Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story Page 4

  It was hugely important for Norbert that the kids witnessed historical events, such as the moon landing or Muhammad Ali’s fights. The family huddled around a small, black-and-white television in the living room, fortified by tea and sandwiches. If one of the children fell asleep, Norbert would poke them in the side to wake them up again.

  Within a few years of coming to Glatten, Norbert Klopp had become one of its most important sportsmen. He played in SV Glatten’s seniors’ football team until he was forty (while his children picked up empties on the touchline to earn a few Pfennige), coached the first team for a season and served as a board member. As his legs tired, his passion for playing tennis grew. Norbert was instrumental in setting up SV Glatten’s tennis section, and the building of a clay court. The club had initially hired a concrete court in an old quarry in Dornhan after Klopp had paid the reluctant owner DM50 to give the Glatteners access. In winter, he went skiing with Ulrich Rath. Isolde was named after Rath’s sister.

  Every Saturday, in honour of the father’s return home, the house was tidied up. Little Jürgen, however, did his best to excuse himself from these chores, telling his older sisters that he had to study for school. ‘In practice, he was lying comfortably in bed, his head buried in a book,’ Isolde says. His roguish ways reminded her of Emil i Lönneberga, the blond, blue-eyed prankster in Astrid Lindgren children’s book.

  A photo from his first day at school shows him with a bandaged knee. He had run out of the house, traditional cone of candy in hand, and stumbled. ‘You see,’ his father gently admonished him, ‘if you hadn’t run so fast, you wouldn’t have a Band-Aid on the picture.’ On other occasions, he fell off his desk chair, lacerating an eyelid, and ran into a scooter, cutting his nose.

  ‘Jürgen’s birth was a huge moment for Norbert,’ says Rath. ‘He finally had a real sportsman to share his passions with.’ Pressure on the girls to excel in sports ceased almost immediately after Jürgen’s arrival. They were allowed to devote time to their own hobbies, like ballet and music. Elisabeth, a loving, even-tempered mum, who decided that the kids should become Protestants, like her (Norbert was Catholic), had a hard time fitting in all the children’s activities.

  Norbert was his son’s personal football, tennis and skiing teacher, and he taught by subjecting him to an ultra-competitive regime. ‘Early in the morning, come rain or shine, he would put me on the touchline on the pitch, let me start running for a bit and then ran himself, overtaking me,’ Jürgen Klopp told Abendblatt in 2009. ‘It was a far cry from being fun.’ The exercise was repeated, week after week, until Klopp was faster than his dad. Norbert also registered him with the athletics club, to improve his pace. In addition, Jürgen would have to spend hours practising headers, just like Isolde had done before him.

  Aged six, he joined the ‘E’ youth team (under-11) of SV Glatten, newly formed by coach Ulrich Rath in 1973. In his first game, Jürgen was tackled and did an involuntary somersault, breaking his collarbone on impact. ‘The very next week he was back, his arm in a sling, staring longingly at his teammates from the sidelines and running to catch wayward balls, just to be involved somehow,’ Rath says. ‘That showed you what he was all about.’

  He takes his visitor down a few steps, deeper into local history. Rath’s basement is a shrine to all things SV Glatten. Naturally, it’s the team of youngsters including his two sons and Jürgen Klopp, his third one, the son of all of Glatten, that takes pride of place. Rath still gets upset when the media refers to Klopp as a Stuttgarter: ‘He was only there for one week, in the first few days after his birth!’ he shakes his head and takes out a photo. Here they all are as nine-year-olds, celebrating a cup win in a regional tournament played on Pfingsten, Pentecost. Klopp, the team’s striker, later self-mockingly joked that it was the only trophy he ever won as a footballer. Hundreds of hobby footballers have since won the Klopp trophy, but only a few of them know much about that fact. It had been Norbert Klopp’s idea, Rath recalls, to cobble together a prize for the winners of Glatten’s inaugural open tournament in 1977: he took one of his son’s football boots, spray-painted it gold, and mounted it on a wooden box.

  That same year, Stuttgarter Kicker’s under-11s came to Glatten for a friendly game. The boys from the capital of Baden-Württemberg arrived with tents and slept in the nearby woods, where pigs were roasted on an open fire. The occasion is fondly remembered for a rafting trip down the Gumpen, where the Rivers Glatt and Lauter meet. Many of the Kickers lads fell into the water, among them an eventual European Cup winner. Robert Prosinecˇki, the future playmaker of Red Star Belgrade and Yugoslavia/Croatia, was playing for the Swabians at the time but was ultimately deemed not good enough. He returned to Zagreb two years later, aged ten.

  Jürgen, like most boys from the region, supported Kickers’ bigger, more successful, rivals, VfB Stuttgart. A trial as a youngster was unsuccessful but he did get a red tracksuit, which he proudly wore until Stefanie ruined it in an accident with a hot iron. Perhaps to make up for that tragic loss, his grandmother Anna famously knitted him a white jumper with a red hoop and a ‘4’ on the back, the number of his favourite player, West Germany international Karl-Heinz Förster. He wore it on trips to the Neckarstadion with friends and family.

  Klopp admired the hard-nosed centre-back’s calmness under pressure and utter dedication. ‘We later found out that we had the same sporting idols,’ says Martin Quast. ‘Förster, a man with strategic vision, and Boris Becker, who lived off impulse and emotions. Kloppo once told me that he would be standing on the terraces as an ultra if football hadn’t worked out for him, and that he had the red hoop implanted in his chest.’ His love for VfB might have cooled a little in subsequent years. Ulrich Rath is moved to tears recalling the day when Klopp, as coach of Mainz 05, evaded officious stewards and jumped over an advertising board in Stuttgart’s stadium to seek out a delegation of his old friends from Glatten, who were sitting in the Untertürckheimer Kurve section. ‘I said to him, “Jürgen, I have a dilemma, two hearts are beating in my chest. One for VfB, one for you.” He said: “Ulrich, that can’t be true. A man only has one heart–and yours is beating for me.” We all laughed but I think he was very serious.’

  Norbert Klopp was one of those football dads who could barely contain his passion on the sidelines. ‘Jürgen has his father’s temperament and his mother’s calmness,’ Isolde Reich says. He felt the force of his father’s uncompromising, exacting standards most acutely when it came to individual sports. Matches between the two Klopps were painfully one-sided affairs, with Norbert unwilling to cede a single point. Jürgen was frustrated, angry even, getting played off the court by a father who was either unable or disinclined to offer any words of support. Neither party enjoyed these early sessions, but Klopp senior considered them a necessary part of Jürgen’s sporting education. They later paired up as a doubles team for Glatten’s tennis club. His father was so obsessed with winning that he once refused to leave the pitch even though he was suffering from a bad sunstroke and was beset by violent chills. Klopp junior stopped the match of his own volition and put his father to bed.

  On the piste, Norbert simply skied downhill, expecting the boy to catch up. ‘Nix gschwätzt isch Lob gnuag’–to say nothing is praise enough–a Swabian proverb goes. Norbert Klopp was its living embodiment. ‘It was his way of getting me to perform,’ Klopp said in an interview with Der Tagesspiegel. ‘When I ran and did skips, he’d say it wasn’t high enough, that there was still space for a whole sheet of paper! He didn’t have the right text available. His tactic was quite obvious, I sussed it out early.’ Klopp had to learn to ‘read between the lines’ to discover traces of his father’s contentment, he added; seamless criticism smothered affirmation. ‘When I scored four goals, he would say that I missed seven other chances, or talk about how well one of my teammates had done. Nevertheless, I knew that he was secretly very proud of me.’

  Left to his own devices after school, Klopp would play more football with Rath’s sons Hartmut
and Ingo. Every patch of grass was transformed into a pitch, and after sunset Klopp would continue to play in the living room, throwing himself on a couch to save shots, or shooting at a small goal that Norbert had put up for him. ‘The house was always full of kids. Jürgen was spoilt by our mum. Anything to make him happy,’ says sister Isolde. A couple of glass panels of the cabinet had to break before the leather ball was replaced by one made from foam. ‘He played and played until he fell asleep exhausted under the dining table.’ Ulrich Rath laughs.

  In the town’s sports hall, blue mats had to serve as goals in lieu of the real thing. Rath had introduced a weekly ‘sports hour’ for boys in the seventies. ‘We were doing gymnastics but the boys always wanted to play football,’ he says. Jürgen Klopp, nicknamed ‘Klopple’ (little Klopp), was often sent forward to ask Herr Rath on behalf of his friends. ‘Jürgen was a decent tennis player, but in his head he was always a footballer. He was quick, dynamic and explosive. He had to kick every ball, even if one or two flew wide and high over the goal. Heading was his speciality. For a few games, I played him as a sweeper but that wasn’t his position. Attack was his calling.’

  ‘It was totally idyllic,’ Klopp told SWR in 2005. ‘There were only five or six boys [of our age] in that little village, and we were the football team, the tennis team and the ski team. It was wonderful, I had a great childhood.’

  Jürgen found going to school easy. At least in the literal sense. He only had to cross the street from his family home to get to Glatten’s primary school. For third and fourth grade, the Rath brothers and him took a bus south to the village of Neuneck. Local legend had it that there was an illegal brothel there at the time, run privately in the back room of a pub. All attempts by the curious schoolboys to find that secretive place of rural sin proved futile, however.

  ‘Jürgen was not a guy to be 100 per cent punctual, but you could rely on him 1000 per cent as a mate,’ says Hartmut Rath, the godfather of Klopp’s son Marc, born in 1988. When the boys weren’t kicking a ball around, they built models and solved puzzles. Klopp had an ‘arty streak’, he adds. ‘He had a huge interest in culture, and listened to many records and tapes of Kabarett artists.’ His favourite was Fips Asmussen, a one-hundred-jokes-a-minute comedian whose early work was more political and satirical (and no doubt funnier, too). ‘Jürgen was a genius in telling jokes, he made everyone in class laugh. He was extremely popular, the life and soul of the classroom,’ Hartmut Rath says.

  Jürgen Klopp has credited ‘Hardy’ for helping him pass his Abitur (A levels). That might be pushing the truth a little bit, but Hartmut admits that his friend–who excelled in languages and sports but was rather less proficient in sciences–did benefit from sitting next to him in class during exams. ‘Copying was easier in those days,’ the younger of the Rath brothers laughs. They both went to the Pro Gymnasium (grammar school) in Dorfstetten and shared a classroom from eighth grade onwards. Klopp had been in a class with Ingo Rath the first two years but went on ‘a lap of honour’–repeating a year, in German schoolkid parlance–on the advice of his teachers. ‘School wasn’t the most important thing to him,’ Hartmut Rath smiles. ‘He was more into football and girls.’ But he was a good kid, somebody who respected his teachers and rarely got into trouble. ‘Hardy’ estimates that the two of them were only given detention a couple of times per year.

  Other transgressions came with their own, swift, punishment. Aged fourteen, Klopp and his friends took part in an open football tournament. Entrants were supposed to be at least sixteen but, as one of the organisers, Norbert Klopp looked the other way. The boys played badly but still took home the first prize–a bottle of whisky–when the victorious side didn’t show at the winner’s ceremony. Jürgen and the Raths imbibed their ill-gotten spoils outside the marquee and came home feeling much the worse for wear.

  The ‘Klopple’ moniker was soon ditched for ‘Der Lange’, the long one, as he started towering over class and teammates. After tenth grade, Hardy and Klopp went to the Eduard-Spranger Wirtschaftsgymnasium in Freudenstadt to prepare for their Abitur. Jürgen had a scooter from the age of fifteen, then drove a couple of 2CVs–‘Ente’, duck, Germans called it–one of which was the colour of Bordeaux red. Robert Mongiatti, one of Norbert Klopp’s best friends, serviced the car outside the family residence. Jürgen later inherited a bright yellow VW Golf from sister Stefanie.

  A school friend often invited class members to study in a secluded garden shed. The curriculum wasn’t always strictly adhered to, by any means. In Rath’s basement and Norbert Klopp’s garage, the teenagers threw parties, playing spin the bottle. If somebody’s parents were away, bedrooms were made available to couples. Although details are sketchy, French kissing was very probably on the syllabus: Klopp’s class went to the city of Port-sur-Saône on a school exchange, speaking exclusively French for two weeks. The boys enjoyed their time in Burgundy so much they returned for a camping holiday the following summer.

  ‘Jürgen was the leader as far as social activities were concerned,’ Hartmut Rath says. ‘He was outgoing, he was part of the school’s theatre group. He was interested in loads of different things, people used to say he had an eye for the bigger picture.’ There were often heated political discussions between Jürgen and his more conservatively minded father.

  In 1998, three weeks before his planned retirement, Norbert Klopp fell ill. Cancer of the liver. Doctors gave him three weeks to three months to live. The diagnosis came as a total shock to the family. Norbert had led a healthy, sporty life. He didn’t smoke. ‘The cancer won’t get me,’ he vowed. He resolved to stay upbeat and found encouragement in Lance Armstrong’s book on beating testicular cancer. The children took him to many different clinics. His liver was surgically removed, frozen and re-implanted. He lived for over two more years, determined to enjoy every single day. ‘His traditional view of men and women changed, he was more understanding of my rebellious streak and my quest for freedom,’ Isolde Reich says. Shortly before his death in 2000, a weak Norbert pushed himself to the limit and beyond to once more play a tennis match with the club. His testimonial. His victory. The Klopps found solace in Norbert fulfilling his very last wish.

  For the last two weeks of his life, the family took him home to Glatten. The two sisters were by his side, taking turns to hold his hand day and night. Jürgen suffered a lot, Isolde says, being unable to be with his father as much as he wanted due to his playing commitments with Mainz. He came home one night after a game and spent the night in Norbert’s room, then drove off to train with 05, having slept very little.

  ‘It was the first great fortune of my life to do exactly what my father had wanted to do,’ Jürgen Klopp said later. ‘I live the life he had dreamt about. Any other job [for me] would have caused friction, I think. My father wouldn’t have understood if I wanted to become–let’s say–a florist. He wouldn’t have said: “No problem, I’ll buy the first bouquet.” No, he would have thought I was crazy.’

  After Norbert’s death Jürgen wanted answers, but eventually determined that ‘somebody up there surely had a plan’. The sadness Klopp feels about his father having not lived long enough to witness his success as a coach is tempered by his religious outlook. ‘I’m pretty certain–or I at least believe very strongly–that he can see me, looking down in a relaxed manner,’ he said.

  Being constantly told to do better on the pitch, on the court, on the piste, was perhaps not a young boy’s idea of paternal devotion. Forty years later, however, Jürgen Klopp has certainly come to realise that spending all those weekends pushing his son further along an infinitely demanding scale was Norbert’s ‘way of being affectionate’. For a father’s love is not measured in words, nor kisses, but in time.

  6. WOLFGANG FRANK: THE MASTER

  ‘Our father was brutally self-disciplined, some might say he was a little obsessed,’ says Benjamin Frank, thirty-six, sitting alongside his older brother Sebastian, thirty-nine, over a lunch of pasta and bittersweet memories in a Mainz
hotel.

  The Franks work as agents and as scouts for Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool FC. Before that, they were consulting for Leicester City, the surprise Premier League champions of 2015–16. They grew up in Glarus, a slow-paced Swiss valley town of 12,000 people who revered their father Wolfgang as a hero. The former Bundesliga striker (215 games, 89 goals for VfB Stuttgart, Eintracht Braunschweig, Borussia Dortmund and 1. FC Nürnberg) had taken local minnows FC Glarus to Nationalliga B, the Swiss second division, for the first time in their history as player-manager in 1988.

  Frank senior, the brothers recall, saw no difference between being a coach and being a father. Both roles came down to the same thing: a duty to educate. ‘He was a freak, in a positive sense,’ says Sebastian–an immensely ambitious man for whom football wasn’t just games and tactics, but everything. A school of life.