Bring the Noise_The Jürgen Klopp Story Read online

  Klopp’s brand of pressing and Gegenpressing necessitated both strong theoretical underpinnings and a selfless attitude. The groundwork for the former was laid via ‘many, many video sessions’ (Kehl). Some of the clips came from other leagues and clubs, including Barcelona, but the analysis centred on Dortmund’s games. Klopp drew arrows on the screen, outlining where the players should be, or move to, to overload the zone near the ball. Kehl: ‘All of that was combined with incredibly intense work on the training pitch, with many stops, corrections, moving across. It’s good to look at videos, but you have to feel it on the pitch. You have to get a sense for the right moment, begin to understand the game in a new way. You have to switch between attack and defence much quicker, you have to adapt to a different impulse in your head. These things won’t happen overnight.’

  A holding midfielder, Kehl was used to protecting the defence and calmly distributing the ball to the players ahead of him. Effectively, he functioned as a human speed bump. But Klopp’s way was the highway, Autobahn football. Kehl’s game had to change more than others’ to adjust to the acceleration all around him. Instead of instantly falling back into his own half as soon as Borussia lost the ball upfield, he and his teammates were asked to flood forward, in an effort to win the ball back immediately. ‘Other coaches said: “Let them have the ball in their own half. We’ll only attack once they get closer,”’ Kehl says. ‘Jürgen’s instructions were to press and move up in unison if we lost the ball in their half, or if they turned their back on us. We also laid traps on the pitch, by not going for the first ball out and making sure the opponents played into an area where we wanted it to be, to the flanks, for example, where we could double up. That was the match plan, paired with a firm willingness to run and tolerate pain. “Even if it looks stupid”: that was one of his mottos. If the first guy pressed and missed, the next one had to be ready to join in. It was very, very wild running [towards the ball]. “Wild” was one of the words Klopp used. He wanted to make it a wild game, to pose problems for the opponents and put them into difficult situations. Many players in the Bundesliga were used to calmly controlling the ball and then coming up with a good idea. With time and space, all players are good but if you step on their toes as soon as they get the ball, even the best ones struggle. If you double- or triple-up on them, it’s even more difficult.’

  Subotić was used to the drill from two previous seasons under Klopp at Mainz but at Dortmund the coach had to go back to the basics. ‘The team was much better but the system was completely new for them. There were many sessions that really weren’t much fun. Klopp explaining things while twenty guys are standing around. Or tactical, synchronised running. No fun at all. But it was important. In time, Zeljko [Buvac] got involved more and more. He’s very silent outside the training ground–nobody asks the assistant, do they?–but he struck up a super relationship with the players. He played football with us as well. That earned him a lot of respect. The players saw: “Ah, he can play.”’

  The same could soon be said of BVB’s new defensive partnership of Subotić and Bayern Munich loanee Mats Hummels, both nineteen. Dubbed Kinderriegel by Bild–best translated as ‘child lock’–the two untried teenagers (at Bundesliga level) were picked ahead of the far more experienced Croatian international Robert Kovacˇ, to the astonishment of many experts. The make-up of the BVB defence became younger still when crowd favourite left-back Dédé ruptured his cruciate ligament in the first game of the season, a 3-2 win at Bayer 04 Leverkusen. Klopp had described the Brazilian as ‘the best player I’ve ever worked with’ to a friend only two weeks earlier, and he was devastated. Fortunately, twenty-year-old Marcel Schmelzer, a product of BVB’s youth system, turned out to be a more than able replacement. ‘He was a machine,’ Klopp told Fligge and Fligge in Echte Liebe.

  ‘None of the four centre-backs in the squad were confirmed starters at the outset, that very much worked in my and Neven’s favour,’ says Hummels, who’d been deemed surplus to requirements by ‘the other Jürgen’–Klinsmann, the new coach at FC Bayern. ‘We quickly managed to put ourselves into contention, and Jürgen could see that we had good personalities. We were only nineteen, yes, but Klopp fully trusted us, perhaps because he saw that we were mentally a bit further on than your regular nineteen-year-olds, due to our backgrounds.’ Hummels had been a supremely confident star performer at academy level for Bayern, whereas Subotić’s personal story was reflected by an air of determination and maturity. A child of Bosnian Serb refugees who had moved from the Black Forest to the US to avoid deportation, he had joined Mainz as a seventeen-year-old from the University of South Florida in the summer of 2006. (He and FSV striker Conor Casey shared the same agent, Steve Kelly. Kelly had arranged for the teenager’s successful trial.)

  As a former defender, one might have expected the coach to micro-manage the young duo. But to Hummels’ mild surprise, Klopp was open about his own limitations with his protégés. ‘He said: “I have never played at your level, therefore I will never pretend to you that I know everything. But I will always try to help you.”’ The obvious lack of experience in the back four, Hummels adds, was mitigated by a strategy that shifted a huge part of the defensive responsibilities 40 metres further forward, onto the strikers and midfielders. ‘The opponents were rarely able to play out the ball without pressure, that led to many long balls that lacked precision and direction. Those passes, played under duress, often went too far or out of touch. It was easier to play for us at the back. It was new but hugely enjoyable. We were so young that we hadn’t yet developed our own routine, we could totally devote ourselves to that way of playing.’ It all came down to the amount of pressure that could be applied ‘against the ball’, as Klopp would stress to his players over and over again. A tracksuit missionary, preaching gospel to the tactically unbaptised.

  Not all ears were sympathetic to his dogma. Croatian striker Mladen Petric´, the leading goal-scorer of the previous season (thirteen goals) and arguably the squad’s most talented player, found it hard to accept the new regime. The day after the Leverkusen match, he was sold to Hamburger SV in a €5m part-exchange deal that brought one of Klopp’s old Mainz favourites, Egyptian Mohamed Zidan, to the Signal Iduna Park.

  Klopp’s move to get rid of the widely popular Petric´ was interpreted as a high-risk manoeuvre, a powerplay by a hard-nosed coach eager to lay down the law. But Watzke implies that there were firm financial and footballing reasons that made the transfer advisable from the club’s perspective as well. ‘We all wanted it,’ he says, grimacing a little as the hotel lobby saxophonist shuffles closer to his sofa. ‘Jürgen was keen to get Zidan in, that was key. And the offer [from Hamburg] was good. Petric´ and [Alexander] Frei didn’t really fit well up front.’ Frei, a Swiss centre-forward and orthodox poacher, wasn’t a natural Klopp player, either, but Borussia felt that he could combine well enough with the more mercurial Zidan behind him. The partnership of Frei and Petric´, the elegant shadow striker, would not have produced the required work-rate.

  ‘The strategy was to play all-action football with Gegenpressing,’ says Watzke. ‘They were very good players, but not the right ones for that.’ Dortmund’s high-pressing game worked even better as a consequence. ‘You could quickly see that the team was more stable at the back,’ Watzke says about an encouraging start to the campaign that brought a win in the Supercup against Bayern (2-1), a win in the DFB Pokal (3-1 v RW Essen) and seven points from the first three league games. ‘Jürgen brought a defensive balance to the side, and the Gegenpressing was his trademark. Today, everyone’s at it, more or less. Back then, you could see from the very first day that something was happening. But we honestly didn’t think it would get that big.’

  As destiny would have it, Klopp’s fourth Bundesliga appointment with Dortmund was the most important game of the season: the Revierderby at home to despised neighbours Schalke 04. The Blues–Dortmund supporters never use their rivals’ official name–were 3-0 up after sixty-six minutes. Borussi
a’s young team looked totally out of their depth, Schalke’s players were arrogantly strutting around the pitch in the knowledge that the fortress Signal Iduna Park had fallen. Kevin Kuranyi had nearly made it 4-0, hitting the crossbar with a header from close range. Klopp was horrified. ‘[My wife] Ulla sat in the stands and thought about packing our suitcases,’ he said later. But, somehow, the impossible happened. Riled by S04’s over-confidence, Subotić scored a goal that set fire to the stadium. Both the visitors’ and referee’s control over proceedings melted away in the furnace. Substitute Alex Frei scored from an offside position. In the eighty-ninth minute of the game, Dortmund were awarded an extremely dubious penalty. Klopp couldn’t bear to watch. He turned his back to Frei, who calmly stepped up and converted: 3-3. ‘Possibly one of the best derbies of all time,’ Frankfurter Rundschau cheered. ‘An epic, worthy of a 1000-page novel. A resurrection.’ ‘If it stinks of sweat here, that’s me,’ a relieved, exhausted, overwhelmed Klopp said in the press conference. ‘The game was so thrilling. I’ve seen wins that haven’t felt this good.’ Dortmund’s best start to a campaign in five years got the whole city excited. ‘Everywhere we went, people were giving us thumbs up, I had never seen anything like it in ten years in the job,’ says Schneck. ‘If you ask me how he managed to wake up the sleeping giant: with a kiss. And an attitude that chimed with the Ruhr area. That’s him. He didn’t go on a course, he didn’t ask anyone how the people here were. He sensed it, instinctively, and behaved in a way that connected with them. He got them going. People kept asking: “Are you sure you don’t have any ancestors from here? A grandfather who worked in the mines or in the steel factories?” They were certain he was one of them. No one could believe he hailed from the Black Forest, that he was Swabian. He himself didn’t see himself that way. He always said: “I knew very early on that I had to leave. I couldn’t imagine myself sweeping the driveway to make sure my neighbour saw me and said: Ah good, he’s swept his driveway.” He never had that kind of small-minded attitude the Swabians are known for. It’s his openness. He approaches people. My lord, in the beginning, he fulfilled every supporter’s wish. If somebody wanted him to go somewhere and say hello, he went there. I never felt as if he was doing that in a calculated way. He simply is that kind of guy: he likes people. I believe I once heard him say: “A coach who doesn’t love his players can’t be a good coach.”’

  Bild pundit Mario Basler hailed Klopp as ‘the white Barack Obama’. Both had ‘an excessive amount of intelligence and know-how’, the former Bayern Munich midfielder wrote, ‘both are bearers of hope, both are idols. At Dortmund, they’re so fired-up that him cleaning his glasses on the bench in a semi-competent manner brings out the cheers on the south stand.’

  Klopp warned that he was ‘not a messiah, only a coach’, and that it was too early to contemplate Dortmund getting into the top third of the table: ‘If we will be able to show commitment and readiness to battle for ninety minutes, something might grow here.’

  His scepticism was vindicated, much more than he would have wished for, when Dortmund crashed to a 2-0 home defeat against Udinese in the first round of the UEFA Cup. (They had qualified for the competition by reaching the DFB Pokal final under predecessor Thomas Doll.) BVB’s first game in Europe in five years revealed how far the young team and their roughcast tactics still had to travel to compete with the elite. The Italians, unfazed by the hurly-burly, coolly bypassed Dortmund’s pressing game and hit them hard on the break. ‘I’ve never seen a team I was involved with play this badly, it was embarrassing in parts,’ Klopp said, shaking his head in disgust. Two early, enforced, substitutions–Zidan and Hummels both got injured–had only heightened the confusion. The hosts had been ‘helpless like a beached whale’, Gazzetta dello Sport reported gleefully. Worst of all, the manner of the loss raised questions about the club’s transfer policy. ‘Is this squad, put together by [sporting director] Michael Zorc over the years, good enough to play top-level football in the long run?’ Süddeutsche wondered.

  Those questions only got bigger in the wake of a 4-1 defeat against newly promoted Hoffenheim, the season’s surprise title contenders. ‘It was a drubbing,’ says Watzke. Ralf Rangnick’s men were playing a very similar style to Dortmund’s, only much better. ‘That was systematic football, the way it should be,’ Klopp conceded. ‘We need to get where they are now. Tactical behaviour is not like riding a bike, unfortunately. You have to practise, again and again.’

  Re-programming the team’s operating system simply took time, Subotić stresses. ‘Three v three or five v five, it’s quite easy. But during the game, you’re tired and you say to yourself: “Do I really have to press again?” Then you press and the guy simply lays off the ball because your teammate hasn’t pressed with you and it’s all a waste. Getting used to that wasn’t easy. It’s mentally and physically very demanding. You were used to running 105km per game as a team. Suddenly, you were up to 115km, and the target was to hit 120km or more. Klopp knew that couldn’t happen overnight. He knew everybody had played twenty years of football and never been asked to work to such a plan before. More work, and more time, was the answer.’

  If the early weeks were shaped by an Aufbruchsstimmung–a sense of departure, to a glorious black-and-yellow future–Dortmund had suddenly arrived at a very unwanted destination in the autumn. This was crisis territory, a deeply troubling concoction of a leaky defence–(‘a shooting gallery’, Süddeutsche sneered), a half-baked concept and a coach struggling to find the best starting XI. There were six changes in the line-up for Hoffenheim, and another six for the subsequent cup game against Hertha BSC that Klopp could not afford to lose. ‘These are black days, a black week,’ he lamented.

  ‘You can be the nicest guy as a manager but everything depends on success,’ Schneck says, raising an eyebrow. Subotić hints that confidence in the dressing room in the new coach and his ways was fragile in that period. ‘I knew him, I trusted him,’ he says, ‘but for every team, it’s really important to see that all the stuff the guy in front of you is going on about actually works. They might all really like him. But his methods working is the most important benchmark.’

  ‘He had to talk people round, it didn’t all come off on day one,’ says Kehl. ‘We had some difficult moments at the beginning, thinking: “How’s that ever going to work?” There were discussions. Nevertheless, he made it clear from the first minute that there was only his way of playing because he was absolutely convinced it was the right way.’

  Against Berlin, raw luck came to Klopp’s rescue. Dortmund scraped a 2-1 win in extra-time, playing a slightly more defensive diamond in midfield to provide an extra layer of security. Next up, VfB Stuttgart were trounced 3-0 at the Mercedes Benz-Arena, with Borussia showing just how good their well-executed match plan could be.

  ‘By now, the very last person in Dortmund should have realised that we’re on the right path,’ Watzke said after the second leg against Udinese. His team had lost the match on penalties, having won 2-0 at the Stadio Friuli in regular time. But the quality and courage of the performance had made this a knockout of the inverse kind: it put the team firmly on their feet. Dortmund’s progress under the new man in charge had become self-evident. Dismissed by some as merely a motivational coach, shadow-boxing, jumping up and down on the touchline like a hyperactive six-year-old at Disneyland on a sugar rush, Klopp showed that he couldn’t just read a game. He could write one, too.

  Klopp also won over the local press corps by intervening on their behalf in an altercation that night. Stewards in the stadium had blocked the journalists’ access to the BVB players after the final whistle, until the Dortmund coach personally muscled in and cleared a path. One of the Italians cursed Klopp, shouting cazzo at him–polite translation: prick–but he just smiled, and, ahem, stood tall. ‘Not to worry–I don’t speak Italian,’ he said.

  Dortmund went on to lose just once more before Christmas–against Hamburger SV, a team that would inexplicably become Klopp’s bête noire
in the Bundesliga–and hibernated during the winter break in sixth spot, ahead of Schalke. The improvement was real.

  ‘We all know that money gets you goals in football,’ says Norbert Dickel, perched on a wobbly plastic table outside a hole-in-the-wall café in Marbella in January 2017. Across the road, inside the red-bricked Estadio Municipal de Marbella, Dortmund’s first team is training this evening. ‘But we didn’t have money then. It was a divine blessing to get Jürgen in. The team we had then started playing really well in that first year, we all saw that. The whole style of playing changed. Leaving aside the fact that we underwent an incredible development in terms of our football, Jürgen also ensured that the popularity of the club rose beyond belief. Simply because he was there, twenty-four hours a day, bringing people together. He never complained about players being injured or sick. He’d say: ‘We have enough good players.’ He wasn’t a moaner; he thought there was no point worrying about things you couldn’t influence. We all sensed that things were moving forward, towards a point where you could believe in success.’ Lünschermann: ‘It was a transformation. We had seen plenty of games that had been rather unwatchable. Suddenly, these young guys were dashing about like hares, going after every ball. They started combining, too, after a while. It was superb. All of us said: “Oh boy, this could turn into an era.” And it did–into an unforgettable one. That’s his doing.’

  The first half of Klopp’s debut Bundesliga season in North Rhine-Westphalia had BVB sitting pretty with seven wins, eight draws and two defeats. An almost identical record (eight wins, seven draws, three defeats) after the winter break, despite a serious ankle injury for Hummels and a poor start to the calendar year, steered the team towards UEFA Cup qualification. Klopp’s contract was prematurely extended until 2012. ‘Not one person in the club was against Jürgen Klopp, everybody supported the decision,’ Watzke declared that March.