Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story Page 6
‘At Mainz, I came into contact with tactics for the first time,’ said former FSV midfielder Christian Hock, who had played at Eintracht Frankfurt in his youth and for Borussia Mönchengladbach’s first team. ‘Tactics were never coached at Borussia. It took a long time to learn the system, it was very unfamiliar: you had to watch the ball and the men at the same time, constantly. Years later, when I was doing my coaching badges, many former players had real problems understanding the back four theoretically. Thanks to Wolfgang Frank, I was already very used to it.’
‘Wolfgang’s aim was always for us players to learn new things,’ Klopp said. ‘We were not just supposed to meet up to play a bit of football at the weekend. Of course we sometimes complained when we spent four hours on shape work on the pitch but we always understood why we were doing that.’ Klopp remembered Frank telling local journalists not to write too much about the back four because he knew he would have a lot of explaining to do in the case of defeats. The break with tradition was viewed with plenty of suspicion.
Despite the marked upswing in results, the disastrous opening half of the 1995–96 campaign had left survival still in grave doubt ahead of the last game of the season, at home to VfL Bochum. Mainz had to win.
TV reporter Martin Quast remembers covering the game: ‘There were 12,000 people at the Bruchweg, nearly sold out at the time. Marco Weißhaupt scored early on. Eighty-three incredibly tense minutes later, Mainz were safe. Everyone went wild celebrating with their hands in the air but Wolfgang Frank had a serious face on and walked up and down, like a caged tiger. He didn’t know what to do. The situation was totally alien to him. Thousands were partying like there’s no tomorrow. And Wolfgang Frank staggered around the pitch, totally withdrawn, as if somebody was controlling him remotely.’
‘Everyone celebrated but my father was totally exhausted, unable to say a single word and suffering from a terrible headache,’ Sebastian Frank says. He had left it all out there. Wolfgang Frank was one of those coaches who’d do 100 miles an hour stuck in neutral gear on the sideline, ablaze on the inside but unable to find an outlet for all that energy. ‘He didn’t want to be the centre of attention,’ Sebastian says, ‘bathing in adulation was not his thing.’
‘The next season, we all stayed together. And no one knew how to handle us,’ Heidel reminisces. ‘For the first time in Mainz’s history, we were all of a sudden challenging for promotion to the Bundesliga.’ ‘No one’s ever taken this club seriously, they’ve been marooned in no-man’s-land for years,’ Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote in October 1996. ‘But now, they are the only team in the second division who play (and understand) four at the back.’ The self-styled ‘carnival club’ suddenly commanded respect and admiration for its radical ways. ‘We’ve suddenly been gripped by euphoria,’ 05 president Harald Strutz was quoted as saying. The whole city stirred with excitement as never before.
And 05 kept on winning. Frank’s team went into the 1996–97 winter break second in the table, only behind Otto Rehhagel’s 1. FC Kaiserslautern, who would claim the Meisterschaft a year later.
Yet for Frank, progress couldn’t come quickly enough. At the same time as he had introduced the fundamental changes to the team’s tactics, in January 1996, he had surprised the board with demands for a bigger, modernised stadium and better training facilities. The Bruchwegstadion had only just had floodlights and an electronic scoreboard installed a few months earlier.
‘He taught us that we needed to have “a vision” if we wanted to achieve things, that was decisive,’ says Strutz. ‘He asked us straight up: “Do you want to play in the Bundesliga one day?” I’m not sure anyone had really thought about that here before. We were still bottom of Bundesliga 2 then. Frank’s vision was to renovate the Bruchweg–the name (literal translation: broken path) ‘was very fitting then’, Strutz concedes–and he demanded the installation of a plunge bath and a sauna, as well as better pitches. ‘Wolfgang Frank was a unique person, very distinctive. A wonderful man. But overly intellectual, spiritualised. He drove the Mainz board nuts with his demands to make success sustainable. I remember he insisted on the plunge bath. All Mainz had at the time was a grubby bath tub, where the kit man washed the boots sometimes. After a game, the team captain would be in there, so nobody else could cool down. Frank was adamant. New pitches, new changing rooms, ‘the press room can’t be here, in the centre of the building, where the players are,’ he said. Slow progress was regression to him. Everything had to change at turbo pace.’
The tiny VIP area in one of the containers that also housed administration was converted into a chill-out room replete with loungers for the players to use during the week; there was talk of hiring of a nutritionist. ‘He wanted to show prospective players that we had the facilities to train them well. That was very important to him,’ Strutz says. ‘And he was always surprised that the bulldozers didn’t turn up the very next day to start the renovations.’ ‘The board must have thought I was bananas,’ Frank admitted years later.
In the club anthology Karneval am Bruchweg local football reporters Reinhard Rehberg and Christian Karn write that negotiations with the stadium owners, the Mainz city council, were fraught. The politicians didn’t see the justification for spending serious money on a club that got only 3,000–5,000 regulars through the turnstiles.
Undeterred by such niceties, Frank kept pushing internally until Mainz had funding in place for a modest stadium extension. ‘He was not an easy coach, nor an easy person,’ says Strutz. ‘He was a complicated personality to deal with, for me as president of the club. He had so much drive. He wanted the club to develop rapidly.’
In January 1997, the unlikely promotion contenders went to Cyprus to prepare for the second half of the season. The Frank brothers were there as well, as youth players. ‘Some of the pros were in tears laughing at us, because we had to join in with the team’s core-stability exercises on the adjoining pitch,’ Benjamin recalls. ‘Our father said, “Don’t worry what others think, just do your thing.”’ (Seven years later, German tabloids and battle-hardened pundits laughed, too, when Jürgen Klinsmann had the national team practising similar drills under the auspices of American fitness coaches. Those exercises became standard practice at club level after the 2006 World Cup.)
When reports of fresh snowfall in Mainz reached Cyprus at the end of a ten-day training camp, Frank decreed that he and the team should stay for another fortnight, to take advantage of the perfect training conditions on the island. The players were less than pleased. They wanted to get home to their families. But the club were so in thrall to the first coach that had ever brought them a semblance of success that they bowed to his every wish. ‘We were second in the table. Mainz 05: second in the table,’ Heidel exclaims for effect. ‘If Frank had said: tomorrow, the church tower should be knocked down, then we would have gone up there and knocked the church tower down. We had never been at the top before. Everything he said was immediately put into practice.’
After what must have been the longest training camp in the history of German professional football, Mainz came back and lost the first game at home to Hertha BSC 1-0. They also lost the second game, 3-0 away to VfB Leipzig. And then they lost their coach.
Heidel: ‘I stayed behind in Leipzig because of an event. The next day, I’m sitting in a taxi and Frank calls me. “Christian,” he says, “I just wanted to tell you that you’ll have to find a new coach.” So I’m thinking, ah, for the summer. Because his contract was up after the season. But then it dawned on me that he meant now, straightaway. I flew back to Mainz, and four journalists were waiting at the stadium. That was a lot, by our standards. He had already told all of them that he was leaving. Just like that.’
Frank had spent the entire journey back from Leipzig brooding over the reasons for the two defeats. Somehow, he had concluded that he himself was the reason. Heidel describes Frank resigning as a Kurzschlussreaktion, a short-circuiting. Not even Jürgen Klopp, the coach’s confidant in the dressing room, was abl
e to change his mind.
Frank’s successor was a man called Reinhard Saftig. A seasoned, moustachioed operator with experience in the Bundesliga (Dortmund, Leverkusen) and Turkey (Kocaelispor, Galatasaray), a safe pair of hands. Or so Heidel thought. ‘Signing him truly was one of my finest hours,’ he winces. ‘Saftig didn’t have the faintest idea. I have to be honest. He didn’t have a clue about the game. Of course we didn’t get promoted. We messed up on the last day of the season, in Wolfsburg. We lost 4-5 there, so Wolfsburg went up in our place. A legendary game, with a grandiose Jürgen Klopp.’ Playing as a right-back, Klopp scored a goal as the away team battled back from being 3-1 and one man down to equalise but also made a calamitous mistake to seal Mainz’s defeat. The game had effectively been a promotion play-off.
Frank, in the meantime, had moved on to coach FK Austria Wien. Benjamin remembers being in the car with his father on the way to the airport. ‘He hardly said anything. All he did was memorise the names of the Austria players by heart. He wanted to know them all ahead of the first training session.’
The Viennese side, a modest collection of journeymen that included the impossibly hirsute Bulgarian international Trifon Ivanov, was as bewildered by Frank’s system as Saftig was at Mainz, where the team still believed in his predecessor’s system. Attempts to switch back to a three-man defence with the newly signed Kramny as a sweeper proved disastrous.
Saftig apparently liked taking nightcaps with the players before games. ‘Key figures such as Jürgen Klopp feared these invitations. Saftig was thirsty and had stamina.’
After five months at the Bruchweg, Saftig was replaced by the Austrian Dietmar Constantini. He had worked as an assistant to the legendary Ernst Happel and explained to bemused local journalists that Mainz’s pressing game followed ‘the shape of a bagpipe’. In practice, that meant the introduction of Frank’s back four, with an important difference: there was a sweeper behind them, too, in Kramny. Heidel: ‘So we had four in a line in defence plus a sweeper behind them. Kloppo was driven to distraction by that. We always had a relationship built on trust. He would come into my office and say: “The coach hasn’t got any idea of tactics. We can’t play like that. A back four with a sweeper…” That’s when I sensed he might become a coach himself one day.’
Constantini didn’t lose many games. But he didn’t win many either, only four out of eighteen. ‘The king of draws,’ Allgemeine Zeitung proclaimed him. Constantini’s last game, a 3-1 home defeat to SG Wattenscheid 09 (with Souleyman Sané, the father of Germany international Leroy Sané, in attack) in early April 1998, saw Mainz slip into the relegation zone again. ‘The guys that came after Frank didn’t trust in the back four,’ says Kramny. ‘They said the players were too slow to play that system and instead came up with all sorts of crazy schemes. But the team didn’t buy into them, they fundamentally still believed in Frank’s formation. That’s why none of the other tactics worked for us.’
Constantini admitted to Heidel that he couldn’t connect with the dressing room. The Mainz general manager swallowed his pride and called on the only coach he could think of who might be able to return the team to winning ways: Frank. His engagement at Vienna had run its course, both sides had already agreed to part ways at the end of the season. After getting a call from Heidel, who sweet-talked him until 3 a.m., Frank left his post immediately to turn back the clock and save Mainz from the drop a second time. He won his first game 2-1 away to Stuttgarter Kickers, thanks to a quick injection of hope. ‘This guy burns so brightly with excitement,’ Klopp told the cameras after the final whistle. ‘If anyone can ring in the changes after only three days, it’s him.’ Mainz finished in tenth position.
The team were happily playing the system they were most comfortable with again. Having restored them to a flat back four and zonal marking, Frank shifted his focus to the conquest of an altogether different space: the one between the players’ ears.
‘He made it his mission to work on the team’s mental strength,’ Strutz says. ‘He went very far in that, with the introduction of psychological and autogenic training, a type of relaxation technique. He also employed an autogenic coach, who–as we later found out–was a former train driver. He had changed jobs.’
Strutz, a former triple-jumper and silver medalist in the German championships in 1969 and 1970, feels he’s partly to blame for Frank’s journey down the rabbit hole of the inner mind. ‘I gave him a book as a gift, Die Macht der Motivation (the power of motivation), by Nikolaus B. Enkelmann, that I had myself been given as a Christmas present, because I thought he might like it. But he adopted that psychological approach to the extent that it changed his life altogether. It went as far as breathing exercises and the repetition of mantras. It got very esoteric.’
Frank’s home was filled with Enkelmann’s books and videos, his sons say. Each morning, he’d wake up and conduct elocution lessons. Little notes with autosuggestive phrases were stuck to the bathroom mirror: ‘I will get stronger and stronger every day,’ and such like. ‘Those who didn’t know him well thought he was sometimes a little odd or cranky,’ Benjamin concedes. In the winter training camp of 1998, again held in Cyprus, Mainz’s players were instructed in speech therapy, training their vocal cords by repeatedly shouting out vowel sounds, much to the amusement of the Greuther Fürth team, who happened to be at the same hotel and heard them scream out ‘aaaaaa’ and ‘oooooo’ from the dining hall. Austrian goalkeeper Herbert Ilsanker once noticed that Frank was conducting an interview in the team sauna. A strange place for it, he thought. But even stranger still, Frank sat in the sauna alone, interviewing himself–to practise the way he addressed the team. ‘His tone of voice was never monotonous. When he spoke to you, you were alert,’ Ilsanker told Allgemeine Zeitung. And Frank spoke a lot. Team meetings lasted an hour on average, and they were scheduled every single day. ‘Things got a little out of hand, some thought,’ Klopp said. ‘Players who had left school relatively early were suddenly reading books on the bus with titles I didn’t even comprehend.’
Strutz: ‘Our priorities shifted a little bit. Frank wanted to improve the players by giving them that “personality stability”, he wanted to show them that there was more to it than tactics and running, that you could beat your opponent through the power of the mind.’ Later, at Kickers Offenbach, Frank would place a table-tennis ball on a bottleneck and asked his players to concentrate on flicking it away in full flight. ‘How can I maximise my mental potential? That will be one of the decisive questions,’ he told Frankfurter Rundschau. (Few believed him then, but many top coaches are today convinced that cognitive training and work on the shortening of reaction times is vital if players’ minds are to keep up with an increasingly rapid game. ‘To get better translates into taking things in more quickly, analysing them more quickly, deciding more quickly, acting more quickly,’ Ralf Rangnick says.)
He was a disciplinarian but also a communicator, remembers Sebastian, very different to the martinet-type coaches dominating the sport at the time. ‘The way he dealt with us players made us go: Ah, look here, there is a different way,’ Klopp told Frankfurter Rundschau in 2007. ‘He would also put the human being centre circle. We really liked him. When we lost, we had two problems. Firstly, that we lost. Secondly, that we had disappointed Wolfgang. That was pretty important to us. It was remarkable how he got the whole team behind him.’
Klopp and Frank sometimes argued, but they only once fell out with each other. Klopp had confessed to the coach during another training camp that he felt as if the coach was ‘chucking a bucket of water over a glass that was already full and overflowing’, and that many players felt the same way. Frank was insulted and Klopp worried about getting fired (‘I didn’t sleep all night’) but the next day, things carried on as normal. ‘I talked to players the way I would have liked coaches to talk to me,’ Frank said about his management style.
Perhaps he didn’t always hit the right note. ‘Frank was a man with a very special character,’ says Strutz
. ‘He could have been a fantastic coach if he’d been a bit more relaxed. Unlike Jürgen Klopp later, he was simply too serious. And he didn’t really understand that young players sometimes want to have fun and drink the odd beer, that they don’t want to be boxed in.’
His sons paint a more nuanced picture. At home, they say, Frank could be very funny, very warm. But he didn’t like the limelight; he wasn’t the type of guy who climbs the fence in front of the home section. ‘My father,’ Sebastian Frank says, ‘lost himself in the life of being a football coach. I’m not sure he knew the price of a bread roll. He sometimes found it hard to deal with normal life. His working days started at seven in the morning with breakfast at the club and finished after midnight. Dad pushed himself to the very limit; he wanted to demonstrate that level of commitment to his players.’
Frank collected anything he considered useful for his job. He cut out articles, archived his training regime and schedule in big files. ‘He soaked up everything,’ says Benjamin Frank. Like many obsessives, he found it impossible to delegate. He wanted total control or at least needed to know everything that went on, down to the last detail. Often, there’d be arguments at home, because he had again given his winning bonus, which was meant to supplement his modest wages, to the groundsman or somebody else at the club, insisting that they were just as important as the strikers or defenders. Frank regarded a football club as one large organism, not a company made up of different departments that had little to do with each other.
His emotions as a coach were directed inwards. Once, he got so disappointed and angry that he moved all the furniture out of his office at the club. Mainz pretended to everybody they were renovating and re-painting the room. The reason for Frank’s anger had nothing to do with an argument with club officials or the players. No, his team had lost a cup game. Away to Bayern Munich. ‘That was him,’ Sebastian Frank nods. ‘He was certain that little old Mainz could win in Munich if they played at their very limit and perhaps caught Bayern on a bad day.’ (Klopp, incidentally, had watched the 3-0 defeat at the Olympic stadium in the stands, having been sent off in the previous round for scything down Hertha BSC’s Iranian striker Ali Daei. After the defender’s dismissal, another Mainz player, Marcio Rodriguez, was shown the red card for an excessive goal-scoring celebration. The Brazilian didn’t notice that Klopp was in the toilets in the dressing room and accidentally locked his teammate in once the match was over.)