Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story Page 5
During his last season as a pro, Wolfgang Frank had qualified as a teacher, specialising in sport and religion. Both subjects instilled in him the belief that there was ‘no such thing as coincidence, that everything–injuries, defeats–happened for a reason,’ Benjamin Frank says. He was consumed with passing on that one, central article of faith to anyone who would listen.
The young boys had to go on regular endurance runs through ice and snow around the town. A few years later in Greece, on one of the very few family holidays Wolfgang’s busy schedule allowed, the teenage brothers woke up at 5 a.m. every day for a run along the beach, followed by breakfast with vitamin pills. Then a second session with weights before lunch.
Late at night or early in the morning, the fax machine in their home in Glarus would start bleeping. Frank was sending through pages with motivational phrases and advice, or intricate training schedules, paired with best wishes and greetings, from hundreds of kilometres away, at one of the fifteen clubs he coached during his career. ‘Every time we had a problem in school or in sport, a long fax would arrive, cheering us up and showing us that he had thought long and hard about the problem, from a distance, in his own way,’ says Benjamin.
As a player, Wolfgang had been fascinated by the playing style of Arrigo Sacchi’s AC Milan, a team that dominated European football in the late 1980s and early nineties thanks to their revolutionary collective tactics, a synchronicity of movement that suffocated opponents by depriving them of space and time. He would study the players’ unified manoeuvres on videos late into the night, and also mull over the importance of regeneration, nutrition and mental training at a time when such topics were considered esoteric in Germany. In Switzerland, by contrast, a lack of funds and the much smaller player pool had facilitated a more open-minded approach. Zonal marking, a system that replaced the defending team’s focus on the opposition forwards with a primary concern to defend the space in front of goal and attack the ball, had been adopted as early as 1986, under the auspices of Swiss national coach Daniel Jeandupeux. Internationals brought knowledge of the system back to their clubs, where some continued to work on it of their own volition, as former defender Andy Egli recalled. Jeandupeux, Egli believed, had first encountered the playing style as a pro and coach in France.
Frank understood that tactical innovation could be a small club’s weapon in their battle with bigger and better sides; that the right ideas could markedly increase the quality of your own performances.
His miraculous success with FC Glarus saw him appointed at FC Aarau, a provincial first division side that had experienced unexpected triumphs themselves under the guidance of German coach Ottmar Hitzfeld. Hitzfeld, who would go on to win the Champions League with Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich, had done so well at the unfashionable club that his side had become known as ‘FC Wunder’ in the media in 1985. They were runners-up in the league and won the Swiss Cup.
Frank, too, took Aarau all the way to the Swiss Cup final, in his first half-season in charge (1989–90) but the miracle ran short. The Argovians were beaten 2-1 by Hitzfeld’s Grasshoppers Zürich in Berne; Frank departed a year later. He subsequently failed to make a mark in positions at relegation battlers FC Wettingen (1991–92) and second division FC Winterthur (1992–93). (The key player and captain at Winterthur, incidentally, was a veteran German striker called Joachim Löw. The Germany manager, then in his early thirties, once stood up in the dressing room to defend the team against Frank’s criticism. Löw also tried his hand at fashion: he sold novelty ties out of his car boot to Winterthur teammates.)
At last Frank got a chance, of sorts, to prove himself back in his home country, in January 1994. Rot-Weiss Essen, a well-supported second division side from Germany’s industrial and football heartland, the Ruhr, needed a new manager after Jürgen Röber had been poached by VfB Stuttgart during the winter break. However, before he’d even taken charge at Georg-Melches-Stadion, Frank and his team had been doomed to relegation. The German FA had withdrawn the club’s professional licence in the wake of financial irregularities. On top of that, Frank had a dressing-room revolt on his hands on his first day in the job: captain Ingo Pickenäcker and his deputy Frank Kurth had resigned in protest as they had not been consulted about Röber’s successor despite a promise from the board.
RWE were hopeful the German FA might show some leniency on appeal. The club’s astute lawyer, Reinhard Rauball (now president of Borussia Dortmund), unearthed many procedural mistakes on the behalf of the football authority. Sensationally, Frank’s men won the DFB Pokal semi-final against Tennis Borussia (2-0) in March to reach the cup final in Berlin, but the enforced drop to division three was confirmed by an arbitration panel a few days later. All of their goals and points were chalked off.
In May 35,000 Essen supporters travelled to the German capital in a mood of defiance. There were many banners decrying the unfairness of the German FA’s decision. ‘If there’s justice in the heavens, we will win,’ said Frank. Down on the Olympic stadium pitch, however, odds-on favourites Werder Bremen, coached by Otto Rehhagel, were indifferent to the prospect of divine retribution. The northerners, who had lifted the Cup Winners’ Cup courtesy of a 2-0 defeat of Arsène Wenger’s AS Monaco two years earlier, ran out easy winners in Berlin. Final score: 3-1.
Decades later, it emerged that an ugly political intrigue had played its part in the defeat. RWE’s Frank Kontny still hesitates to reveal a story he calls the ‘darkest moment of my playing career’. The 52-year-old was captain at the time and destined to start the final in defence. ‘But on the morning of the game, Frank told me that I was out of the squad, and that I had to find a new employer if I wanted to play again,’ he says. ‘My world came crashing down that day. The greatest-ever game was taken away from me.’
Like most RWE players, Kontny was working part-time away from football to support his family during the club’s insolvency. Board member Wolfgang Thulius had arranged a job for him as a property agent. After the club had reached the DFB Pokal final in March, new people had come in and won control of the board. They seemed to put pressure on Frank to cut all ties with the old regime. Kontny: ‘I was on the wrong side of the divide and unfortunately Frank took a decision that had no basis in football.’ In Kontny’s place, the manager started Pickenäcker, who had suffered a serious groin injury just a few weeks before and wasn’t quite ready. Pickenäcker was at fault for Werder’s first two goals and was subbed off seven minutes before half-time. Essen rallied after the break, pulled one back through Daoud Bangoura but Wynton Rufer secured Werder’s 3-1 win with a late penalty. ‘I’m convinced it would have been a different game with me on the pitch,’ says Kontny with a heavy heart. ‘I was very disappointed in Frank, I cursed him. He was a good coach–he always said we had to keep learning and expand our horizons, training sessions lasted two hours–but I think today he would recognise that he made a big mistake.’
Three weeks after the final, Rot-Weiss travelled to Mainz for the penultimate game of the season. A tumultuous match at Bruchwegstadion (attendance: 3,000) with three red cards, two for the away team, ended with a ninetieth-minute equaliser by 05 midfielder Zeljko Buvac that made it 1-1 and mathematically confirmed the home side’s safety from relegation.
In September 1995, perennial strugglers Mainz were once again bottom of the table in Bundesliga 2 and on the lookout for a new man on the bench. General manager Christian Heidel contacted Frank. ‘The last-straw man,’ Rhein-Zeitung called him.
‘He came and said a lot of things that sounded very nice and lovely,’ Heidel says with playful irony. ‘He had the demeanour of a teacher. I’m always careful with teacher types, they’re sometimes not easy to deal with. But after a while, I said: “Okay, why don’t you do it.” In hindsight, that was a momentous day for Mainz 05. I’d like to tell you that I knew straightaway that he was a good coach. But the truth is, nobody else wanted to coach us.’
The team were impressed by training methods they perceived as ‘quite
sophisticated’ (Heidel), but they kept losing their games regardless. Mainz went into the winter break as the worst team in the division, with twelve points on the board, five adrift of safety. Heidel: ‘Kicker magazine wrote: “Mainz’s chance of relegation: 100 per cent.” Not 99 per cent, 100 per cent. I’ll never forget that.’
Frank knocked on Heidel’s door. ‘He said: “We have to make a change.” I thought, yes, you can say that again. He told me he had thought things through and decided that we would go into the winter training camp and play without a sweeper in future. I said to myself: “What? He can’t be serious.”’
A professional football team without a libero or sweeper, a ‘last man’ behind the defence, was largely inconceivable in mid-nineties Germany. The clubs and the national team had won all their big trophies with a libero since Franz Beckenbauer’s heyday in the 1970s. ‘We all believed that you needed somebody as a safeguard in case the opposition got behind your lines,’ says Heidel. ‘How could you get rid of the sweeper? Impossible. I had played as a sweeper myself, so it felt to me as if he was attempting to get rid of me as well, in a way.’
Former Germany international Hans Bongartz had employed a version of a sweeper-less flat back four as early as 1986 at 1. FC Kaiserslautern–he had been inspired by a defeat at the hands of Sven-Göran Eriksson’s tactically ahead-of-the-curve team IFK Göteborg in the 1982 UEFA Cup semi-final–but hadn’t made a lasting impression in the German top flight with his innovation. As president at FC Bayern, Beckenbauer expressly forbade Erich Ribbeck from continuing his (admittedly rather amateurish) experiments with four at the back in 1993–94. A few weeks after Frank’s appointment at Mainz, national team manager Berti Vogts told Swiss tabloid Blick that a system without a sweeper was ‘fundamentally destructive’ and thus not destined to find acceptance in the Bundesliga.
Heidel: ‘I thought we’d be a laughing stock, I was very fatalistic. During the training camp, I vowed that I would take a closer look. There were all these poles on the pitch. And the players thought “this guy has lost his mind”. For hours, they ran around without the ball, they practised moving from side to side in formation. Today, it’s obvious that one flank is left open as the back four move towards the side of the pitch where the ball is. But when we played the first game at home that way, the whole stadium was shouting at us. An opposition striker was by himself all the way to the left but the whole of our team was on the right. Nobody realised then that the ball couldn’t get to the left that quickly, that the defence had enough time to shift back over. Ball-orientated zonal marking, that was called, and it was a completely new thing in Germany. Witchcraft, basically. So we trained and trained and trained. And I was certain we’d get relegated.’
In the mid nineties, practice sessions essentially came in two flavours. There was work (lots of running), and there was fun (playing). Exercises in collective movement or theoretical study were unheard of. Frank, by contrast, was ‘possessed by tactics’. Heidel says. ‘I had never seen anything like that before.’ The coach spent hours watching football, especially Italian football. And Sacchi was still his idol. ‘He showed us all of his matches on video tapes, I was always there. “A general manager has to be there,” Frank said. So I had to watch all that crap, too. There was no editing then. He would pause the picture, rewind, play and rewind again, for hours on end. He was crazy for Sacchi’s tactics.’
Frank also travelled to Italy to see the master’s training in person. ‘Sacchi didn’t take him seriously, but he was allowed to watch from the sidelines,’ says Heidel. ‘That’s where he got his ideas from. We weren’t nearly as advanced in Germany.’
In sports science professor Dr Dieter Augustin from Mainz University, located a short walk from the stadium, Frank had met a fellow football theorist. Augustin preferred acutely structured positional play to FSV’s verticality but differences in taste notwithstanding, they both agreed that players needed visual aides to further their footballing education. Students from Augustin’s course were asked to put together short video clips of Mainz and their opponents to help with match preparation. A simple but original idea: German teams had neither the staff nor the knowhow to work with video analysts then. One of the young sports scientists who volunteered for the experiment was Peter Krawietz. He would later become Mainz chief scout and Klopp’s trusted assistant.
‘Frank’s video sessions at 7.30 in the morning were much feared,’ former 05 player Torsten Lieberknecht said. ‘We sat on these garden chairs made from steel in a tiny room and had breakfast, while Wolfgang Frank was pushing buttons on the video player. It took for ever.’
Frank also found inspiration from his playing days. A year at AZ of Alkmaar in the Dutch Eredivisie in 1973–74 had seen him marvel at Ajax’s total football. Upon his return to Germany, the slender forward nicknamed ‘Floh’ (flea) had reunited with his former Stuttgart coach Branco Zebec at newly promoted Eintracht Braunschweig. Zebec, a Yugoslavian who had led Bayern Munich to their first-ever Bundesliga title in 1969 with a punishing fitness regime and strong tactical discipline, was the first manager to experiment with zonal marking in the German top flight in the mid-seventies. Everybody was still strictly man-marking then. ‘We no longer stupidly ran after our [individual] opponents under Zebec, he was ahead of his time,’ Frank later recalled.
Twenty-one years later, Mainz were craving similarly futuristic impulses. ‘We were practically dead as a team during the winter break,’ Mainz defender Klopp told Süddeutsche Zeitung in 1999. ‘We were open for new ideas. We would have even climbed up a tree fifteen times for the promise of some points in return.’ Frank estimated that it took 150 hours of theoretical training before the new system was internalised. Instead of the usual fun-packed training German pros were accustomed to, they spent entire days without the ball. ‘But we thought: if Gullit and Van Basten had to learn that at Milan, we could put up with it as well,’ Klopp later said in an interview alongside his mentor with Frankfurter Rundschau in 2007. ‘You have to realise how courageous that was. In football, it takes a long time to put new things into place. Wolfgang introduced four at the back in the middle of a raging relegation battle. We had basically been in the jungle before he came. We had chased after everyone in an opposition shirt.’ Frank, he remembered thinking, might as well have told the team ‘to take an exam in quantum physics for all we knew about four at the back.’
‘The football at Mainz had been quite conservative, but something had to happen. The time was ripe for it,’ Frank explained. The team, Heidel says, were not entirely convinced from the start. ‘They didn’t know what was happening to them. All this running around without the ball. To the left, to the right. Frank explained to me over many hours in an Italian restaurant that one fewer guy at the back would mean we had an extra guy in midfield. And I would say: “Yes, but what if one guy just runs straight through on goal?” Then he said: “There won’t be anyone running through, there mustn’t be.” Up front, we were pressing, to force the opposition into playing long balls. At the back we had giants like Klopp, 1.93m, who won all the headers. That was our new game. That’s how we left the training camp.’
A first friendly with the new set-up pitted them against third division 1. FC Saarbrücken, ‘a “money team” who led their league by miles and were certain to go up,’ Heidel remembers. ‘It was in Frauenlautern, near the French border, and I was pretty sure we’d concede five goals. But at half-time, we were 6-0 up. I thought I was dreaming. They had their best XI out but no idea how to play against us. They were completely overwhelmed. That was the birth… the rebirth of Mainz 05 and the birth of the back four [in the second division]. We were the first to play it this way, in conjunction with a ball-orientated, zonal marking. Ralf Rangnick [at Ulm] and Uwe Rapolder [at Waldhof Mannheim] came afterwards.’
Former Mainz defender Jürgen Kramny played for Saarbrücken in that game. ‘I was there when Mainz’s four at the back came into life,’ he says. ‘We were a pretty decent side in the third division a
nd Mainz were up against relegation in Bundesliga 2. But we had no chance. They killed us. They played us off the park.’
Jürgen Klopp, Peter Neustädter, Michael Müller and Uwe Stöver were the four defenders that day. ‘It worked so well that we didn’t change at all for the next eighteen months,’ Klopp said.
Frank described his tactics as a sophisticated version of children’s football: ‘Everybody had to go where the ball was. The aim was to create numerical superiority to win the ball, then to sprawl out, like a fist that opens.’ These novel methods turned Mainz into the best team of the Bundesliga 2 Rückrunde (second half of the season). They won thirty-two points, more than any other team in the top two divisions. ‘It was nuts, unheard of in German professional football,’ Heidel smiles.
For Klopp, it was ‘an epiphany: I realised that our system made us beat teams that had better players. He made our results independent of our talent, to an extent. Up until then, we thought that as the worse team, we would lose. Frank’s great strength was to have a concise match plan.’ It was widely accepted that hard work or ‘wanting it more’ than your opponent could make up, a little, for inferior quality. But a collective concept, based on the utilisation of space? Nobody in Germany had thought it possible that it could make such a difference. ‘I fell in love with tactics for the first time,’ Heidel says. ‘Suddenly we could beat teams that were individually better than us, simply because we had an idea that worked.’ The team practised ‘until they passed out’, he adds. ‘Eventually everybody got it. Today, it’s commonplace to have smart, adaptable players, but back then, you needed a few heads who could lead the others. Kloppo, of course, was the tactical head of the team, even if his game didn’t look like that. He relied on his power, on his emotions, on his physicality as a player, he wasn’t one for playing nice stuff. But he was the team’s brain.’