Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story Read online

  Aware of United’s interest, Watzke had intended to insist that Klopp honour his contract, which had been extended to 2018 only the preceding autumn. Sensing that the 46-year-old was quite conflicted, Watzke changed tack and opted for a very risky strategy. If Klopp wanted to go to Man Utd, he wouldn’t stand in his way, he told him, playing on their mutual trust and a connection that had long since crossed from business into the territory of friendship. After some deliberation–and the conversation at Watzke’s kitchen table–the BVB manager came to the conclusion that his work at the Signal Iduna Park was not yet done.

  United, however, felt there was still a possibility of luring him away. When Moyes received his inevitable marching orders on 22 April, Klopp was quickly installed as the bookmakers’ favourite to succeed the Scot. Incessant media speculation in the UK prompted the Swabian to release a statement via the Guardian the next day, to kill the rumour. ‘Man Utd is a great club and I feel very familiar with their wonderful fans,’ it read, ‘but my commitment to Borussia Dortmund and the people is unbreakable.’

  Klopp continued to attract interest from the Premier League, regardless. Six months after he had turned down Woodward, Manchester United’s local rivals Manchester City made an approach. Tottenham Hotspur, too, enquired about his services. At the same time, Klopp used an interview with BT Sport ahead of Dortmund’s Champions League game at Arsenal to make his long-term intentions known. Asked whether he would be coming to England once his time at Borussia was over, the answer was unequivocal. ‘It’s the only country, I think, where I should work, really, [after] Germany,’ he nodded, ‘because it’s the only country I know the language a little bit. And I need the language for my work. So we will see. If somebody will call me, then we will talk about it.’

  The writing was very much on the wall then, Watzke says. Dortmund were having their first–and only–poor domestic campaign with Klopp in charge, and an escape to rainier climes all of a sudden held more attraction than before. Watzke: ‘Our season was already in the toilet, and you got that distinct feeling… For me it was clear that he wouldn’t go anywhere else in Germany after Borussia, he wouldn’t have been able to do that. He always said he didn’t study English but I’m pretty sure he polished it a little bit. I could observe that he had. It was obvious that he’d go to the Premier League. That’s his game.’

  A football romanticist, Klopp had long been an avowed fan of the real, no-holds-barred version of the sport played across the channel. At a Spanish winter training camp as Mainz coach in 2007, he had devoured Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch (and chased a lizard around his hotel room with his toothbrush in front of a TV crew); much of the inspiration for his brand of muscular, passionate football, as well as the idea that his teams could feed off the electricity of a fanatical crowd, derived from the sport’s motherland. Both at Mainz and at Dortmund, the crowds belted out passable versions of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, conjuring up fervent atmospheres that took conscious inspiration from (idealised) English traditions. ‘I like what we in Germany call “Englischer Fußball”: rainy day, heavy pitch, everybody is dirty in the face and they go home and can’t play for the next four weeks,’ he said to the Guardian in 2013. That year, his young Dortmund team had gatecrashed Europe’s elite competition, bursting all the way to the final of the Champions League, while he was wearing a baseball cap that had the word ‘Pöhler’ imprinted on it–Ruhr area slang for somebody playing football the old-fashioned way, ‘on a Sunday morning on a lawn, the basics, loving the game’.

  Almost exactly one year after Klopp had said no to United, his bond with Dortmund turned out to be breakable after all. He announced he would resign at the end of the 2014–15 season, making sure to add that he didn’t intend to take a sabbatical.

  In an art nouveau villa in Bremen’s leafy Schwachhausen quarter, the phone started ringing a few weeks into the new Premier League season. As Brendan Rodgers’ time at Anfield came to a slow, drawn-out end, a number of people contacted Klopp’s agent Marc Kosicke, promising to make an introduction to Liverpool. One, a German football agent, said he knew Kenny Dalglish really well. Kosicke preferred to wait. Eventually, somebody purporting to be Liverpool FC chief executive Ian Ayre called. Could they have a conversation about Klopp coming to Anfield? They could, Kosicke replied, but only via a video Skype call. While Ayre hung up, ahead of calling again over the app, Kosicke did a quick image search of the Liverpool official. Just to be sure. Too many pranksters and time wasters out there.

  ‘Once you’ve been at Dortmund, where can you go as a coach?’ Martin Quast, a friend of Klopp since the early nineties, asks. ‘In Germany, there’s only the national team left for Kloppo, everything else would be a step down, even Bayern. Kloppo gets off on emotions, on empathy, on rocking the house, on being a part of something really big. Compared with Dortmund, Bayern doesn’t really give you that. I could only imagine him taking on a club abroad, a club like Liverpool.’

  Christian Heidel says Klopp had only one reservation: his English. ‘We talked about it for a long time. He asked me: “Should I do it?” I said: “The spoken word is your weapon, you know that. You have to decide if you can get across what’s important in English. If you let others talk for you, it won’t work. You’re only 70 per cent Klopp then. You need to be sure.” And then he said: “I’ll manage it. I’ll study now, and I’ll get there.” And since he’s very intelligent, he got there, very quickly. I think at the time [of LFC’s approach], no other club would have stood a chance with him. He’d always been keen on them, he was excited by the emotional dimension of the job. I don’t think he’d have gone to Manchester City or a club like that–even though they really wanted him.’

  Klopp’s name had first cropped up at Anfield in the spring of 2012, as possible successors to Kenny Dalglish were being sounded out. A middle-man got in touch with the Dortmund coach but was told in no uncertain terms that Klopp had no intention of leaving. He was on the way to winning a historic double.

  In September 2015, things got much more serious, rapidly. Brendan Rodgers’ poor start to the season had prompted Boston-based Fenway Sports Group (FSG), Liverpool FC’s owners, to scour the market for the next manager. ‘We were thinking about someone who had experience and success at the highest level,’ FSG president Mike Gordon, fifty-two, explains. ‘Jürgen had done that domestically, obviously in the Bundesliga. He really had done that, apart from maybe one or two kicks, in the Champions League, too. I think his credentials as one of the best managers, if not the best, were apparent for all. And we liked the type of football he played. Both the energy and the emphasis on attacking: high-electricity, high-wattage football with an appeal. So from a football sense it was a relatively easy and straightforward decision.’

  While there were ‘obvious grounds for support’ for Klopp, as Gordon puts it, FSG’s point man for Liverpool conducted due diligence on the German to see whether the hype was borne out by reality. ‘I tried to set aside his popularity in the football world and his charisma, for an unbiased analysis,’ says the former hedge fund manager, who started out selling popcorn at baseball games as a kid. ‘I did a fair amount of research along with the people inside the club, determining how he should be evaluated, purely in an analytical and football sense. The process was much the same you would undergo in the investment business before taking a big position. I am happy to say–and it is self-evident at this point–that however high and elevated his reputation was in the football world, the facts were actually more compelling and more persuasive still.’

  Gordon’s research pointed to Klopp having had ‘a decidedly positive effect, in a quantifiable sense, relative to what you might otherwise expect’ on Mainz and Dortmund. Put more simply, the Swabian had outperformed. The appeal to Liverpool, whose strategy is based on a smarter use of resources, in comparison with some of their more financially potent rivals in the Premier League, was clear. ‘In a football sense, it was pretty straightforward,’ says Gordon. ‘But of course, I didn’t k
now if philosophies and personalities, that of the club and Jürgen’s, would mesh. It had to be a mutual fit. We also needed to know whether Jürgen wanted to lead the football programme and project of Liverpool. Those were very important pieces that needed to be determined.’

  A meeting was scheduled in New York on 1 October. Klopp’s and Kosicke’s attempt at secrecy got off to a very bad start, however. In the Lufthansa lounge at Munich airport, one of the staff asked Klopp–whose baseball cap didn’t make for much of a disguise–why he was going to JFK. ‘We’re watching a basketball game,’ he replied. A plausible explanation, except for the fact that the start of the NBA season was another four weeks away.

  An hour after their arrival in Manhattan, the two Germans were rumbled again. As luck would have it, the receptionist at the Plaza Hotel on 5th Avenue hailed from the coach’s footballing hometown. ‘My word, it’s Kloppo!’ he exclaimed in broad Mainz dialect. Somehow, news of the clandestine trip never leaked.

  FSG’s principal owner John W. Henry, LFC chairman Tom Werner, and Gordon met with Klopp and his agent at the offices of law firm Shearman & Sterling on Lexington Avenue, a few blocks to the east. ‘My first impression was that he was very tall. And I am not,’ Gordon laughs. ‘It was very late but we had this very lengthy and substantive talk, and then we adjourned until the next day and met for more lengthy and substantive talks at the hotel. I want to emphasise: these were very much two-way conversations. This was about Jürgen being right for Liverpool FC and Liverpool FC, us as owners, being right for Jürgen.’ Klopp’s charisma, as suspected, was of a similar size to his frame (‘he uses his personal skills, and his way of relating to people, to get across his message’) but what Gordon was struck by most was ‘the enormity of substance’ he detected behind the toothy smile and super-sized persona. ‘It wasn’t about “boy, this guy is really charming, he is going to do wonderfully at press conferences and as a representative of a club”. Very quickly, what came across was his breadth of talent: not just the personal side, but the level of intelligence, the kind of analytical thinking, the logic, the clarity and honesty, his ability to communicate so effectively even though English was not his first language. That side I think he doesn’t always get full credit for because people are so taken with him as a person in the flesh.’

  Klopp told the FSG executives that football was ‘more than a system’, that it was ‘also rain, tackles flying in, the noise in the stadium’. Most of all, he said, the Anfield crowd had to be ‘activated’ by the style of performance, to spur on the team and vice versa in a self-amplifying cycle of exuberance.

  Gordon: ‘It was very hard to find anything that was in any way deficient and that is the honest truth. What I am saying is: it was clear that Jürgen, as a football manager, really was on the same level as a corporate leader or someone you would choose to run your company. I say this as someone who’s spent twenty-seven years as an investor, engaging with some of the very top CEOs and leaders of business in America and Europe. At that point it was obvious to me that he was the right person. So we decided to discuss parameters and that’s when Jürgen excused himself.’

  While Kosicke continued to discuss remuneration, Klopp walked around Central Park. The stroll would last longer than anticipated. Both sides were initially rather far apart, financially, but the outline for an agreement was eventually found.

  After Klopp had returned to Germany, Gordon sent him a text message. ‘Words cannot express how excited we are,’ it read. In his reply, Klopp apologised that he didn’t have the right vocabulary either. But he did know one word that summed up his feelings: ‘Woooooooooooow!!!’

  5. IN THE GAME OF THE FATHER

  In the summer of 1940, school was out for Norbert Klopp. His father Karl, a hired hand at the farms and vineyards surrounding the city of Kirn in Rhineland-Palatinate, needed the six-year-old–the only son in a family of four kids–to join in the work.

  Tending the fertile fields of the south-west kept the Klopps alive during Germany’s darkest years. The region’s most famous football team, 1. FC Kaiserslautern, too, relied on local produce for sustenance, once the sun started to shine again in 1945. The ‘Red Devils’, whose ranks included superstar and recently released POW Fritz Walter, played dozens of friendlies against village sides in exchange for potatoes and onions.

  Norbert Klopp wanted to be a footballer. Who didn’t? He had shot up to 1.91m in his teenage years, and grown into a strong, agile goalkeeper. He played for local side VfR Kirn, one of the best clubs in the region, and his early talent was such that he was invited to a trial with Kaiserslautern in 1952. ‘I was awestruck,’ the eighteen-year-old told family friend Ulrich Rath later, ‘I was on the pitch with all these legendary players…’ Lautern were royalty. They had won the German championship the previous season and would win it again in 1953. Four of their players–Fritz Walter, Ottmar Walter, Werner Liebrich and Werner Kohlmeyer–went on to lift the World Cup in Berne in 1954.

  Klopp, for all his talent, wasn’t quite at their level. Back at VfR Kirn, who had been promoted to the (regionally segmented) first division and took on the likes of Lautern and Mainz 05, he couldn’t get past Alfred Hettfleisch, the number one between the posts. As Kirn’s reserve goalkeeper, Klopp was briefly afforded the newly introduced Vertragsamateur (amateur under contract) status that introduced professionalism in all but name in West Germany. But monthly wages of DM40 to 75 made the players hugely dependent on points bonuses (between DM10 and 40). Klopp had little chance to share in these: since substitutions weren’t permitted, he never made it into the line-up of the first team. He continued in the reserve team against other amateurs, for the fun of it.

  Karl Klopp insisted the boy took on a ‘proper job’. Norbert started an apprenticeship at Müller & Meirer, a manufacturer of small leather goods. About half of Kirn’s population, 5,000 people, worked in the tanning and leather industry in the early 1950s, as Germany’s economic miracle rapidly raised living standards. ‘A leather craftsman earned between DM250 and 300 a month, it was a good job at the time,’ says Horst Dietz, eighty, who worked in the same section as Norbert Klopp, sitting in the row behind him. A row consisted of three people: an apprentice, a ‘gluer’ (often a young girl) and a craftsman, and each room had about twenty rows, supervised by a master at the front. It was piecework: one row produced up to 100 wallets or similar goods a day, working from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., with a one-hour lunch break.

  The loft in Dietz’s house in Kirn resembles a sports pub. Framed shirts and cups from his playing days for VfR Kirn line the walls, there’s a photo of him and Franz Beckenbauer, a huge screen for live football and an actual bar. He used to live in the countryside as a youngster, Klopp’s family were in the town centre. Norbert would often take him home for lunch during the working week. ‘He was like a big brother for me. The Klopps were very well known, but they lived a normal life,’ says Dietz. ‘Working hard was one of their principles.’ If articles remained unfinished at the end of a shift it was expected they would be completed at home. ‘We tried to give them to our grandmas to do, because at fourteen, fifteen, we were interested in girls and going out in the evening,’ he smiles. Unlike Klopp, who was three years his senior, he made it into Kirn’s starting XI as a striker, playing for a few years in the second division before taking on a job with Coca-Cola. ‘Norbert was very ambitious, he always wanted to go to the very top,’ Dietz recalls. ‘He was a daredevil, not only in sport. A charismatic guy who’d go somewhere and immediately own the room. He was full of energy and charm. A ladies’ man, one might say. We often spent the whole day talking about football.’

  In 1959, Norbert Klopp moved south to the Black Forest town of Dornhan, to work in the nearby Sola leather plant. He joined TSF Dornhan as player-manager, playing in a variety of positions. His shots from the edge of the box were much feared, Rath says. The neatly turned out septuagenarian–slick grey hair, lucid eyes–had been a promising footballer himself in his youth, playing for Württemberg’s r
egional team before a treble leg break put paid to his playing career. He’s now SV Glatten’s honorary chairman.

  At a wedding in Dornhan–‘they were public affairs then, you didn’t have to have an invitation,’ Dietz says–Norbert Klopp met Elisabeth ‘Lisbeth’ Reich. The daughter of a brewery owner was considered ‘a good catch’, Dietz adds. Following their wedding in the autumn of 1960, Norbert Klopp helped out in the Schwanen-Bräu family firm, run by his mother-in-law, Helene Reich. Elisabeth’s father had come home from the war with a moving piece of shrapnel in his head and died soon after. Klopp’s role at Schwanen-Bräu included being a Festzeltmeister–the person responsible for setting up beer tents for festivals. Elisabeth’s brother Eugen took over the company until it closed down in 1992.

  In his early thirties, Klopp retrained as a merchant, taking evening lessons in nearby Freudenstadt. His new job, as a sales representative for Fischer, a manufacturer of fixing systems, saw him travel all over the south of Germany during the week. Tall, smooth and handsome, Klopp was ‘born to be a sales person’, says Rath. ‘He was likeable, sociable. A great entertainer who could tell the best stories. He could speak in the Swabian dialect to someone on the right and standard German to the left.’ Her husband, Klopp’s mother Elisabeth said, was a natural orator: ‘He could just go.’ ‘An ace, rhetorically,’ is how Isolde Reich describes her father.

  Martin Quast’s father, who also hails from Kirn, knew Norbert Klopp well. They played field handball together. ‘He told me that Norbert was always at the centre of everything. “Where there was Norbert, there was laughter.” Anyone who had the faintest interest in sport in Kirn knew and liked him. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?’

  Norbert Klopp was a stickler for appearances. ‘He needed more time in the bathroom in the morning than us three women,’ Isolde smiles. ‘He always looked his Sunday best. Jogging trousers were considered appropriate for sports but not acceptable inside the house. And under no circumstances outside!’ One day, she recalls, Norbert drove one of his sons-in-law and a friend to see Jürgen play for Mainz 05. He wore a white shirt, a tie and yellow V-neck jumper, ‘a bit like [the then German foreign secretary Hans-Dietrich] Genscher’. They stopped at a service station, and Norbert took the opportunity to lecture the critically underdressed state of his companions ‘on the right attire for viewing a football game in Mainz’. Even at carnival, a dress code was strictly enforced: the whole family would go as clowns, with Jürgen riding in a handcart as a toddler. Klopp senior ironed his own shirts and cut the kids’ hair. His son’s eyebrows formed a natural border below which no strand of hair was allowed to fall. Stubble was also strictly verboten. ‘Norbert, who dressed immaculately at all times, and Jürgen sometimes clashed about his casual outfits and sporty style,’ says Rath. One of the first things her brother did upon moving out of the house was to ‘throw away the shaver and hair brush’, Isolde adds.