Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story Page 7
With Frank in charge, 05 once again overachieved in relation to their minuscule budget. They finished seventh in 1998–99 and ninth a year later. But the man who had ‘woken Mainz from their deep slumber’, as Süddeutsche Zeitung years later acknowledged, was again impatient. He wanted to coach in the Bundesliga, and believed that MSV Duisburg, the Zebras, offered a better chance to earn his stripes at the highest level. But the move to the traditional, mid-sized club from the Ruhr area backfired. Frank was axed four months into the next Bundesliga 2 season, with the team hovering near the relegation zone. ‘His methods were met with rejection by large parts of the team from the start,’ Rhein-Post noted. He had, amongst other things, instructed his players to hug trees during an endurance run through the woods.
His next stint, at SpVgg Unterhaching, was more successful–he led the former top-flight side, based in a suburb of Munich, from the third division to Bundesliga 2–but was sacked a year later. A campaign with SSC Farul Constant a in Romania proved another dead end. The roll call of his subsequent employers reads like a who’s who of lower-division basket cases and clubs that specialised in racking up thwarted dreams and false dawns in lieu of points: FC Sachsen Leipzig (now defunct), Kickers Offenbach, Wuppertaler SV, SV Wehen Wiesbaden, FC Carl Zeiss Jena, KAS Eupen (Belgium). It didn’t really work out for him at any of them.
Frank later admitted that he had perhaps taken on a few too many clubs in his career. ‘It would have been much better for him to wait for the right offer. But to be out of a job, not able to put everything he had into his work, scared him,’ Sebastian Frank says. ‘There was also the fear of getting forgotten and overlooked if he were to stay off the radar for too long. Our father often thought about what could have happened, where the journey could have taken him.’ Once, Werder Bremen had contacted him, but Frank had been sure he would find happiness in Austria at the time. The same happened again with Hansa Rostock a couple of years later.
‘Our father had a huge knowledge base and visionary ideas,’ Benjamin Frank adds. ‘He came across as confident, but also secretly doubted himself all the time, as far as his work and his effect on the team was concerned. As a coach, he remained unfulfilled.’
‘He never quite made it into the big time because he was a difficult character,’ Heidel says. ‘I was the only one he got along with. We were quite close, until we fell out very badly. After he left us the second time, for Duisburg, we didn’t talk to each other for two years. He always thought he could find something better.’
But neither party did. At the turn of the millennium, Frank’s groundbreaking system was still so advanced by the standards of German football that subsequent Mainz coaches had little idea how to make it work. ‘Tactically, the side were better than their coaches,’ Klopp said. The national team and the vast majority of club sides were still firmly wedded to a sweeper system. Heidel: ‘At Mainz, half the players knew how to play with four at the back, and the other half didn’t. And the coaches had no clue. We put anyone on the bench who happened to have a tracksuit in his wardrobe. But no one was able to explain to the players what they had already been taught by Wolfgang. We were basically dead in the winter of 2001. Finished. I said to Kloppo: ‘You’re smart, you’re eloquent, you understand the game. Do you want to see if you can make it work?’ Within two weeks, he had it sorted.’
Klopp and Frank had had long discussions about football and the art of coaching, Benjamin Frank says. ‘Klopp always asked questions, he wanted to know the purpose of specific drills. Dad advised him to write everything down: team talks, tactics, training sessions, playing ideas. He had a sense that Klopp would make good use of it one day. Our father was certainly the inspiration behind him turning into a manager.’
On the day of the lanky defender’s promotion to player-coach, Mainz became the first club of note in Germany to put the cart before the horse. Starting with Klopp, coaches would now be picked to fit the squad and a certain playing style, not the other way around. ‘We don’t want a coach that explains his concept to us, we want to formulate a concept and then find the right man for that,’ Heidel says. ‘That became the way we did things, until I left in 2016. And it all goes back to that first year with Wolfgang Frank, our first year of any success. We understood then that tactics could get us somewhere, even with individually inferior players. It’s like that at Mainz today.’
What’s prudent for FSV, he adds, should also be right for more financially potent sides. ‘You can’t change your whole set-up and team every time you change coach, you’ll never find stability that way.’ He namechecks Hamburger SV, giants of the Bundesliga in the seventies and eighties, who’ve been stuck in a rut due to a lack of joined-up thinking.
Like another restless, highly-strung prophet before him, Frank was allowed only glimpses of the promised land: impatience barred his admission, too. But he was at least able to witness his people–his protégé Jürgen Klopp, and a host of other former players such as Joachim Löw, Torsten Lieberknecht, Jürgen Kramny, Peter Neustädter, Christian Hock, Stephan Kuhnert, Lars Schmidt, Sandro Schwarz, Sven Demandt and Uwe Stöver–help bring German football tactics in from the wilderness as coaches.
‘He would tell us, “when you’ve all become managers, please come back and tell me about your heroic deeds,”’ Klopp said. On the day of the Champions League final in May 2013, the BVB coach sent his old friend a text message: ‘Without you, I wouldn’t be here today, in London at Wembley.’ Klopp also kept in touch with the sons, inviting them to visit Dortmund’s summer training camps at Bad Ragaz, Austria.
Frank’s most prominent apprentice, along with another Swabian tactics-obsessive, Ralf Rangnick, went on to establish The Flea’s maverick blueprint of zonal marking, a back four and hard pressing as the new orthodoxy in the Bundesliga in the mid to late noughties. But it took another few years before the scale of Frank’s impact was more widely appreciated. ‘When great things happen, the rewards often come too late,’ Klopp said a few days after Frank’s death on 7 September 2013. He had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour only four months earlier.
Frank had worked as an opposition scout for Mainz in the last year of his life. He had looked after himself, been careful to eat well. Both the diagnosis and the speed with which the cancer took him came as a huge shock to everybody. ‘One week before he had surgery, when it was already quite clear that he wouldn’t live much longer, he told me again that leaving Mainz had been the one grave mistake of his life,’ Heidel says. ‘It was very hard to deal with his death…’
‘But maybe it was meant to be that he got sick,’ Sebastian wonders. His sons were with him until the end. Mainz 05 supporters honoured Frank with a tribute ahead of the Bundesliga game against Schalke 04 a few days after his death. ‘Mainz ist deins’, Mainz is yours, read the banner. Plenty of coaches win trophies, but only a few can make a club and a city their own. Fewer still leave behind a legacy that far outlasts their time on the bench.
‘There is not a single person in football at Mainz who’s not 100 per cent convinced that everything started with Wolfgang Frank,’ Klopp said about his Lehrmeister, his teacher and role model.
Klopp also made sure many former players came to pay their respects at the funeral at Mainz’s main cemetery on 19 September. ‘Everyone showed up,’ says Martin Quast. ‘Players from the clubs he coached, representatives from the German FA, from the Bundesliga, from the coaching academy. I get goosebumps thinking about it. Most people have no idea. But those who work in football, the insiders, they all know. They know that Wolfgang Frank didn’t just have a huge hand in the development of football in Mainz but on modern football. Fundamentally. He thought about things no one had ever thought about.’
‘You were a Bundesliga coach, even if you didn’t work there,’ Klopp said, holding back the tears. ‘I have told more than a thousand players that Wolfgang influenced a whole generation of footballers and still continues to do so. He was the coach who has influenced me most. He was an extraordina
ry human being.’
Quast has known Klopp for twenty-five years but Frank’s funeral was the first time his friend was struggling for words. ‘He spoke, of course, but he’ll probably say that was his toughest job ever. Giving a eulogy for his great mentor. I got the sense that this wasn’t just a farewell: many turned up to pick up a spiritual message, or to deliver one. It was more than a funeral. It was a recognition.’
It’s through the work of Klopp, Frank’s most studious disciple, that the pivotal importance of this introverted, complicated man in the renaissance of German football has since been more widely realised. There’s no greater honour an apprentice can bestow on his master.
7. ‘SCHÖNEN GUTEN TAG. HIER IST JÜRGEN KLOPP.’
Dortmund 2008–2010
Strangely enough, there’s no German equivalent for ‘sell the sizzle, not the sausage’. But that’s the classic marketing trick Borussia employed in June 2008, the month after Jürgen Klopp signed his contract. Six weeks before any balls would be kicked, huge posters with Jürgen Klopp’s head went up next to the B1 Schnellstraße that runs past the Signal Iduna Park and through the city’s more genteel southern quarters. His face was the message, a promise: the new man in the driving seat would transform the ‘sleeper carriage football’ (Tagesspiegel) from the past few seasons into a roaring, rumbling express train.
‘Dortmund weren’t stupid,’ says former press officer Josef Schneck over a glass of mineral water in a business hotel a short walk from the BVB stadium. ‘They used him to push the sale of season tickets. And they went through the roof. People were camping outside the club offices the night before.’ Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Freddie Röckenhaus, one of two reporters who had revealed the shocking levels of debt and financial mismanagement in the early noughties, compares the posters to election advertising. ‘They might have said: “Vote Merkel”. But they said: “Vote Klopp!” People did.’ Dortmund had to cap sales at 49,300 to ensure that a few thousand day-tickets were kept available for employees and fan clubs.
From the outset, says Schneck, Klopp was happy to talk to anybody: ‘He wanted to meet with the ultras and with fan club representatives to get them on board.’ Jan-Henrik Gruszecki, one of the founding members of BVB ultra group The Unity, remembers being distinctly underwhelmed by his club’s choice of manager at the beginning. ‘We thought Mainz, that “La La” club, always in a good mood–not cool. Klopp was one of the faces of the 2006 World Cup–also not cool. And what had he done as a coach? Not a lot. We were worried he wouldn’t be able to arrest the slide. The football was dull. There was no money. Aki Watzke had to get every transfer over €500,000 signed off. We were well on our way to becoming a nothing mid-table team. But Klopp… I don’t think I’ve ever been so impressed with somebody in my life. We taught him how to play “Schotten”, a card game, and he talked to us. It was crystal clear that Klopp and his wife Ulla, who’d come with him, were 100 per cent committed to Borussia. They wanted to know everything about the club and its people. He told us how excited he was to get going, and that we had a huge role to play as the twelfth or thirteenth man, that we had to develop this feeling of “we”. He had us, from that moment on. No coach had ever done all of that.’
Schneck: ‘When somebody in marketing told Klopp that a few corporate customers had given up their VIP seats, he said he would call them to see if they changed their mind. He went into the office, picked up the phone and said: “Schönen guten Tag, hier ist Jürgen Klopp. I am the new coach of Borussia Dortmund. I’ve been told you want to cancel your tickets. Don’t you think you should reconsider?” Some of them were so gobsmacked, they said: “Okay, we’ll think it over.” He reeled them back in. Can you imagine any other coach doing that? That was Jürgen. He stole everybody’s hearts.’
‘We’ve had successful coaches at Dortmund who were also class acts in their dealings with people before,’ says Fritz Lünschermann, a bespectacled, cheerful, bear-like man in his early sixties, who has been looking after the first-team’s organisational needs as ‘team manager’ since 1988. ‘Ottmar Hitzfeld, Matthias Sammer. But Jürgen Klopp is unrivalled. He had the whole staff eating out of his hand, by treating them seriously and valuing their efforts. Jürgen asked people how they felt, if they had any problems and so on. I remember I was wearing very colourful shirts at the time. Jürgen went up to me and said: “Ey, listen, are you always wearing such wallpaper?” I said: “I’ll have to see if I’ve got anything else in my cupboard.” And then I put those wallpaper shirts in the bin. I listened to his advice. You couldn’t be upset with him.’
His freelance work as a personal stylist aside, Klopp used the summer break to immerse himself in the club’s traditions and heritage. Lünschermann, ‘a walking lexicon’ (Schneck), explained to him the importance of the ‘Drei Alfredos’, the attacking trio of Alfred ‘Ady’ Preißler, Alfred Kelbassa and Alfred Niepieklo who won back-to-back championships in the mid 1950s. He and Klopp immediately hit it off, Lünschermann says. ‘He is a guy always having fun, and I’m of a positive disposition, too. I had to coordinate the football schedule with him for the season but there was another matter in those early weeks. Every year, our Council of Elders, made up of former players and long-standing members, have their summer party. I said to Jürgen: “It would be good if you came.” They all gathered in a restaurant in Wickede and were straightaway smitten with Jürgen. He sat down with everyone and talked to all these elderly gentlemen and their wives, who didn’t have a clue about football. But he made them feel appreciated and took their concerns seriously. He stayed much longer than he initially planned, a few hours, and left a lasting impression on that generation. They will still say today: “Jürgen was a one-off.”’ Legendary players such as Aki Schmidt and Hoppy Kurrat loved Klopp, Schneck adds. ‘Other coaches treated these meetings like an unwelcome chore. Jürgen, on the other hand, acknowledged that the club wouldn’t be there without them. His interest was genuine. He treasured the history.’
Klopp won over the club even when he lost, and lost badly. On a staff day years later, employees were put into mixed groups to compete in physical games and a quiz. Schneck: ‘I was in a group with Jürgen, a groundsman and a woman from accounts. There was an egg-and-spoon race, you had to shoot on goal, that sort of thing. And there were questions about Dortmund’s history. We were sure we were in the lead but in fact we came last. Everybody else was cheering! As losers, we had to wash the team bus. You could do these things with Jürgen. He was there, he was approachable. You felt: this is the perfect fit.’
Klopp’s force of personality, he recounts, smashed through the barriers between work and private life. ‘One day, I mentioned in passing to him that my mum would soon turn ninety, and that she was still very sharp. Klopp replied: “Shouldn’t I come and congratulate her?” That would be a dream, of course, but I didn’t take him seriously at first. I never mentioned it again. But a few weeks later he asked me: “Tell me, isn’t it her birthday soon? Please write down the address, I’ll come and visit.” And then he rang the doorbell. They had coffee and cake, and all the guests who came to the party couldn’t believe that Klopp was sitting there, chatting with my mum. To him, it was the most natural thing.’
The pre-season started with a training camp in Donaueschingen, in the Black Forest, and a canoe ride down a river. ‘That was the first thing we did, all get together and have a good time,’ Dortmund defender Neven Subotić says. ‘Kloppo is the kind of guy who leans over and flips somebody else’s canoe. That’s when the fun starts. You know, aha, this is not about him showing who’s boss and us doing a serious race. I don’t think Klopp ever thinks: “How can I be funny?” It comes naturally to him.’
‘Jürgen is a born entertainer. Straightaway he had this huge presence, this aura, in Donaueschingen,’ Watzke says. ‘The team went with him immediately.’ They didn’t have much choice, of course. ‘He knew what he wanted, there was only one way for him,’ says Subotić. ‘His strategy was basically to run the opponents into the
ground. That’s not for everyone. Some thought: “I just want to play. Give me the ball.” Especially some of the older, more experienced players, they had their own views. Winning them over to such an intense way of playing was a challenge he mastered really well, I think. It was a new situation for him, because at Mainz he had had a team that was put together to play his way. At Dortmund, he had to find out who was with him and who wasn’t.’
Sebastian Kehl, twenty-eight at the time, was appointed captain by Klopp during the training camp. Kehl makes the point that getting the players to run in pre-season was only half the job. The new system, a radical departure from Borussia’s methodical, possession-based game under Doll and Van Marwijk, needed not just more running but a different way of thinking about football.
‘Klopp worked tirelessly to implant his philosophy in our heads,’ Kehl says. ‘I remember that he called me during my holidays to talk at length about his ideas and concepts. It was a completely new path we ventured on.’ Some smaller Bundesliga sides, notably Klopp’s Mainz, had played such an extreme style before. But there was an unspoken consensus that better teams, with more quality, didn’t have to work and think as hard. ‘Tactics is for bad players,’ the former VfB Stuttgart and FC Bayern manager Felix Magath had memorably proclaimed a couple of years earlier.