Kloppo

[Uilleam 5,926]

From today's Sunday Times, an interesting and informative, if somewhat long, read about Liverpool's charismatic Kraut:

 

The seven ages of Jürgen Klopp: the making of the man who brought title to Liverpool

Dortmund amplified his genius and Liverpool confirmed his legend — but Klopp was formed in Mainz, James Gheerbrant writes

James Gheerbrant

Saturday June 27 2020, 12.00pm, The Sunday Times

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/b0715b6c-b85d-11ea-8e2c-ebb19b599bc1

 

THE MAINZ MAN

The first time Jürgen Klopp heard the words of You’ll Never Walk Alone was not at Liverpool but at the Bruchwegstadion in Mainz, the city in Germany’s Rhineland where his coaching career began. Another port, another storm. The song is also a standard of Mainz’s fans: it rang in his ears when he led the club into the Bundesliga, and it pricked his tear ducts on the day he departed.

There have been three staging posts in Klopp’s career. Borussia Dortmund amplified his genius. Liverpool consecrated his legend. But it was Mainz that made him. He arrived as a quiet second-division striker; when he left 18 years later, he was one of the most famous people in Germany and on his way to becoming the best coach in the world. In the middle of that period, in a nondescript hotel room, he took the phone call that would change his life.

Klopp with his wife at Oktoberfest — but life was less comfortable for Klopp in the 1990s at Mainz, on a few thousand deutschmarks a month

In February 2001, Mainz were sliding towards relegation from the Bundesliga 2. Klopp, by now a converted right back, was struggling. The departure of their influential coach, Wolfgang Frank, had left a huge void. Frank, ahead of his time in a country still obsessed with individual quality and the symbolism of the libero position immortalised by Franz Beckenbauer, had inculcated the virtues of a flat back four and a systemic tactical approach. Mainz’s players were fluent in collective football, but none of Frank’s successors spoke their language.

“The team was on a higher level than the managers – that was the problem,” Christian Heidel, then Mainz’s sporting director, says. “Jürgen can capture people. We often had conversations when he was my player, and I always came away thinking about what we’d discussed, but without the feeling I’d been subjected to a lecture. My idea was: if he can grab me like that, then he can grab the players too.”

Heidel picked up the phone to Klopp. The voice on the other end of the line went quiet for ten seconds, then said: “I’ll do it.” The first game, against third-placed Duisburg, was in two days. Heidel still remembers Klopp’s first team talk. “Everybody who was there will tell you they were 100 per cent convinced the team would win the next day,” he says. “His powers of persuasion are extraordinary, and he’s kept that quality to this day: a team trusts him. His charm, his charisma, his rhetoric: either he had these qualities in the cradle, or he learnt them immediately.” Duisburg were vanquished 1-0 by a team playing with total belief.

Tactically, Klopp was a natural, says Erich Rutemöller, his tutor on the German FA’s Fussball-Lehrer course. “He had a very clear concept of what he wanted, both in and out of possession,” he recalls. “To this day, I remember the topic of his demonstration lesson, which he got a phenomenal mark for: on how an undermanned defence falls back against a counterattack.”

Klopp kept Mainz up, and in his first full season led them into the promotion places, where they stayed until the last day. But his mastery of tactics was not yet matched by his assurance with the media. Mainz encountered a Union Berlin side fired up by a careless Klopp quote, which portrayed them as a “bunch of scufflers”. Amid a rancorous atmosphere in Berlin, Mainz lost 3-1, blowing promotion. “For ten minutes, he sat weeping in the dressing room,” Heidel remembers, having learnt the hard way that “football matches are not only played on the pitch”.

The next year was even worse — Mainz won 4-1 on the final day, but missed promotion on goal difference. 10,000 people were waiting in the city’s Gutenbergplatz when the team bus rolled back into a funereal scene. Klopp seized the microphone and the moment, delivering a rip-roaring speech which harnessed the emotional force of Mainz’s disappointment. “Every single one of those people went home thinking, ‘We’ll go up next year,’ ” Heidel says. Sure enough, Mainz did.

Klopp had learnt a defining lesson: by radiating unshakeable positivity, even in the worst moments, he had the power to rally people to his cause and make them believe. And if there was any chance of him forgetting that, he would be reminded by the words of the song that echoed through his career, from the delirium of Mainz to the destiny of Anfield: “When you walk through a storm . . . walk on with hope in your heart, and you’ll never walk alone.”

THE BOY
Jürgen Klopp’s story begins in Glatten, a picturesque village nestled in the Black Forest. “I first got to know Jürgen when he was a baby,” laughs Ulrich Rath, the 79-year-old honorary chairman of the local football club, SV Glatten, and Klopp’s first coach. “Of course he was shaped here. We Swabians have a saying, ‘Ohne Fleiß, kein Preis’ [nothing sweet comes without sweat] and he puts that into practice. He demands something, but he is always prepared, just as he was as a young player here, to lead by example.”

Klopp joined Glatten when he was six and played under Rath’s tutelage for ten years. “Even then, it was clear that Jürgen was a good, quick striker,” he remembers. “A certain leadership quality was already apparent. He wasn’t a technically gifted player, but he was driven and always put a lot of effort in. He had a strong will, which took him far.” In his first game for Glatten, Klopp fractured his collarbone, but the following week, he was back on the sideline, with his arm in a sling, fetching balls.

 

Though his diligence shone through, for the young “Klopple”, football never felt like hard work. That probably had something to do with the fact that Glatten’s team was made up entirely of his friends, including Rath’s sons Harti and Ingo. These formative years were idyllic, but also important. From Klopp’s earliest experiences of football, the pleasure and purpose of the game were grounded in the collaborative dynamics of the team, rather than the indulgence of individual talent.

“I loved it from the first day because I could do it with my friends, together,” he told The Independent last year. “It’s . . . using the skills of your friends to be the best team you can be. I loved that. We all benefit from each other. And the game itself: running, shooting, being dirty. That’s how I fell in love with the game.”

From his father Norbert, Klopp got a genetic inheritance and a rigorous instruction. Norbert, who stood 6ft 3in tall, was a sports fanatic, and as a young goalkeeper he had trials with Kaiserslautern. By trade, he was a travelling salesman, which, if you think about it, is a pretty good analogue of the job of a football manager.

“His father was a very approachable, vivacious, eloquent guy, and he passed those qualities on to Jürgen,” Rath says. “But behind closed doors, Jürgen has a quiet inner strength, and I think he gets that from his mother, because she was born here in the Black Forest and her family go back here generations. It’s not a side of him you see often, but without that inner strength, I don’t think he would have been able to accomplish what he has.”

Norbert was his son’s hardest taskmaster. “He wasn’t the most patient person, so when I wasn’t as good as he wanted, it was quite uncomfortable,” Klopp later said. “He was rather a drill sergeant.” He trained Jürgen from the age of five by racing him from the touchline to the halfway line and zooming past him.

These experiences were the opposite of his halcyon days with Glatten. But after six years, something remarkable happened: Jürgen started to outsprint his father. Norbert’s tough love had made him fast. And though he left Glatten as a teen, Klopp has never forgotten what his boyhood taught him: that a sense of fun can coexist with an insatiable appetite for improvement.
 

THE PLAYER

Klopp was said to have the mentality of a Champions League player and the ability of a fourth-division player

Klopp joined Mainz in 1990, after a peripatetic early career that included a brief stint in the second team of Bundesliga club Eintracht Frankfurt. “Jürgen was a very direct player: one of the quickest in the second tier when he got going,” remembers Guido Schäfer, his team-mate for his first six seasons at Mainz. “He was exceptionally strong in the air and had an incredible mentality. In terms of mentality, he was probably a Champions League player, and in terms of ability, maybe a fourth-tier player. Put those together and that’s how he wound up in the second tier.”

Klopp had some good moments as a striker, notably a game against Rot-Weiss Erfurt in 1991 where he scored four goals against a defence including the future Germany international Thomas Linke. But gradually the goals dried up and in 1995 he moved into the back four, where his aerial ability could be repurposed. Having to adapt to his limitations was humbling, but it also made Klopp a more cerebral player. “When you play football like I played football,” he later said, “you have to think more about the game than when you are a genius kid.”

At Mainz, Klopp was a popular captain, but not always a clubbable one. For the most part, he traded in truth bombs, not love bombs. “It wasn’t always easy to get on with him,” Schäfer remembers. “In matches, he didn’t just tangle with the opposition or the referee, but often with his team-mates too. He was very impulsive by disposition, even irascible. He wasn’t shy of giving you a piece of his mind during a game, even over a gap of 15cm. It was like getting a blast from the [Alex] Ferguson hairdryer. But then five minutes later, everything would be rosy again.”

Life at Mainz in the mid-90s was a hardscrabble existence. Like most players, Klopp – who by this time had a wife and a young son, Marc – was on a few thousand Deutschmarks a month. “We were not the sort of club where life was a bed of roses – quite the opposite,” Schäfer remembers. “We were always scrapping to avoid relegation. In winter, we had to train on a hard pitch, not on grass, with snow on it; there was no sauna or revitalising pool either. It was all very spartan. And the pitch – you could have grazed cattle on it. I don’t think today’s players would last 90 minutes on that surface. It was a battle, and a battle for survival.”

The club’s facilities might have been ramshackle but the team themselves could not afford to fall apart. Mainz’s players lived in constant fear of the financial repercussions of relegation, unsure if they would be able to keep paying their rent, or even if the club would survive. Disunity meant oblivion. They had to be held together by something: a system, a shared ethos, a sense of camaraderie.

Frank’s philosophy helped, but Klopp took it upon himself to fortify the bonds established by his mentor. “Jürgen always made sure that by hook or by crook, the team stuck together,” Schäfer says. “If we hadn’t brought that mentality on to the pitch, we would never have stayed up. That’s the biggest lesson: that with effort and morale and total commitment, you can make up for a hell of a lot. By having a collective idea, by running more kilometres, by hunting in a pack, you can overcome those deficiencies.”

It wasn’t all blood and thunder, though. On the way back from away games, Klopp and his team-mates would gather round while Schäfer, the squad’s designated raconteur, regaled them with outlandish anecdotes. “Jürgen was always the first to crack up laughing,” Schäfer says. “I like to say that a little bit of his spontaneity, his wit, he learnt on the back row of the Mainz bus.” Klopp noticed something: the midfielder’s funny stories had just as powerful a bonding effect as his own impassioned speeches. To get people to sit up and listen, sometimes you have to put on a show.

 

THE BIG TIME

Klopp arrived in the Bundesliga in 2004, at the age of 37. He was, immediately, different. For years, the high priests of German football – Beckenbauer, Ottmar Hitzfeld, Otto Rehhagel, Felix Magath – had been austere, technocratic figures who operated at a remove from their players. Klopp’s revolution was to dissolve this distance completely, saluting tackles or goals with such histrionic fervour that Süddeutsche Zeitung christened him “the ultra among coaches”. His demeanour was that of a man plugged into the same emotional circuitry as his team.

The proximity manifested itself in other ways too: players called him du, not the more formal version of “you”, Sie. He gave the midfielder Fabian Gerber a day off training to celebrate his mother’s birthday. “He used to say, ‘I want to be the coach I would have liked to have as a player,’ ” Rutemöller says.

In the top flight, Klopp had to be better at the game beyond the game, and he was. He had a knack for encapsulating blue-collar values in snappy soundbites, pledging that Mainz would be “the vanguard of the regular guys in the pub”, and contrasting his predilection for “heavy metal” football with the classical stylings of bigger teams. He wanted his football to be entertaining, but he wasn’t a stickler for aesthetics: Heidel recalls a Uefa Cup match against Seville where “we played with ten men on the edge of our box, and defended like our lives depended on it . . . For him, this 0-0 was like a victory.”

 

When he was appointed by Dortmund, after suffering relegation in his third Bundesliga season with Mainz, Klopp flirted with a shirt and tie, but reverted to his trusty tracksuit after a month. He realised that players responded to authenticity, not authority. At a big club, the personal touch was even more important. As Raphael Honigstein recounts in his superb biography Bring the Noise, Klopp even manned the phones in the ticket office and washed the bus. Oliver Kirch, a midfielder who joined Dortmund in 2012, remembers when Klopp called to persuade him to sign from Kaiserslautern: “Out of respect, I called him Herr Klopp, and he said, ‘Forget that, I’m Kloppo.’ That reeled me in.”

Klopp’s relatability was a vital tool in his armoury, because the football he preached, based on co-ordinated counterpressing, was physically and mentally exacting. “With Jürgen, the most important thing is what you do when you lose the ball,” Kirch says. “You do lots of drills to drum that into your brain, so it becomes like a synaptic reaction.” It was brutally hard work, but the players were won over. “We stopped asking questions . . . and it was actually fun to play that way, almost addictive,” Mats Hummels said.

Part of Klopp’s genius was his messaging. He called his style of play Jagdfussball: hunting football. He made his players feel like blood brothers. Even as Dortmund led the table in his third season, he told them: “Bayern Munich are the champions always — we are not the champions, we are the challenger,” and even likened Bayern to China, an intractable superpower. Every rhetorical trick was designed to cast his young squad as the voracious disruptors of an entrenched elite.

But the best motivator was the team’s success. As the midfielder Sven Bender put it, “When things go like clockwork, you’re happy to run” – and for a while they did. Dortmund won back-to-back Bundesliga titles in 2011 and 2012; the next season, they reached the Champions League final. There was just one problem: Klopp’s high-pressing style had inspired widespread imitation, including by Bayern. Success had made his anarchic football canonical. Jürgen Klopp – the outsider, the innovator, the heavy-metal manager – had become part of the establishment.

THE MEDIUM

The city of Mainz is a living monument to the ways in which information is communicated and commodified. The main square is named after Johannes Gutenberg, who established the first printing press here. Mainz is also the seat of ZDF, one of Germany’s two public-service television channels. By strolling from one part of town to another, you can traverse the entire history of the knowledge economy, from its earliest origins to its modern medium. In 1992, Klopp decided he wanted to play a small part in this history.

At the height of his playing career, he undertook a three-month internship on the regional sports desk of the commercial broadcaster Sat1, producing features for the magazine show Wir im Südwesten. Klopp maintained his industry connections, and when ZDF, who held the rights to Germany internationals, were looking for a pundit for their coverage of the 2005 Confederations Cup and the home World Cup the following year, the charismatic local hero was a left-field candidate, but an unignorable one.

“He had even then a keen understanding of the importance of TV,” remembers Jan Döhling, an editor who worked with Klopp on ZDF’s football coverage. “As a player, he never played in the first division, nor had he ever worked with the national team as a manager or had anything to do with them. But he has this entertainment factor which makes him fun to listen to.”

At that time, football broadcasting was in its pre-enlightenment era, more concerned with characters and consequences than tactics and technical expertise, but ZDF wanted to try something different and Klopp was a willing revolutionary. Armed with a touchscreen which allowed him to freeze and annotate frames, his role was to demystify the strategic nuances of the game, explaining to the armchair viewer how teams functioned and why they failed.

Klopp’s gift for articulating the tactical intricacies of a match in a simple and engaging way, amplified by the enormous audiences who tuned in to watch Germany’s run to the World Cup semi-finals, made him a star. “Often on TV, that level of technical detail can be communicated in a way that viewers don’t understand,” Döhling says. “But Klopp has – and this is part of his talent – the whole package which makes it not only possible for people to follow him, but also hugely enjoyable. I wonder if that comes in handy when he’s working with a football guy who maybe doesn’t have much interest or background knowledge about the theoretical aspects of the game. It’s the same principle: you have to make sure people don’t switch off.”

At the same time that Klopp was becoming a familiar face in living rooms across Germany, the shape of football management was subtly changing. The explosion of media interest in the game, combined with a more modern approach to recruitment and fitness which de-emphasised the manager’s influence, was turning the job from a behind-the-scenes role into a public-facing one. Meanwhile, a sophisticated and aspirational fanbase was hungry for a tactical discourse that transcended the binary justice of results. The skills Klopp was honing in the TV studio were becoming essential for top-level managers. What looked like a spot of moonlighting was in fact more of a calculated reconnaissance.

 

“I had the impression that he wanted to soak up everything,” Döhling says. “Outwardly, he’d always say, ‘I get to watch World Cup games, brilliant,’ but I think what was more important was that he learnt how the media works. His relationship with the media became a working partnership. His three years on TV gave him the opportunity to try things out. If he tried a way of getting his message across and it worked . . . he’d take that with him.”

Klopp’s years as a pundit were golden. He chimed with a mood of optimism around German football and gathered a multitude of awards. But while the sun always shines on TV, in football the clouds are never far away.

 

THE PERFECT STORM
After finishing in second place behind Bayern Munich in 2013 and 2014, in Klopp’s seventh season at Dortmund the bottom fell out of his world. At the start of February, past the season’s halfway mark, Dortmund were in last place. Even José Mourinho at his lowest point never plumbed such depths of ignominy.

To this day, it’s hard to understand what caused such a precipitous decline. Undoubtedly, bad luck played a part. Expected-goals models suggested that Dortmund scored far fewer goals than the quality of their chances merited, while their opponents benefited from the inverse effect; with average finishing at both ends, Dortmund would have been fourth at halfway.

Other factors conspired against them. The absence of Robert Lewandowski, captured by Bayern, was keenly felt. His replacement, Ciro Immobile, didn’t gel, but Klopp was slow to countenance playing Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang up front. Injuries bit hard. Hummels and Erik Durm dramatically lost form. Klopp had also made the mistake of emotionalising the loss of Mario Götze, the midfielder who left to join Bayern the season before, phoning his players to commiserate and comparing the blow to a “heart attack” – an error he would not repeat when his influential playmaker at Liverpool, Philippe Coutinho, departed for Barcelona.

The most painful realisation was that the psychic connection between Klopp and his players, his greatest source of strength, had become frayed. “I think he was afflicted by the awareness that not everyone in the squad was behind him,” Heidel says. “There was a void that he had to close.”

“He was a bit stumped by what was happening,” Kirch recalls. “But I think he thought that certain things weren’t working so well any more, because the players had been hearing the same messages for too long.”

Part of the problem was that Klopp’s rhetoric, which cast his team as the ravenous pursuers of an imperial power, was much harder to sustain once Dortmund themselves had attained supremacy. Kirch puts it succinctly: “Your role changes, when you’re used to being the hunter, and suddenly you become the hunted.” And as Dortmund fought their way back up the table, it was perhaps telling that Klopp reflexively slipped back into that familiar mindset, giving their recovery mission the codename Die Aufholjagd: the hunt to catch up.

Nevertheless, the way that Dortmund salvaged their season under immense pressure was remarkable. A run of four victories in February lifted them clear of relegation danger, and with a solid finish to the campaign, they eventually secured seventh place, and the final Europa League spot. “I find it astounding that somehow he found the lever to pull them out of that tailspin and still achieve something,” Rutemöller says. It helped that Klopp retained his levity, joking around with his players and delighting a gala audience with the line: “Why should the sun be shining out of my arse all the time?”

 

In private, he was deeply hurt. “He really took it to heart,” Kirch says. “Of course you’re going to be personally stung, if you think your team isn’t as receptive to you as they once were.” After a chastening defeat by Juventus in the Champions League prompted another bout of introspection, Klopp offered to resign. At a press conference in April, it was announced he would leave at the end of the season. Away from the flashbulbs, Klopp, a man of deep Christian faith, struggled to make sense of his trial. Had he brought this on himself?

Perhaps somehow he had. Dortmund’s chief executive, Hans-Joachim Watzke, once described Klopp’s ability to “cook up a storm on the touchline”, evoking a not entirely inaccurate image of a wild, Lear-on-the-heath figure, summoning and conjuring with elemental forces. Klopp himself said of his style: “I like the total intensification, when there are crashes and bangs everywhere.” But when you play with thunder and lightning, sooner or later, you’ll find yourself in the eye of a storm. Left untamed, chaos will eventually consume you. Klopp needed to refine his football, while preserving its restless heart. He’d spent his career eschewing control; now it was time to embrace it.

THE ALCHEMIST
Rath’s voice cracks and his eyes brim with tears as he remembers the moment he realised where his protégé’s journey would end. “When he was a player at Mainz, Jürgen used to go with his team-mates to England on Boxing Day,” he says. “We were chatting one day at my house, and I saw how his eyes lit up when he talked about it. That was when I knew that one day, he would go not to Italy, or to Spain, but to England.”

As a child, Klopp fell in love with what Germans call Englischer Fussball: a visceral style he summarised in a Guardian interview as “rainy day, heavy pitch, everybody goes home dirty in the face.” He was courted by Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur, and most seriously by Manchester United, but somehow it feels right that he ended up at Liverpool, a place where football is freighted with emotional resonance.

A deep sense of spiritual compatibility underpins the marriage between Klopp, who once vowed that voting for a right-wing party is “the one thing I will never do in my life”, and the club forged in the socialist tradition of Bill Shankly. You can trace a shared red bloodline from Shankly’s covenant of “everyone working for each other” to Klopp’s communitarian football. “Shankly used to say, ‘I was made for Liverpool and Liverpool was made for me,’ and Klopp can say the exact same thing,” the club’s chief executive Peter Moore told El País.

Klopp has had to weather blows that might have tested even his unshakeable enthusiasm. Last season, Liverpool finished with 97 points, the third-highest points total in Premier League history, only to be pipped by a single point by Manchester City. The year before, surfing a red tide of belief, they reached the Champions League final against Real Madrid but were denied by three deus ex machina goals: two Loris Karius howlers and a Gareth Bale wondergoal. It was a shattering disappointment, but the next day, Klopp was filmed bouncing up and down, belting out Liverpool chants in a raucous singalong with three friends.

“After a match, he can be on the floor, a broken man,” Heidel says. “Twelve hours later, he’s a completely new man, with optimism, charisma, with the belief – the knowledge, even – that things will get better. That’s a lesson not only for football, but also for life.”

Klopp’s popularity extends far beyond Merseyside. Even in his second language, his blend of charisma and good sense commands a reverential following which transcends partisan dividing lines. The comedian Dieter Nuhr has a nice riff on his messianic appeal, in which he jokes: “Klopp is the only man who could stop climate change.”

Perhaps part of the reason he is so beloved is that he fills a vacuum among our leaders. At a time when division and anti-intellectualism are rife, he practises a rare brand of populism: one that is inclusive and egalitarian, seeks to empower rather than take power, and can’t get enough of experts. “He’s a very willing delegator,” Schäfer says. “He knows where his limits are, and when to fall back on the acumen of specialists.” At Liverpool, they have a specialist for everything: doctors in nutrition, fitness scientists and even a throw-in consultant.

Klopp also places considerable faith in the insights of Liverpool’s analytics team. This is a significant conversion for a once avowed sceptic of the use of data in football. During his TV career, he worked with a statistician called Roland Loy, who applied mathematical modelling to football. One of Loy’s findings was that tackles were overrated: the team that tackles most wins only 40 per cent of the time. To Klopp, this was anathema – tackles were the signature drumbeat of his thrillingly percussive style – and he proudly professed “0.0 per cent faith” in Loy’s conclusions. And yet, in Klopp’s time at Liverpool, they have gone from making the most tackles in the Premier League to the fourth-fewest.

“I think he spent some time going over his mistakes, and now you’re seeing a more evolved version of Jürgen Klopp,” Kirch says. “Everything is more controlled.” His Liverpool team are more comfortable in possession than his Dortmund team. Their press is less ferocious, but more sustainable. They have more systematic ways of creating against a set defence. And rather than being reliant on a primary playmaker, since the departure of Coutinho Klopp has spread the creative burden equally among the three forwards, Roberto Firmino, Sadio Mané and Mohamed Salah, and the two full backs, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andy Robertson.

This collectivism goes to the heart of Liverpool’s ethos and extends beyond the team. “Jürgen creates a family,” his assistant Pepijn Lijnders has said. At Melwood, Liverpool’s training complex, he knows the names of all 80 employees, and insists that they eat lunch in the same canteen as the players. He gives the Anfield crowd the sense of being active participants in Liverpool’s success. At a time of dislocation and disenfranchisement, in a city where those feelings run deep, Klopp makes everyone feel like they have a stake.

Because of the swirling mythology around Liverpool’s title quest, it is tempting to see Klopp as a figure of fate. But something he said after a match against Huddersfield Town last season lingers. “You cannot ask for destiny,” he said. “You have to work for it.” There could be no better epitaph for the manager who transformed the Liver bird into a phoenix; the man who turned heavy metal into gold.

[Bill 13,717]

8 hours ago, Uilleam said:

it pricked his tear ducts

I couldn't read beyond this phrase.