“Nobody is only one person.” – Jürgen Klopp.
The First Day
When Jürgen Klopp arrived in England last October, it was very easy to see him as only one person, and not even one person, but merely a caricature. In his first press conference at Liverpool, he provided the soundbite – ‘The Normal One’ – and things quickly escalated from there. Some pointed out that Avram Grant had previously described himself as ‘The Normal One’ and, fittingly for the normal one, nobody had noticed. This also proved the point. Klopp was a communicator who could make everything sound fresh.
During his morning with the media, he did more than that: he made everything sound possible. “Stop thinking about money,” he said, announcing his arrival in England with a determination to challenge all that was considered essential to succeed in the Premier League.
He talked about the greatness of the club he was taking over and the potential of the squad which would play, he promised, “emotional football”. Everything was different. “It’s time to restart,” he said.
On that day, Klopp looked like a man of evangelical fervour, a man who could save Liverpool and alter the course of English football.
The months since have brought more nuance. At times, Klopp has expressed amazement at the the demands made by English football. Those – among them maybe the owners and the manager himself – who expected Klopp to get a lot more immediately from the Liverpool squad may have been disappointed. Others pointed to the league record and noted that things weren’t different, they were the same.
In recent weeks, however, it has been possible to see that Klopp will bring to Liverpool what he brought to Mainz and Borussia Dortmund.
Defeating Manchester United, even this Manchester United, in the Europa League last 16 has helped. United’s lack of common purpose helped highlight the traits that Klopp cherishes in a football team. Liverpool’s performance during Klopp’s return to Dortmund last month reminded those who have watched his sides for many years of something else.
Will Klopp have a surprise in store for LvG at Anfield tonight? #LFC pic.twitter.com/GLyLQPiqVI
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) March 10, 2016
The second leg against Dortmund was another chance for the players to show they have absorbed his methods which centre on one big idea.
“Whenever I talked to him, he always brought it back to one thing,” says Uli Hesse, author of Gol!, the History of German Football, and, incidentally, a Dortmund fan. “There are very effective ways of bringing a superior football team down to your level.”
More importantly, Klopp’s first six months in English football will have told him a lot, while not shocking him at all. What he has encountered at Liverpool will seem familiar to him. In some ways, it might be seen as the perfect stage for him to display his managerial gifts, which rely to a great extent on the force of his personality, but are also much more complicated than that. In other ways, Liverpool will represent a challenge he hasn’t faced before.
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“The main thing with Klopp is that he has the talent to show his talent,” says one friend.
In the weeks that followed his unveiling, Klopp may have become aware that he was in danger of being seen as a one-dimensional soundbite provider. His press conferences became more muted and if the team’s performances were erratic, the emphasis was on another aspect of his managerial style which has been central not only to his success, but to his life.
“I don’t know where he gets that energy from,” Hesse says. “When you talk to him, he is totally present. He listens to everything you have to say. It’s rare. Normally when you meet people at his level one on one, their eyes will begin to wander but he’s never like that, he’s always totally focused.”
The Last Day
Last June, Heiko Wasser left Dublin, where he had been commentating for German TV on Ireland’s game against Scotland, and headed to a Turkish holiday resort.
Wasser is a well known figure in Germany. As a Formula One commentator for RTL, he has seen the world, but more importantly you feel when you talk to him, it has allowed him to meet some of the great Borussia Dortmund players of the past.
Dortmund are his sporting passion and he delights in recalling his time in the company of the men who beat Liverpool in the 1966 European Cup Winners’ Cup final. He also comes alive when he talks about Jürgen Klopp.
When Wasser got to Turkey after the Ireland game, he saw a familiar face. “Hello, my manager,” he said to Jürgen Klopp, who also happened to be on holiday at the same resort.
The month before, Jurgen Klopp had said farewell to Dortmund’s fans.
“I’m not your manager any more,” Klopp said to him.
“You’ll always be my manager,” Wasser replied.
Wasser says he doesn’t know any Dortmund fan who didn’t cry when Klopp left. Many also worried where he would go next.
Klopp may be an outsider but that doesn’t mean a club like Bayern Munich doesn’t interest him.
“We wanted him to go to a club where we could carry on loving him,” Wasser says.
Liverpool pursued Klopp and believed they had secured a manager who would have been wanted by all the other clubs with Champions League ambitions in England. It was a coup, but how much interest there was from other clubs is unclear.
People said Klopp and Liverpool would work beautifully together. To those who saw him as a maverick and an outsider, it seemed to make sense. But Liverpool demands much from its managers, even those who belong.
Beginnings
“He tried to build a fire in me,” Jürgen Klopp said last year about his father. Norbert Klopp was a salesman and had been a decent amateur footballer. He had big ambitions for his son, ambitions he drove him towards by pointing out his son’s weaknesses. Last year, Klopp told BT that his childhood was a happy one, but his parents inhabited “two different planets – my mother understood everything. My father not so much.”
Norbert Klopp was a familiar presence on the sideline during his son’s football matches. He was “a powerful voice,” Klopp’s friend Jens Haas told his biographer Elmar Neveling. “He was ruthless,” Klopp said in an interview in 2009. “When we went skiing, I only ever saw his red anorak from behind. He never waited for me. It didn’t matter that I was just a beginner. He wanted me to become the perfect skier.”
Klopp showed more promise as a footballer, but his career was an ordinary one. “He was mature beyond his years,” Hesse says. Klopp became a father while a young player and it reenforced his belief that he would have to do the most with his talents, wherever they lay. “He told me once he knew he would never get rich from football,” Hesse says.
Klopp moved from one lower league club to another, studying sports science while he played for Eintracht Frankfurt’s Amateurs, but he found a home at Mainz 05. “It takes a special type of character to succeed at Mainz,” Hesse says. Klopp had that character.
Klopp arrived as a striker and early in his career scored four goals in a game, but when Wolfgang Frank arrived at the club, Klopp moved into defence.
Some players go into management and become the opposite of all they were as footballers, but Klopp’s playing career had many similarities with his management style.
“Sometimes he lost control out on the pitch because he had so many good ideas in his head,” Frank said, “but not the footballing talent to act on them.” Management was a logical step.
If Klopp’s magnetism and charisma were central to his progress, his footballing beliefs were shaped during his time under Frank. Mainz were desperate so they abandoned the core belief of German sides – a sweeper system – and consciously followed the model of Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan.
The style worked for Mainz, and when Frank resigned in 1997, the sporting director of the club Christian Heidel knew that the new manager would have to follow the same philosophy. Much of German football remained committed to different ideas which made it difficult to find a coach who would adapt to the club’s plans.
Mainz also had a collection of strong-willed players, Klopp among them, who were devoted to Frank’s ways. A year later, Frank returned, stayed a couple of more years and moved on. Once again, a new manager encountered resistance from the group of players known as ‘the shadow cabinet’ when he tried to abandon the flat back four.
Mainz went through six permanent managers between 1997 and 2001 when Heidel again had to consider his options. None of the potential managers appealed to him. He thought about the strong personalities in the squad who had their own ideas. Heidel later told Neveling of his conclusions. “They can sort out their own mess, the team can shoulder some responsibility.”
Heidel suggested to Klopp that he take over as player-manager, but he worried the player would think it was a joke. Instead Klopp accepted with one condition according to Neveling: he wanted to be manager, not player-manager.
Outside the club, many were sceptical if not scathing about Klopp’s appointment. Inside the club, it was different. The players already knew Klopp’s qualities and when he won his first two games, Heidel kept Klopp on until the end of the season when they avoided relegation from the second division.
Klopp followed the Wolfgang Frank way, but he had his own style, his own magnetism which made people want to follow him. The message and the messenger had a similar energy.
Full-Throttle Football
Klopp’s seven years at Mainz provided plenty of the emotional intensity he may have craved, and plenty of intense moments he may not have wanted.
Mainz narrowly missed out on promotion in his first two seasons, the second time on goal difference. “I don’t believe in a football god, only in God,” Klopp said on the second occasion. “I believe that everything that happens in life has meaning. Someday I’ll find out what today really meant.”
Klopp talks openly about his Christianity. He told Des Kelly on BT about it last year.
“I am Christian, I have to say and I believe in God, of course. But, for sure, we’ve only this one life. And we should make the best of it. That’s what I try to. To do the best is not to enjoy each day as if it’s the last, or celebrating, drinking, whatever because tomorrow it could be the end. No, it’s to make it a better place. I think it’s only possible in your surrounding, come in the room and try that people don’t feel worse when you come in. That’s how I understand life, that’s what I try to do with a football team.”
During his time at Mainz, Klopp discovered what he could do with a football team. At the third attempt, Mainz were promoted to the Bundesliga but, as always, things were never easy.
Between November and February of Mainz’s first season in the Bundesliga, they lost seven league games in a row. “As a manager, you’re on your own, you can’t ask another manager: what do you do after fix, six, seven losses on the go,” Klopp said. “No one can give you an answer to that because any other manager would have been sacked before that point.”
He learned about himself and what he could do, but if hard work was the central theme, he also discovered there were other ways to make an impact.
The thing about Jürgen Klopp is that he is a TV personality. While he became known within football for what he was doing at Mainz, he made an impact with the German public during the 2006 World Cup hosted by Germany, a tournament which had a profound impact on the country.
“The whole country falls in love with them…and with itself,” Raphael Honigstein wrote about Jurgen Klinsmann’s side who became “the most popular losers the country had ever seen”.
As Germany under Klinsmann moved towards the semi-finals of the tournament, Klopp provided analysis on television, often alongside Franz Beckenbauer. It was a reminder of how far he had come, but also demonstrated something else that didn’t change during his rise: Klopp would always be an outsider.
“He was a natural in front of cameras,” Hesse says. “One of his greatest strengths is that he always finds a very fresh way of telling you something. He always comes up with a new turn of phrase, or a new picture or a new image. He was never boring.”
At Borussia Dortmund, things had become boring. The 1997 European Cup-winning side seemed like it belonged to another age. Things had become increasingly sour. “The feeling was that you only went to matches to see your mates, not to watch the team,” Hesse says.
He remembers the 2008 German Cup final as a good example. Dortmund were playing Bayern Munich. In the third minute of injury-time, Mladen Petric scored an equaliser which would take the game to extra-time.
Hesse noticed that a Dortmund fan in front of him wasn’t celebrating. This struck him as curious as they had equalised against fierce rivals in the final seconds of the game. As they waited for extra-time, he asked the fan why.
“If we win, it means we’ll never get rid of that asshole down there,” the fan said and pointed at the dug-out where Dortmund’s coach was enjoying a rare moment of relief.
They needed a change. “People felt it had become unemotional and boring,” Hesse says. “If that’s how you feel, Jürgen Klopp is the manager for you.”
The Wall of Sound
Mainz’s achievements had been noted in German football, but what had been recognised as well was the manner of them. “Teams who played them felt like they were playing against an extra man,” Hesse says and that was what Dortmund needed.
After a couple of good seasons in the Bundesliga, Mainz were relegated. At the start of the 2007-08 season, Klopp told Heidel he would leave if he didn’t get the club promoted. On the final day of the season, Mainz needed to win to get promoted, but they also needed Hoffenheim to fail to win at home. Mainz won, but Hoffenheim also won 5-0.
On 23rd May, 2008, more than 20,000 people gathered in Mainz to say farewell to Klopp. “All that I am, all that I’m capable of, you all made that possible,” he told the crowd.
There was another club who wanted to believed that everything was possible.
Like all Dortmund fans, Heiko Wasser has to provide the context, he has to remind you of what went before. After Ottmar Hitzfeld won the European Cup in 1997, the club had “a lot of very strange managers”, he says. Like Hesse, he remembers an atmosphere different to the Dortmund known today, a less colourful, less exciting place. Then it changed. “All of a sudden, there was Jürgen Klopp.”
Hesse makes a similar point. “What most people forget is that Dortmund didn’t sign him to win trophies, they signed him because they needed a shot in the arm.”
Other clubs had looked at him, but decided he was too much of a maverick. Klopp just didn’t look like a football manager.
At Dortmund, some fans wondered what they were doing hiring a television personality. Hesse remembers getting a call from a friend, another Dortmund fan who had been a sceptic. “This guy is entirely different to how I expected him to be.”
Klopp also had to get used to a few things. Hesse recalls a conversation where Klopp told him what he had been offered to join. “I knew there wasn’t much money, but I did have to ring them up and say you know I’m earning more money at Mainz,” he told Hesse.
Klopp met with supporters’ groups, in part Hesse believes, because he knew he would have to take some tough decisions and he would need their understanding. He decided to sell Petric and, a year later, Alexander Frei who didn’t fit in with the type of football he wanted. Wasser got to know Klopp during his years at Dortmund. He wasn’t a close friend, their conversations were never heavy or philosophical, they never discussed God or Christianity, but they had a few late nights together, and he understood what it was like to experience his transformative zeal.
While there was a lot more to Klopp than the caricature, Wasser realised early on that the enthusiasm his manager displayed on the touchline was authentic, and remained whether the manager was in the dug-out or discussing the game late into the night.
“He had a new idea of football,” Wasser says. This was the Mainz idea, now taken to a higher level, but Klopp never lost his vision. “You need an absolute belief in your own idea,” Wassler says.
Klopp had found a home in Mainz, but he identified with Dortmund as easily. “He never drank wine or champagne, only beer,” Wasser says. Klopp also smoked Lucky Strikes, but after he left Dortmund, he cut back as he lost weight and lived a healthier lifestyle.
He also adopted a rescue dog who required much medical attention. Klopp paid for several operations on the dog’s hip. He named the dog Emma after Lothar Emmerich, one of the stars of the 1966 Dortmund side. When he became manager at Liverpool, he ensured that Emma made the trip to Merseyside as well.
Some might see significance in this devotion to a lame and disregarded animal. Klopp believes in the underdog. “He is a football romantic,” Hesse says, but it doesn’t mean he will never work for those who he considered his natural opponents.
Klopp won two Bundesliga titles with Dortmund and reached the Champions League final, but he was always competing with Bayern Munich, who could spend more, do more and, as he saw it, take more.
“Bayern go about football in the same way that the Chinese go about industry,” Klopp said once. “They look at what the others are doing, and then they copy it with other people and more money. And then they overtake you.”
Some saw that comment as Klopp just being Klopp, a flash of anger which didn’t mean much. There were moments when he reacted to something in a manner he would quickly regret. When he had a touchline confrontation with a fourth official as Dortmund lost against Napoli in 2013, he wondered what had happened to him, but he never felt it wouldn’t happen again.
His manner had endeared himself to supporters, but there was more to it than fury and enthusiasm. “It’s too easy to see him as just a master motivator,” Hesse says.
He was that, too but his final season seemed to put a lot of what he had achieved in jeopardy.
But some things were non-negotiable and when it was announced he was leaving, as they had in Mainz, the Dortmund fans knew they were losing someone special.
On his first day at Liverpool, Klopp reminded people of something.
“When I left Dortmund I said, ‘It’s not so important what people think when you come in, it’s much more important what people think when you leave.”
The Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Few clubs ask as much of their managers as Liverpool. Few clubs are as ready to treat a manager who will be trapped between the pincer jaws of tradition and expectation as a saviour on one hand, and a man who might squander all that is essential to the club on the other.
“What Liverpool do to managers is we drive them fucking mental,” says Neil Atkinson of the Anfield Wrap.
“The two managers I worked under longest are Gerard Houllier and Rafa Benítez,” Jamie Carragher said in an interview with The Telegraph three years ago. “I have so much respect for the two of them. I would argue with anyone they did good jobs at Liverpool given what they won, and they both certainly helped me. But what I would also say is the fella who walked in the door was not the same fella who walked out.”
The reason for this is simple, Atkinson says: the league. Liverpool need to win the league and every manager who arrives must eventually wrestle with a problem which is not just a career goal, but an existential demand.
Liverpool are not unique in thinking a manager has to understand their club as Louis Van Gaal has discovered at Old Trafford, but they can be unforgiving of those who show a lack of understanding.
When Roy Hodgson was appointed Liverpool’s manager in 2010, his appointment was hailed by many in English football who felt he deserved the job after a lifetime in the game, and a good record at his previous club, Fulham.
Results were the most important factor in ensuring Hodgson was sacked in January, but he also managed to sound exactly how a Liverpool manager shouldn’t sound. Before Liverpool played Northampton in the League Cup, he said they represented a “formidable challenge”, which turned out to be right as Liverpool lost.
When Alex Ferguson accused Fernando Torres of diving, Hodgson replied that Ferguson was “entitled to his opinion”, while he told one reporter that he sounded “too Scouse”.
All these moments helped create the correct impression that Hodgson didn’t belong at Liverpool the way he belongs, say, at the FA.
Whether it matters is another question. Klopp is different, but what protection that offers remains to be seen. “Liverpool supporters like foreigners, they like the other,” Atkinson says.
Klopp has a quality which may protect him if results are bad, but even if he is an outsider, a maverick and a man who knows how to perform well on television, eventually he will need to win.
Hesse was surprised Klopp took the Liverpool job at that stage in the season when he would have to work for so long with players he didn’t sign.
On the other hand, since October, Klopp has been able to get to know much more about the club and English football. He has criticised Liverpool’s supporters for leaving the ground early, while there are other signs of what will be expected.
Last month, Liverpool announced that Andreas Kornmayer, Bayern Munich’s fitness coach, will join the club next season. The intensity will increase, and those like Christian Benteke and Jordon Ibe who have been found wanting will probably depart.
But all the players will have to absorb some big ideas. Jürgen Klopp is not a caricature, he contains multitudes and he may have arrived in England with the most radical idea of all.
Atkinson feels this idea might be central to what Klopp believes in. It goes against a lot of what football is supposed to be about in the modern era, when it has become an angry confrontation, a constant and attritional grind between players – uncaring, millionaire players – and the fans of the club they support. Klopp wants unity, a shared purpose and relentless work. But he also wants it to be fun.
In 2008, Stern magazine asked Klopp if he had a philosophy of life and, of course, he did. “That wherever you were, you made it a little better. That you gave all you could. That you loved, were loved and didn’t take yourself too seriously.”
In a football world which stresses passion, it may be a counter-intuitive idea that one day is viewed as the secret of his success.
Another line about football and life and death often gets trotted out when Liverpool are being discussed, but Klopp might remind the club and its supporters of something once understood, but which has been forgotten. Football, like life, is too important to be taken seriously.
