Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story

by Raphael Honigstein

  ‘I hear people say that Klopp’s no longer himself, that success has gone to his head and so on, but it’s all nonsense,’ Quast says. ‘Those who really know him are aware that not a word of that is true.’ Quast remembers meeting Klopp at the launch of a new car model at the Opel factory in Rüsselsheim, at the height of Dortmund’s relegation worries that season. ‘I had just had some very bad news about my mother’s brain tumour, it was benign but beyond treatment. Her doctor had also looked after Wolfgang Frank. Klopp says to me: “What’s wrong? You don’t look good.” So I told him the whole story.’ Quast stops, apologising for the tears in his eyes. ‘Hundreds of Opel employees were there, looking down at him from five storeys. A thousand cameras. Loads of people who all want a piece of Klopp. We were standing a little to the side but I saw that everybody was staring at us, the photographers went “click, click, click”. Klopp didn’t care about all of that. He just hugged me really tight, not saying a word. It wasn’t necessary.’

  Looking back, Dortmund were saved by the bell(s) of Christmas, ringing in a six-week respite. ‘I don’t think we ever thought “this is the end of us” but it was so good to get to the winter break,’ Subotić says. Klopp insisted that the Christmas party should go ahead as planned. There was a time to work and a time to have fun, he told Lünschermann, and without the latter, one couldn’t do the former. ‘He was very good at compartmentalising things,’ the BVB team manager says. Krawietz remembers feeling acutely relieved after losing against Bremen, the last game in 2014: ‘We knew we couldn’t get any lower. We would spend six weeks in the relegation zone but we had at last a chance to regenerate and practise a few things without the pressure of competitive football. By that time, we had a pretty good idea what was missing in our game: some systematic processes that we hadn’t been able to practise. It was clear that with a bit of rest for the legs and the heads, we’d be able to get it right, that this team could function again, straightaway. That’s exactly what happened.’

  Not exactly. Or at least, not straightaway. Dortmund drew 0-0 at Leverkusen in the first game in January but then lost 1-0 at home to ten-man Augsburg. Borussia were so bad in their eleventh defeat of the season that the most loyal of supporters, those on the Yellow Wall, shouted at the players in disgust. They were in eighteenth place now. Hummels and Weidenfeller tried their best to placate the angry fans, talking with them for a good few minutes through the fence. ‘It would be unacceptable if we didn’t understand their frustration about us being bottom after nineteen games,’ said Hummels. The famous BVB togetherness was beginning to crack under the pressure of relegation angst.

  ‘That was our most difficult moment, the first time I really started fearing for the worst,’ Watzke says. ‘We felt as if we were in a horror movie.’ There were rumours that Ottmar Hitzfeld and Lucien Favre had been sounded out to come in as ‘fire fighters’ but the Dortmund CEO says ‘it was never an option to part ways with Jürgen, even then. Nobody thought about that for one second.’

  As Krawietz had thought, the team bounced back. The next five games were won; they shot up the table like a belated new year’s rocket. ‘Play, fun, thrill: that’s Borussia Dortmund,’ Klopp said after the 3-0 win in the Ruhr derby. The slogan was borrowed from a Kinder Surprise ad and referenced Aubameyang’s and Reus’ surprise goal celebration: the Black and Yellows’ dynamic duo had dressed up as Batman and Robin on the pitch. Suddenly, qualification for the Champions League looked feasible once more.

  The official strapline for the second half of the season was Aufholjagd (race to catch up). ‘Klopp always used these terms. They weren’t just empty words, they were an anchor for us,’ Subotić recalls. ‘People took their cue from it and we made it real. He was brilliant at that.’ Lünschermann, who had listened to hundreds of Klopp’s team talks by then, maintains that the coach continued to find words that ‘got under the players’ skin’. He was able ‘to bring them into line, mesmerising them. After seven years, he hadn’t lost his ability to squeeze out the best of people.’

  ‘To pick yourself up and come back so strongly is not normal,’ says Sven Bender. ‘It was only possible because we all pulled together. The coach had to walk through that valley of shadow, and the team had to. The club made a noble decision and kept faith with the coach, that’s not a given in today’s football business. Usually, the coach gets axed at this point.’

  His prickly demeanour outside the dressing room notwithstanding, Klopp was still good at lightening the mood with a choice bon mot. ‘We had this osteopath, Heiko. A lovely guy but a little clumsy,’ Gündogˇan smiles. ‘Usually, he was never on the pitch with the team but that one day, he was there before Kloppo came out. He’d been at the hairdressers that morning or the day before, and Kloppo looked at him and went: “Will your hairdresser finish cutting your hair tomorrow?” All the players were on the floor laughing. Perfect delivery. Even though the mood wasn’t that great any more.’

  The lowest low blow was yet to come. Dortmund had come away with a 2-1 defeat from the first leg against Juventus in Italy in the Champions League. ‘An almost perfect result,’ said Klopp. A huge fan choreography before kick-off in the Signal Iduna Park summoned the spirit of the past–Dortmund had won the European Cup against the ‘Old Lady’ in 1997–and togetherness. But when Carlos Tevez scored after three minutes for the visitors, Dortmund were rendered completely helpless, dying a slow, 87-minute-long death out on the pitch. They created next to nothing and conceded two more at the back. ‘Their football was almost invisible,’ Süddeutsche Zeitung noted after the demoralising 3-0 defeat. The manner of the capitulation left no doubt. Klopp’s BVB team weren’t just out of Europe. They were over. ‘[The club] will have to bid farewell to old habits, to nostalgic glorification–and to taboos,’ the Munich-based broadsheet added. ‘The coach will have to give shape to a new vision of football.’ The coach or a coach?

  Watzke, Zorc and Klopp met in Watzke’s office not long after Easter. ‘We all had this feeling of trepidation,’ Watzke says. ‘In principle, we all knew that it would be better if we finished it. But Michael and me couldn’t say it. Eventually, Jürgen said: “Listen, we’re all thinking the same here, aren’t we? I’ll tell you now: I’ll go.” We had agreed that things had run their course. It wasn’t a case of his effect on the team having worn off or anything like that, but seven years was a very long time. We had felt it for a while. No one had dared to admit it. And it still felt really shit to make the decision [to part ways].’

  ‘Could we have gone on at Dortmund?’ Krawietz asks rhetorically. ‘Yes. In theory. But it was best that the journey ended at that precise point. In order for it to go on, some wide-ranging decisions concerning the team would have had to be made. There are always two possibilities to develop further, to freshen up things: either the coach goes or you change the team, its important pillars at least.’ The BVB triumvirate weighed up that second option but it was considered financially unviable. Two league defeats, against Bayern and Borussia Mönchengladbach, made qualification for next season’s Champions League all but impossible. The club didn’t have the money to sign instant game-changers or rebuild the squad. Krawietz: ‘It would have needed a revolution, a changed team with a changed playing style. But wasn’t it easier to change the face up front? That was absolutely the right decision for everybody, for the club and for us as well.’

  The team were shocked. ‘There was a message on my phone, a push mail from a magazine, breaking news. The most important story of the year,’ Subotić says. ‘Klopp was leaving? You couldn’t even imagine anyone else doing that job, not in the way he was doing it. At first, nobody wanted to think about it. He had established the club at the very top, not by borrowing money and buying the best players in the world. But with his strategy, his philosophy. To think that he was to go at the end of the season. Nuts. All of Dortmund was in shock. Even people who didn’t support the team.’ The announcement hit people in the club ‘with a massive bang’, Lünschermann said. ‘A tough pill
to swallow.’

  At the ad-hoc press conference on 15 April to announce his departure in the summer, Watzke was fighting back tears. ‘These talks have been very hard for us, because of our special relationship, founded on trust and friendship,’ he said, before hugging Klopp. ‘You can rest assured of the gratitude of all of Borussia.’ Klopp explained that he was no longer certain that he was ‘the right coach for such an extraordinary club’ and that it had been his duty to communicate those doubts to his superiors. ‘One big head needed to roll–my one,’ he quipped. It was all a touch melodramatic, but it struck the right chord for the Ruhr area, where people pride themselves on saying the things other Germans dare not think. A more business-like departure wouldn’t have done justice to the emotional upheaval caused by the flag-bearer’s resignation.

  In January 2017, Watzke is still proud of ‘the most classy parting of the ways in football, ever. It wasn’t an act, we all did find it very hard.’ A football divorce, just like a real one, is rarely amicable. This one, he insists, was. ‘Throughout those seven years, we always had some differences in opinion. But it would have been a weird friendship if that hadn’t been the case. Our strength was never letting any of that leak outside. We never had a personal problem. It was never acrimonious. We never left the room in a huff, with one of us slamming the door or screaming “arsehole!” and so on. That never happened. We kept on playing cards regularly, even in that last season. I don’t think we’ll ever have a coach like that again.’ Nevertheless, the bad run left neither party unscathed. ‘The three of them were so close before that, they were all hurt,’ says Dickel.

  Klopp and Dortmund had amassed so many happy memories together that the pain soon gave way to a sense of contentment, Schneck says. ‘It was like the end of a long-term relationship, with both sides knowing there is no other way, but also remembering all the good times they have had with each other. People could still look each other in the eye after that. And since then, the relationship [between him and the club] has become warmer again.’

  In the dressing room, dismay turned into a determination to give their spiritual leader a fitting send-off. ‘We didn’t want to believe it at first,’ says Subotić . ‘But we respected him so much that we thought: “If that’s what he says, it must be right.” Not every manager would have created the same kind of energy. Giving our all for the last few games over the next month or so was the logical thing to do for us. We were all grateful to him, from the bottom of our hearts, for all those years we’d been able to enjoy together. He improved every single player, or almost every single player. He improved the club. We wanted to pay him back for that.’

  Dortmund collected thirteen points from the last six league games to squeeze into a Europa League place: seventh spot in the table. Somewhere between disappointment and just about respectable, but not the disaster it had threatened to be.

  Klopp did not trust himself to give a live farewell to address the crowd at the last home game, against Werder Bremen, for fear of breaking down. In a video message, he professed his deep gratitude at having been allowed to be in charge of the club for seven years, and for ‘a sack full of happy memories’. He welled up watching himself talk in the stadium. The Yellow Wall’s moving tribute gave voice to the sense of indebtedness the supporters felt towards their departing tracksuit hero. ‘Thank you, Jürgen’, the big banner said. ‘It takes years to understand how valuable single moments can be’, a smaller one underneath read.

  ‘I think Jürgen was as afraid of that last moment as the fans were,’ Dickel says. ‘Seventy-five thousand people in the stadium were crying, united in mourning, and in denial as well. “Jürgen Klopp was leaving the club.” People didn’t want to say it because saying it made it true.’

  A deep run in the DFB Pokal offered one last chance of a fairy-tale ending. Borussia managed to inflict the one defeat Pep Guardiola’s Bayern suffered in three years in the cup, forcing their way into the final in Berlin on penalties. ‘That game in Munich did him and us a world of good,’ says Gündogˇan and he picks up his phone. On a shaky dressing-room video, Klopp is grinding his hips to a rap song, beer bottle in hand. One ‘super-cool game’, would follow, he promised.

  What was supposed to be one final, passionate night away in the German capital only confirmed that this particular love affair had run its course, however, the best efforts of an army of cheerleaders notwithstanding. Dortmund failed to capitalise on an early 1-0 lead against VfL Wolfsburg and left the pitch beaten 3-1, looking like a shadow of their former, percussively powerful selves. ‘Losing against Wolfsburg…’ Gündogˇan shakes his head in mild disgust. ‘Really. An embarrassment. He deserved better. It just wasn’t to be.’

  ‘The pain has set in. It hurts, extremely,’ Klopp said after the game. ‘Every time I embrace one of my players and think that’s probably the last time, the tears are coming, immediately. I have to deal with it, one thing after the other. And I’d like to do it when the cameras are off.’ At the subdued after-match party, he put on a brave face. ‘Winning today would have been too kitschy, too American,’ Klopp claimed on the stage. Standing ovations and cheers greeted a self-aware line about his BVB legacy: ‘It’s not important what people think of you when you arrive, it’s important what they think of you when you leave.’

  As all was said and done, Klopp made sure to drop in with Borussia’s ultras for one last time. A few days after his return from Berlin, he spent four hours over drinks with members of the Unity, thanking them for their support over the years and chewing the fat. ‘It was a wonderful evening,’ says Jan-Henrik Gruszecki. ‘I vividly remember one of the more, shall we say, sturdy fans asking him: “Why do you always play Subotić ? He’s thin like a herring.” Klopp looked at him, raised an eyebrow and said: “He’s not thin, he’s in good shape.” He brought the house down.’

  Christian Heidel believes Klopp was more wounded by the conclusion of the Dortmund chapter than he ever let on. Not because it was over–‘they all agreed the time was right, you can’t keep doing such a job with as much energy as he expends for too long’–but because the club failed to truly recognise the extent of his achievements. ‘He went to Dortmund and made them champions, twice, cup winners, he got them to the Champions League final. And for all of that, they hand him a bunch of flowers in front of the south stand. I’m sure he thought of the way Mainz said goodbye to him in that moment, and my guess is that he was disappointed that Dortmund didn’t really make him feel that it was him who had saved that club, him who took it from near bankruptcy to a rich club, with his ideas, and his personality. They couldn’t have done it without him, not even close. He turned the whole club upside down. All of that seemed a little forgotten at the end. I’m not sure he’s still emotionally very connected to Borussia Dortmund. To the people, yes, to the staff, to the kit man, to the supporters, for sure. But not to the club itself any more. When we played the [Ruhr] derby [with Schalke this season], he was crossing his fingers for me. That wasn’t about Schalke or Borussia Dortmund, but about rooting for me. I know that, honestly.’

  Eighteen months after Klopp left the Black and Yellows, however, it’s obvious that they do miss and fully appreciate him. ‘He was more than a coach, he was a coach for the whole club,’ Watzke says, a little wistfully. ‘Jürgen was the most resplendent ambassador any club could wish for.’

  Dickel agrees. Leaving aside the way BVB played football under him, he was a huge factor in improving the club’s image. ‘We became much more well-known around the globe. Everywhere we go, they say: “I remember, you had a crazy manager.” Everywhere. But never with any negative connotations. Kloppo and BVB will forever be linked, irrespective of where he’s working.’

  Süddeutsche writer Röckenhaus, whose professional working relationship with Klopp had become somewhat strained towards the end of his tenure, is convinced Borussia would take him back in a heartbeat. ‘You ask anyone at Dortmund, even the groundsman, who’d been angered by Klopp, perhaps. They’d take him t
omorrow. That’s all down to him being the person he is. He’s simply charming, in his own way. He can get on your nerves, for sure, but you can easily see yourself sitting in a bus next to him, driving for hours to get to some shitty game. Or having a drink with him after a defeat. To say nothing of the partying with him. They would all love to get him back.’

  16. LFC AND BEYOND

  Thanks to their late flourish in May 2017, Liverpool are once again playing in the Champions League in 2017–18, for only the second time since 2010. The fantastical riches of the Premier League’s TV deal–£2.76bn per season–no longer make participation in UEFA’s top competition a game-changer for a club of Liverpool’s size. But, FSG’s Mike Gordon explains, bringing midweek floodlit nights back to Anfield is still hugely important, financially and symbolically. ‘It does make a difference in terms of revenue. And in addition, it puts your club into a different category in terms of standing. Before Jürgen’s arrival, there had been questions whether the club had lost some of its lustre. Our return puts that to rest. We have a manager now who’s the best in the world in my mind, and we have a squad of world-class players. Naturally, they want to play in the Champions League. It’s a signal to the world that we’re back. It helps us entice the best people.’

  But none of the new or existing players quite connects with the fanbase in the same way Klopp has done since October 2015, Jamie Carragher feels. ‘To be honest, he’s the star of the team,’ the former defender says. ‘If it was possible, a lot of the supporters would have his name on the back of the shirt. He’s the face; he’s the name of the team. When you think of Liverpool you think of Jürgen Klopp. His personality is infectious. There’s no act, no games with him, he’s exactly the guy you see on TV. He has a laugh, he has a joke, he’s full of energy. I’ve been to a couple of team parties. One of them was after they had lost to Crystal Palace at the end of the season, when it looked bad for fourth place. But he was high-fiveing all the players and they were all hugging each other. That relationship he has with his players is a major part of his success as a football manager. I never had a relationship like that with any manager. He’s just a big, energetic man, and you want to play for him.’