that the problem was ‘a lack of plan B’, as countless media observers claimed. The issue, he insisted, lay with application, not strategy. And the injuries? Simply bad luck. Or maybe not? Some wondered whether the rot had set in due to the departure of athletics coach Oliver Bartlett in 2012. But that explanation is not corroborated by any of the players or BVB officials who contributed to this book.
Unsurprisingly, ‘things got a little disquiet in training’, says Hermann Hummels. ‘It wasn’t always nice. But it’s normal. Being with a coach for such a long time is like being in a relationship. There is tension. It’s unavoidable.’
There were arguments about tactics, too. Some of the more experienced players were possibly a little less receptive to the ‘run, run’ mantra than they had been before. Subotić : ‘When you get the feeling as a player that you’ve already achieved something, that you have a bit of experience, you suddenly don’t want to say yes to everything any more. I guess that’s human nature. If it was necessary, Klopp upped the volume. He shook us up a bit, to wake us up. Not by saying: “You have to play something different, boys, it’ll be tough.” No, he went up to a player and slapped him across the face. You think: “Oh, he might slap him back.” That was a rougher move. But you knew he didn’t do it to let off steam but to up the intensity. We understood. And the aggression was always contained. Never uncontained, that wouldn’t have worked.’
‘There were confrontations, and it sometimes became personal. But that’s okay, too,’ says Gündogˇan. ‘The important thing is to agree on a joint way forward afterwards, so that there’s no lingering resentment. With Kloppo, there were never any open questions left at the end. We always managed to get everything out of the way.’
There was a popular misconception that the Borussia manager was the players’ best friend at the time, Watzke explains. ‘Jürgen was more than a coach for everyone. But not a brother. Not the caring, slightly older colleague either. He commanded great authority, and it wasn’t always as matey as it looked. He could change his tune. He’s unpredictable. He can explode from one moment to the next, smashing everything to pieces. But he always managed to keep everything under wraps somehow.’
Dortmund, like all
the best families, kept their squabbles in-house. Disagreements never went beyond the changing room, there was no falling out. The giddy, teenage love-affair between Klopp and his players of the previous years had evolved into a more regular relationship, with customary ups and downs, but the mutual adoration itself was still very much there. Klopp treated his men like a strict father would, making life uncomfortable to bring out their best, not to shift blame on to them or vent his frustrations. He never briefed against his players to the media, never played games. ‘It was always about football. And everyone knew exactly where they stood with him,’ says Subotić .
The coach’s deep, personal connection with the supporters remained strong, too. When BVB ultra Jan-Henrik Gruszecki approached Klopp with a plea to auction off one his baseball caps in support of a crowd-funded film about Borussia’s founding father Franz Jacobi, he refused, flat-out. ‘But then he immediately said: “We can do much better than that. I’ll give you a whole day,”’ Gruszecki says. ‘We “sold” him to Dortmund’s biggest employers for a signing session and made €20,000, which covered a tenth of the budget.’
Watzke: ‘One of the reasons we got so much out of our players was an extraordinary bond between the players and the club, and between the manager and the players. I know this might sound like a cliché but we were an extremely tight-knit group. All these players coming back to us is evidence of that. They didn’t experience that combination of joy and familiarity, that backing and fairness anywhere else.’ Şahin and Kagawa both returned to play for Klopp at BVB after unsuccessful spells abroad, and even Götze re-signed with Borussia in 2016, having almost made the move to join up with Klopp in Liverpool. ‘He threw the odd tantrum but he was also very sensitive and understanding of his players. Everybody appreciated that.’
Buvac, responsible for the tactical details, continued to enjoy broad support, too. Klopp’s right-hand man was forced to coach the team for two Champions League group games when his superior was punished with a touchline ban by UEFA. An irate Klopp had screamed ‘How many more mistakes do you want to make? One more and it’s fifteen today!’ right into the face of the fourth official, almost dislocating his jaw in anger. Banished from the touchline, he watched the rest of the game on television in the office of the stadium green-keeper. ‘My face would have warranted a five-game ban,’ he ruefully admitted later, ‘I don’t recognise myself sometimes on the touchline.’ ‘We were all happy for Chucky,’ says Subotić, ‘he’s not an extrovert, and the opposite of egotistical. It was cool that he was addressing us, for a change. We had all learned to love him.’ Klopp’s partial absence notwithstanding, Dortmund qualified in the top spot from another tough Champions League group (Arsenal, Napoli, Marseille).
Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story Page 24