Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story Read online

  ‘The next thing, I’ll never forget this,’ Heidel says. ‘The journalists left and Klopp said: “We’re off to train now.” We boarded a couple of buses and drove to Friedrich-Moebus-Stadion. And I got there and I saw something that made me think: “Ah, there’s life here.” There were these poles on the pitch everywhere. The team were practising moving side to side in formation again. That’s when I knew: we had returned to the times of Wolfgang Frank.’

  The squad was as surprised as the journalists that Klopp was the new boss. ‘All of a sudden, there’s Kloppo in the meeting room addressing us as coach,’ former FSV midfielder Sandro Schwarz remembers. ‘He was still one of us, really, you didn’t have to address him formally or keep your distance. He had a natural authority but we were still close, and he followed through on things. The team didn’t mind because we were in such difficulties in the relegation fight. Nobody believed in us any more. The boys who had been there for a while longed to play the 4-4-2 system again, the system that had made us strong. With his positive demeanour, he got us to adopt the old behavioural patterns once more.’

  The first-ever team meeting left a lasting impression on Heidel. ‘I still remember how that room looked. This guy had never addressed a team before. Never. I was a bit leaner then, fitter. If somebody had given me a pair of boots right then, I would have dashed out to play against Duisburg after hearing him talk. I had witnessed ten, eleven coaches before. But nothing like that. You wanted to go out and play straight away. I left the room and encountered many doubters. They said, “He’s only a player…” I told Strutz and my colleagues on the board that we would win, 100 per cent. If the team were as sure as I was, we had to win, we would win. I can’t tell you the exact words but it was a mixture of tactics and motivation, more of a lecture. We could have played immediately. He talked and talked until the team believed they were good.’

  ‘Taking the job felt like a kamikaze mission,’ Klopp admitted to spox.com a decade later. ‘There was only one question I asked myself: what can we do to stop losing? I didn’t think about winning the game at all. The first session was all about running across the pitch tactically. I put up these poles and wondered what the right distances between the lines had been under Wolfgang Frank. Most players still had the right moves lodged in their long-term memory from the days they had practised it under him until they had been blue in the face. We wanted to play a game that was independent of the opposition.’ As far as the motivational part of his pep talk was concerned, it too echoed one of Frank’s themes: that ‘investing the final 5 per cent’ (Klopp) would make the difference.

  Klopp made ‘simple decisions’, Kramny says. ‘I moved from right midfield into the centre. One or two more changes. Heidel told us that we all had to pull together after giving previous coaches such a hard time. We all felt responsible. There wasn’t much time to do a lot, so the idea was to inject a bit of fun, to practise our shape and dead balls. And then we said: Okay, let’s go. Run, run, run. It was pissing down on matchday.’

  Heidel: ‘There were 4,500 people in the ground. Playing on Ash Wednesday is something special in Mainz. Duisburg were the much better side, a hot contender for promotion. I have to honestly say we played them off the park. We won 1-0 but they never got near our goal. They couldn’t deal with our system at all. The people in the stadium went berserk.’

  Those in the main stand had a particularly good time. They saw a Mainz coach ‘behaving like the twelfth man, effectively playing the game on the touchline’, Heidel adds. ‘The stand only held 1,000 people at the time but they were in stitches laughing about that guy down below. I don’t even know where he ran to when we scored. Maybe he was even sent off by the referee?’ (He wasn’t, on this occasion.) ‘It was all very, very special. But you have to say this: that was his birth. And then he was on his way.’

  3. REVOLUTION 09

  Dortmund 2008

  It’s a sharp winter’s night in Marbella in January 2017, and the Don Pepe Gran Meliá Hotel lobby is a Dynasty set designer’s dream: white marble, gold-cased pillars, potted palm trees. And a man playing the saxophone.

  Borussia Dortmund staffers in shorts are pushing crates of dirty apparel from the evening’s training session past the vacant hotel bar. Sitting on a cream-coloured sofa, Hans-Joachim Watzke takes in the scene with a contented nod. The 58-year-old BVB CEO is a successful entrepreneur; his workwear company, Watex, turns over €250m annually. He’s the man who saved the club from bankruptcy in 2005, the man who brought back the good football, the excitement and the trophies to the Westfalenstadion by hiring Jürgen Klopp in 2008. But, like any true supporter, he seems to find the most happiness and pride in just being here, on a ten-day winter break trip to Andalusia with the team. He’s wearing a training suit with his initials on the chest.

  ‘Why Klopp? It’s an easy question to answer,’ he says, setting down his espresso cup. ‘In 2007, it was clear that we would survive as a club, but also clear that we had no money to put into the team.’

  Ballspielverein Borussia 09 e.V Dortmund, Bundesliga champions in 1995 and 1996, Champions League winners in 1997 and champions again in 2002, had done a ‘Leeds’. A cash injection of €130m from floating the club on the Frankfurt stock exchange in 2000 had been spent on hugely expensive players in an unsustainable arms race with Bayern Munich. When the team failed to qualify for the Champions League in 2005 for the second time in a row, the club almost collapsed under the weight of €240m worth of debt. ‘We were at the club HQ and didn’t know whether we would still have a job the next day,’ stadium announcer and former BVB striker Norbert ‘Nobby’ Dickel says. ‘Awful times.’

  ‘Dortmund is a city that lives with the club, that lives for the club,’ Sebastian Kehl says. The former captain remembers the whole town being on edge, extremely worried that Borussia could be wound up. ‘Taxi drivers, bakers, hotel employees–everybody feared for their livelihood. It was very tough to deal with for us players, knowing that winning or losing won’t make much of a difference.’

  It was Watzke, the former treasurer of the club (not the plc), who saved BVB, by wresting control from the quite literally discredited duo of sporting director Michael Meier and president Gerd Niebaum. He negotiated a loan from Morgan Stanley and a capital increase, enabling Dortmund to buy back their stadium and end a crippling lease-back arrangement. But the radical cost-cutting plan left no funds to buy star names.

  Watzke: ‘[Sporting director] Michael Zorc and I had agreed that we wanted to build a young team. [Left-back] Marcel Schmelzer was already there, and [midfielder Kevin] Großkreutz. We wanted to play different football as well. Under Bert van Marwijk and Thomas Doll, the ball would go from one end of the back four to the other and back again, ten times in a row. We had 57 per cent possession but there was no action. You can’t play like that in Dortmund. We wanted to promise people a team that ran so hard that bits would come off. That’s what we had encountered at Mainz when we played there in the prior two years. You always felt they weren’t that good but somehow made it very difficult for you and beat you sometimes. Because they had the mentality of murderers. And a very good set-up, tactically. That had to be down to their coach. Taking someone from the second division would have been difficult for Dortmund now. But back then, it was possible.’

  Borussia weren’t entirely sure Klopp could make the transition from patron saint at Mainz to reviving a Bundesliga giant that had fallen on hard times, Christian Heidel reveals. ‘They had concerns,’ he says. Watzke first approached the Mainz general manager in October 2007, ahead of the German FA annual general meeting. Heidel: ‘He phoned and asked if we could go for a coffee. I didn’t know him then. We sat down and the talk quickly turned to Jürgen Klopp. His contract was up at the end of the season. Watzke asked: “How good is Klopp?” I said: “If I now say that he’s good, you’ll pinch him off me. I could also lie and tell you that he’s useless. But then you’ll tell that to Kloppo and he’ll be upset with me.” Then I said: “This guy is
a Bundesliga coach.”’ Watzke probed further, without explicitly mentioning Dortmund. Was Klopp able to coach a big Bundesliga club? ‘I told him that Kloppo could coach any club in the world,’ Heidel says. ‘That’s because he’s got an advantage [over his peers]: he’s really intelligent. He will adjust at a big club. If you need someone in a suit and in a tie, don’t get Jürgen Klopp. But if you want a top coach, you’ll have to get him. It wasn’t a case of making an immediate decision but I know that Dortmund were looking at him a bit more closely from that day on. But they still weren’t entirely convinced. Watzke kept on calling me, I don’t know how many times. I always said: “Go for it, go for it. You will never regret the day you sign Jürgen Klopp.”’

  Regrets over the hiring of Thomas Doll were growing all the time at Strobelallee. The former Germany midfielder, in the job since March 2007, failed to inspire the players or the public with the painfully dull brand of football his team played. Dortmund were closer to relegation than to the top of the table and ended up in thirteenth place, their worst league position in twenty years. A good run in the DFB Pokal, where in the final in April they were beaten only by Bayern Munich in extra-time (2-1), couldn’t deflect from the shortcomings. ‘Perhaps it was the most valuable final defeat in the club’s history,’ Sascha Fligge and Frank Fligge wrote in Echte Liebe, a chronicle of Dortmund’s comeback over the past decade. ‘In the case of a cup triumph, the club’s leadership would have had a hard time firing coach Thomas Doll, in whose qualities they had stopped believing. Jürgen Klopp might never have gone to Dortmund. History would have taken a very different turn.’ ‘The defeat [in Berlin] was part of the strategic plan to clear the path for Jürgen Klopp,’ Watzke joked later. Klopp, incidentally, had followed the match in Berlin as a TV pundit for state broadcaster ZDF and confided in programme editor Jan Doehling that he wanted to be ‘down there on the touchline one day’. Back at their Berlin hotel, Dortmund fans were serenading him with ‘Jürgen Klopp, you are the best man’ in the lobby. They wanted him to take over.

  Watzke says he always felt that Klopp’s personality was big enough for the Herculean task: ‘We had a sense from his TV work that he had the ability to present [a big project]. We didn’t talk about any other manager. We only wanted Klopp.’ A clandestine meeting at the offices of one of Watzke’s friends not far from Mainz brought further certainty following Doll’s resignation on 19 May. ‘Once the employees were all gone, we got together,’ says Watzke. ‘It was a fantastic conversation. We told him our vision for the club, and it corresponded with his. Michael Zorc had gone to meet him separately the day before. We wanted to form an opinion independently of each other. We’re often in agreement, but we were completely in agreement here. The chemistry was immediately very strong.’

  Chemistry of a more synthetic kind exerted a pull on Klopp, too, however. Bayer 04 Leverkusen, owned by the eponymous pharmaceutical company, had also set their eye on the coach. They didn’t have the cachet of the Black and Yellows, but were free from money problems as well as possessing a decent, well-balanced squad capable of challenging for Champions League qualification. ‘Kloppo didn’t want to go to Dortmund at first, he wanted to go to Leverkusen,’ says Heidel. ‘I said to him he had to go to Dortmund, because of the emotions there, and so on. He had a conversation with [Leverkusen CEO] Wolfgang Holzhäuser. They couldn’t make up their minds… Then Dortmund’s interest grew more concrete. But Klopp wasn’t sure initially.’

  His remuneration was another sticking point, Heidel adds, with a small chuckle. ‘A funny story. Dortmund’s first offer came in lower than his existing wages at Mainz in Bundesliga 2. They weren’t that flush at the time. Kloppo said: “Listen, they offered me less than I’m making at Mainz.” I said: “Don’t worry, I’ll help you.” Dortmund couldn’t get their head round the fact he was making that much already. Watzke called again: “How much does he earn at yours?” “He earns good money here, he’s the most important man, I’d rather save money on a player,” I told him. “I don’t believe it,” Watzke said. They revised his salary upwards.’ Klopp signed a two-year deal at Dortmund’s Lennhof hotel on the morning of Friday 23 May and was unveiled at 11 a.m. at the stadium.

  Borussia, in truth, had more than pecuniary rewards to offer. In Josef Schneck, they employed a press officer that Klopp really liked, for starters. ‘We first met in April 2004, at an event in Cologne,’ Schneck, a kind, jovial man in his mid-sixties, says. That night, Klopp was receiving a Fair Play award from the association of German sports journalists for the way he had dealt with the heartbreaking finishes to the previous two Bundesliga 2 seasons. Matthias Sammer, then the Borussia Dortmund coach, was invited to give the laudatory speech. ‘We went there with Matthias, and Karin, his wife, and we sat with Klopp at the same table. It was a very nice evening,’ Schneck recalls. It’s a touching little anecdote, considering that Sammer and Klopp would fall out spectacularly a few years later, at the height of the Bayern–Dortmund rivalry.

  ‘I also knew Jürgen from press conferences [when Mainz had played in the Bundesliga between 2004 and 2007],’ Schneck continues. ‘Once, Mainz drew 1-1 with us, in Dortmund, and I congratulated him on winning a point. To draw at Dortmund was a success for Mainz, wasn’t it? But he just looked at me and said: “Congratulations to you too.” That was classic Klopp. And after he came here, in his first few weeks at the club, he joked to Michael Zorc: “I couldn’t decide whether or not I should sign for Dortmund. But I knew you had a decent press officer, so you can’t have been too bad a club.”’

  What’s more, few clubs could count on such fervent support. The Signal Iduna Park’s famous ‘Yellow Wall’, Europe’s biggest terrace with 25,000 standing places, appealed to ‘the football passion that burns inside of me’, Klopp told reporters at his unveiling. ‘Whoever has been down on the pitch here knows the [Yellow Wall] is something extra-special, one of the most impressive things you can find in football. It’s an honour for me to be the coach of BVB and to be able to get the club back into the groove. It’s a wonderful story. I’m incredibly excited to get to work here.’ Was it a big step up for him, from the carnival club Mainz to one of the league’s traditional heavyweights?, somebody enquired. ‘We didn’t stagger from one gala session to the next in Mainz,’ he smiled. ‘We worked with great discipline. I feel well prepared.’

  There were rumours in the city that some of the sponsors and companies involved in Dortmund’s debt restructuring had hoped for a more urbane coach, a big name with international pulling power.

  Klopp, perhaps aware of these misgivings, wore a jacket in the press room. But no tie. ‘Secretly, quietly, he has worked on the gentrification of his wardrobe over the last few months,’ Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntags-Zeitung noted. His fiery rhetoric, however, paid homage to the working-class region’s deep-rooted love of football as wild entertainment, a source of identity and a quasi-religious experience.

  ‘It’s always about making the crowd happy, it’s about producing games with a recognisable style,’ he vowed. ‘When matches are boring, they lose their rationale. My teams have never played chess on the pitch. I hope we will witness the odd full-throttle occasion here. The sun won’t shine every day in Dortmund, but we have a chance to make it shine more often.’ Süddeutsche Zeitung’s BVB reporter Freddie Röckenhaus was very impressed with so much solar-powered optimism. ‘If Klopp trains the team as well as he does punch lines, Dortmund will soon be ready for the Champions League,’ he wrote. ‘It’s only taken him forty-five minutes to sweep BVB supporters off their feet with his infectious sparkle and eloquence. If ever a coach’s mentality fit right into the football-mad Ruhr area, then Klopp’s does.’

  The excitement was not confined to followers of Borussia. On Klopp’s personal home page, a user stated his approval. ‘It’s great that you’re going to BVB,’ he wrote. ‘That club isn’t my team at all but I own plenty of their shares. Since I have great confidence in you and am aware of your abilities, I’m already looking forward to h
aving more money in my pocket.’ The anonymous investor’s trust would prove justified. Dortmund’s share price rose by 132 per cent: from €1.59 on 23 May 2008 to €3.70 on the day of Klopp’s departure, precisely seven years later.

  4. THE ROAD TO ANFIELD

  2012–2015

  On 11 April 2014 at 10 p.m., Jürgen Klopp met Hans-Joachim Watzke for a drink at Munich’s Park Hilton Hotel and told him that he had made up his mind. He was staying put.

  Earlier that day, ahead of the team’s departure for an away game at Bayern’s Allianz Arena, the Borussia Dortmund coach had still been undecided. He’d received a tempting, hugely lucrative offer from the north-west of England, a chance to take over and revolutionise one of the biggest clubs in the world. ‘We first met in my kitchen,’ says Watzke. ‘Without going into details, it was an interesting talk. I think it made a difference because he said to me on the plane that we needed to talk again in the evening. I was due to have dinner with my daughter, who lived in Munich, so I could only see him at 10 p.m. He straightaway said: “I can’t deal with this pressure any more. I’ve turned them down.”’

  Not long before, Manchester United executive vice chairman Ed Woodward had flown out to see Klopp in Germany. David Moyes’ short tenure at Old Trafford was coming to an end, and Klopp was United’s favourite to replace him, to bring back a sense of adventure to the Red Devils’ game. Woodward told Klopp that the Theatre of Dreams was ‘like an adult version of Disneyland’, a mythical place where, as the nickname suggested, the entertainment on show was world-class and dreams came true. Klopp wasn’t entirely convinced by that sales pitch–he found it a bit ‘unsexy’, he told a friend–but he didn’t dismiss the proposition out of hand either. After almost six years in the job at Dortmund, perhaps the time was ripe for a change of scenery.