Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story

by Raphael Honigstein

  During the winter break, they nearly pulled off an even more stunning victory. Making good use of his friendship with Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez, Watzke almost thwarted Lewandowski’s Bayern move, encouraging Los Merengues to sign him up instead. Lewandowski wavered but in the end decided to honour his pre-contract agreement with Bayern. His move to the Allianz Arena for the beginning of the 2014–15 season was confirmed on 4 January 2014.

  Hummels’ return from injury for the second half of the season–the defender had hurt his knee at the World Cup–immediately brought more stability at the back. Since Dortmund’s game was predicated on hitting opponents on the counter-attack, the ability to keep a clean sheet was absolutely vital. When other teams took the lead and could afford to sit back, BVB found it hard to find the space their explosive transitions still needed. A steady improvement in domestic results and progress to the Champions League quarter-finals vindicated Klopp’s conviction that only details had been missing before Christmas. The team had enough individual and collective quality to finish second behind Bayern, make it to the DFB Pokal final and push Real Madrid very hard in the Champions League. The Spaniards just edged the tie 3-2 on aggregate, having won the first leg in Madrid 3-0. ‘You’re out, aren’t you?’ ZDF presenter Jochen Breyer had asked Klopp after the final whistle at the Bernabéu. ‘How could anyone pay me for doing my job if I stood here, saying that we’re out already?’ Klopp replied, shaking his head in disbelief.

  ‘My friend Florentino Pérez still gets sweaty palms thinking about that first half in Dortmund [in the second leg],’ Watzke smiles. ‘It was an outstanding quarter-final. On the whole, we hadn’t become worse, Bayern had simply become better. Maybe 3 or 5 per cent was missing but it was okay. And we should have won the cup final, of course. That Hummels goal…’

  A depleted Bayern had lined up with five at the back in Berlin to frustrate Dortmund. Klopp’s men had destroyed Guardiola’s men 3-0 at the Allianz Arena a month earlier, they were the in-form team; they had the momentum. An attritional game was heading for stalemate when on sixty-five minutes Mats Hummels saw his header cleared from well behind the line by Danté. The referee waved play on, and Bayern scored two goals in extra-time to escape with the trophy in tow.

  ‘It was tragic,’ says Watzke. ‘A catastrophic refereeing mistake. There’s no other word for it. The ball was thirty-five centimetres behind the line. I don’t know another coach who’s been this unlucky with refereeing decisions in big finals.’

  Players, officials and the guests at the post-match banquet were so down that Klopp held one of his ‘state of the nation’ speeches, decreeing that everybody had to party, in recognition of a team that had given their all over the course of ten months and dealt with all problems–including ‘the worst injury crisis in the history of football’–in ‘exemplary fashion’. ‘We would be crazy if we overthrew everything,’ he added, in reference to the media’s misgivings about his regime, Dortmund’s consistency should not be taken for granted. ‘Others don’t even celebrate when they win something. But Borussia must be different. If anyone tells me “what a shame” tonight, I’ll punch the glass out of their hands without so much as a word. Please enjoy the evening and don’t worry: we will definitely be back. This is a team with a strong backbone. It doesn’t matter who they take from us, we’ll bring in new guys and everything will be all right.’

  Everything wasn’t all right, however. Far from it. Two months into the 2014–15 season, Dortmund just wouldn’t stop losing games in the league. Five defeats on the trot between late September and early November pulled them down to seventeenth spot–eighteen months after contesting European club football’s biggest prize, Klopp’s men were heading for Bundesliga 2. No Dortmund team had ever had a worse start to a campaign, not even the side that got relegated in 1971–72. ‘It’s a brutal, shitty situation, crazy,’ an exasperated Klopp said after the latest defeat, 2-1 in Munich. Dortmund had seven points on the board, seventeen fewer than Bayern. Every half-decent domestic result, every win in the Champions League, was taken as a clue that the nightmare was about to end. But it never did. At the halfway mark, Borussia’s points tally was fifteen, and they were still seventeenth, in the drop zone. Only goal difference separated them from the worst team in the league, SC Freiburg. Bayern were on forty-five points. ‘We’re left looking like complete morons here,’ Klopp said, ‘and we deserve it.’

  As a fresh-faced, occasionally clean-shaven Mainz coach in the second division, Klopp had told his players and the German public that success on the pitch had to be ‘explainable, in other words: the result of objectively beneficial, repeatable endeavour’. The reasons for the disastrous lack of success in his seventh year at BVB proved much harder to ascertain. Because football is a low-scoring game, the distinction between symptoms and ills, between mere bad luck and underlying deficits often isn’t an easy one to make. Did they miss so many chances due to a strength-sapping playing style that seemed ‘stuck in eternal adolescence’, as Süddeutsche Zeitung wondered? The contrast with Guardiola’s Bayern, who had perfected their own version of pressing to the point that they ran less than anybody else in Germany, was especially painful. Even Watzke noted Dortmund’s ‘less economic, more laborious’ way of playing.

  A little more than two years later, officials, players and the people closest to Klopp have identified a bucket-load of explanations for the crash, some of which are conflicting. All of them, however, continue to have trouble comprehending the sheer ferocity of the slump. ‘It’s still an enigma to me,’ says Watzke.

  Robert Lewandowski’s departure might not have been the single most important factor but it was something akin to the trigger for the recession. More than anyone else in the team, he could combine hard work with efficiency in front of goal. ‘It was obvious that we couldn’t hold on to him any more,’ says Dickel. ‘Jürgen knew about the club’s financial possibilities, we weren’t able or willing to pay somebody €15m in wages a season. I was hoping that Robert would go somewhere else but everyone knew that he would go. We only could have kept him by selling the town hall.’ Dortmund had done well to find successors for previous high-profile departures before but the Polish forward proved literally irreplaceable. New Italian striker Ciro Immobile, a €18m buy from Torino, had problems adjusting to life in the Ruhr area and to Klopp’s system. ‘He couldn’t quite make it work in its full complexity yet,’ Krawietz says. ‘Certain automatisms’–synced-up, instinctive moves–‘got lost.’

  Why didn’t they field Aubameyang in the centre-forward role instead? The pacy Gabon international was a different kind of striker, much less physical than Lewandowski, granted, but he could certainly score goals, as the two subsequent seasons under Klopp’s successor Thomas Tuchel proved. Aubameyang would find the net seventy-nine times in all competitions for BVB playing through the middle.

  ‘It was our first grave misjudgement,’ Watzke says. ‘In the summer of 2014, all of us–especially Jürgen, who was in charge of the line-up–were convinced that Aubameyang was not a number 9. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have needed to bother with Immobile at all. Things would probably have worked out differently, it would have been easier. And so on, and so on. As it was, 2014–15 was a shit season.’

  ‘Aubameyang is doing very well [as a striker] now,’ Krawietz agrees. ‘You could already see back then that he could get you goals, that he was perhaps better suited to playing as a centre-forward than on the wing, as he had problems tracking back. But on the wing is where we needed him at the time.’ The loss of Lewandowski was indicative of a wider dilemma the club faced, he adds. ‘On the pitch, we had grown much faster than we had developed in terms of our finances. We had young players and players that were bought for little money, who performed so well, at home and in Europe, that they were all of a sudden in a completely different league in terms of their value. The club couldn’t keep them, they had to sell them. But at the same time, it was obvious that replacements of equal quality were not availab
le, due to the finances. That led to a situation where we could only ever aim to keep our level, we couldn’t actually improve. Bayern, meanwhile, were investing smartly and kept developing. Expectations at Dortmund had grown so much that we weren’t able to live up to it any more.’

  Watzke concurs with that macro-analysis. ‘The team that we had in 2012 and 2013 would have probably gone on to make the next step if Bayern hadn’t started shooting at us this much,’ he says. ‘That’s for sure. We keep rolling the stone up the hill each year, like Sisyphus. But you can’t complain, you have to live with that if you’re Borussia Dortmund. I’d love to be as comfortable financially as Bayern. Unfortunately we weren’t able to grow as much economically in the short space of time as would have been necessary to keep the team together.’

  Watzke and Krawietz also describe Germany’s World Cup win in Brazil as damaging for Borussia that season. The late arrival of the quintet of internationals–Mats Hummels, Roman Weidenfeller, Matthias Ginter, Kevin Großkreutz and Erik Durm–caused disruption, the coaching staff felt. Krawietz: ‘They had a three-week holiday, which was too short, and wanted to be playing again, without having the physical foundation. That ultimately led to us not having the usual confidence in our system. On top of that, systemic errors crept into our defensive game. We were extremely vulnerable to counter-attacks. We played games where we enjoyed plenty of possession, created good chances but lost 1-0 or 2-0 because of a couple of counter-attacks. During a season, you have to rely on the basics from pre-season working in some kind of way. We realised: bloody hell, we really need to change a few things here. We needed to practise our movement on the wing and crossing, maybe for two, three weeks. No time. Or the strikers’ movement through the middle, to make sure that for once somebody was going to the damn near post. All we could do is mention that in the video sessions. But when it came to a trained impulse, to Gegenpressing, we weren’t able to get that across to make it stick.’

  Psychologically, Dortmund’s national team contingent seemed exhausted. ‘Hummels aside, the other four hadn’t played in Brazil but they were right in the middle of this huge hype,’ Krawietz remembers. Watzke: ‘To put it mildly, the World Cup didn’t play a productive role. Our players had hardly featured in Brazil, but they all felt like world champions.’

  Hummels’ plight was more mundane, he says. ‘I came back injured and never really recovered my form that season. As captain, my job was to lead by example but I was too busy trying to get to grips with my own problems. I couldn’t be a leader and talk to others from a position of strength because I was playing crap football myself.’

  The outspoken centre-back’s customary calmness on the ball and his positive influence on his teammates were badly missed, which was yet another reason for Borussia’s fragility. A wave of injuries, coupled with a fixture list that made neither extensive rotation nor detailed tactical repairs possible exacerbated the crisis. Dortmund’s problems didn’t add up–they multiplied.

  ‘We kept losing games in the exact same way, over and over again,’ says Krawietz. ‘That starts to hurt your confidence as a team after a while. In the Champions League we did okay, we qualified for the knockout rounds, but that only made us wonder if we were lacking the right attitude in the league. You’re in a spiral, going round in circles, going down. And we didn’t manage to get out of it.’

  ‘We all went crazy,’ Dickel says. ‘It was impossible to understand. We had 74 per cent possession, fifteen shots on goal, they had two shots on goal and we lost 1-0. Week after week. It was horrible.’ Hummels: ‘We came away thinking “we weren’t that bad” after every game. You still glance at third spot in the table and you work out your points difference. You think: “We can’t go down.” And then you’re bottom of the table with half the season gone and you realise you’re in the shit, up to your neck.’

  Klopp was visibly affected by the disastrous run. His job was not in danger–Watzke had given him a cast-iron guarantee–but he felt personally responsible. ‘The whole thing drained him. He was in the driving seat, he took it to heart that we were not going in the right direction for some strange reason. I remember looking at him thinking: “Oh, he looks really tired and stressed,”’ Subotić recalls.

  ‘As a guy who’s so emotionally involved, you knew it was hitting him very hard,’ says Hummels. A coach, like any other leading figure, must project self-confidence in order to instil confidence in others. But how can you keep faith with your ideas if results continue to go the wrong way?

  ‘Your head is full of questions,’ says Krawietz. ‘Is it your fault? Is it the team’s? What shall we do? It was an extremely shitty situation. More than anyone could really bear. You don’t wish that kind of spell on your worst enemy. It was unbelievably exhausting, unbelievably depressing. And at the same time, you’re not really allowed to show your emotions. The coaching staff have to be the first ones out there the next morning, saying: “Come on, guys, we go again. Here’s what we’ve done wrong. Two, three details, and we’re back on track.”’

  Watzke suggests that sections of the team were maybe not as willing to adhere to Klopp’s ideology as before. ‘That total, complete euphoria and passion we had had in the first year wasn’t there any more. That devotion. The players had become older. And richer, and more successful. Perhaps they wanted to show that things could work at a lower pace. Which is not how Jürgen operates.’

  Krawietz sees it a little differently. ‘It wouldn’t be fair on the players and their characters to say they weren’t willing or able to play Gegenpressing any more. I can see why some might say that. But it was much more complex than that. Don’t get me wrong: we certainly didn’t get everything right, not every decision that we made and that Jürgen was responsible for worked out. But it wasn’t as simple as that.’

  Nevertheless, the negative results bred dissent. Some of the more senior players were not shy about making their thoughts known, exchanges were rather fraught at times. And yet, the residual bond and trust between Klopp and his players was strong enough to keep things from breaking completely apart, just about. ‘Whenever he went too far in an argument, he was magnanimous enough to realise that and to apologise, either to the player concerned or in front of the whole team,’ says Hummels. ‘With him, it always came from the heart. That won him our respect, in a huge way. He didn’t just say things, he truly felt them. He also could put himself in the shoes of a player. He’d say to me: “Mats, I know how you feel, I was a player myself. How can I punish you for that?” when we disagreed on something.’

  By contrast, the increasingly embattled coach did not accept outsiders casting doubts on his tactics. He scolded a local reporter for suggesting that other teams might have ‘found out’ his side and developed strategies for negating Borussia’s high-pressing style. ‘I’m not looking for a fight, so I will even answer the stupid questions,’ he shot back acidly, before going on to claim that Dortmund’s plight was all down to their own failings. ‘If you say we’ve been “found out”, what does that say about the work of opposition coaches for the last few years?’ he added. ‘Were they unable to see what our game is?’ He maintained that ‘pace cannot be deciphered’, that winning games was merely a question of Dortmund playing to their own abilities again. Talking up the progress of the opposition in a league that had blunted his original concept by making it the new orthodoxy would have been counter-productive, he felt. Success was always a question of reconnecting with your own, inherent strengths. The right answer was already there. It just needed to be properly implemented. ‘The problem isn’t our problem but the solution is,’ he insisted. Keeping calm when confronted by a chorus of criticism was tough, especially since he considered most of the negativity unwarranted.

  ‘Jürgen felt he was getting a raw deal [from the media]. That was his problem,’ says Schneck. ‘He felt they didn’t treat him right and so he made up his mind: “They have no idea, they need to fill their papers somehow.” I remember a game we lost, I think away to Wolf
sburg. He went hell for leather in the press conference. I said to him: “Mate, that was really shitty. That kind of tone was inappropriate.” He goes: “Leave it out, you were one of those shit journos, too.” He was irascible, not diplomatic at all. Of course, he later said: “Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.” And I knew him too well to be offended. But his relationship with the media got more and more fractured.’

  Klopp had changed, TV reporters and writers noticed. The lightness and self-deprecating humour that used to season his bluntness were gone, replaced by latent passive aggression, the natural mindset of under-pressure football coaches the world over. Vis-à-vis friends and colleagues, however, people whose loyalty Klopp was assured of, he remained his own dependable self. It would have been easy, for example, in view of Dortmund’s tumble down the table, to cancel a talk on motivation that his old buddy Sven Müller had organised in Frankfurt in December 2014 but Klopp had given his word to Müller and turned up.

  ‘To see someone feeling this bad, sitting here and laughing, that’s motivating, isn’t it?’ he told the audience in the hotel ballroom. Throwing in the towel in the Bundesliga was not on his mind, he added. ‘I’m either all in or not at all. Right now, I’m Borussia Dortmund. It’s like a marriage, there are good and bad times. Why should the sun be shining out of my ass all the time?’ Klopp claimed he was a better coach ‘than in 2012, when we were champions. The problem is: that’s not reflected in the table.’