Borussia Dortmund fans remember the pre Jürgen Klopp years with neither fondness nor nostalgia. Shortly before Klopp came along, the club was skint, for a start.
By 2005, three years before Klopp arrived at the club from Mainz 05, Dortmund had reached financial rock bottom. Far from being rock solid, things were pretty rocky, so rocky that they were within a transaction or two of being liquidated. In stepped the inner sanctum, including the club’s treasurer, and the rocks were avoided. But only just.
Belts were tightened. The players took an unpopular 20% wage cut. Belts were tightened again. The stadium naming rights were sold. The club was never flush in these pre-Klopp years – he arrived in 2008 – but at least they were scrapping in the Bundesliga, where their fans rightfully believed they belonged.
While monetary ruin was staved off, football ruin loitered uncomfortably as a possibility. In the 2005/6 season, the season in which the club nearly folded in other words, they finished seventh in the Bundesliga. Not bad at all, I hear you say.
Given the wage cuts and the belt tightening, it was an impressive result, but a closer reading tells a slightly different story. The team Klopp was about to inherit played out the second-highest number of draws next to Stuttgart in the league. You didn’t beat Dortmund but, then again, they didn’t beat you.
The following season the team finished ninth in the Bundesliga, with more loses than wins. A season later, the season immediately before Klopp took over, in other words, they finished 13th in the Bundesliga. They and others were in a race to the bottom – or so it looked – or were they simply heading for the rocks again?
Wins were hard to pick up during the period, but managers were pretty difficult to pick up, too, because they fell down with astonishing regularity.
Jürgen Rober lasted all of three months before he was kicked off the plank, from just before Christmas 2006 until the middle of March the following year.
Thomas Doll, Klopp’s predecessor, took over from Rober in March 2007 but only lasted for 14 months until the end of the following season. He left with an undistinguished record that season of 10 wins, 10 draws and 14 defeats. Relegation had been avoided – but that was about it.
The financial abyss might have been avoided but the football abyss had not. By the time Klopp took over from Doll in the summer of 2008, Borussia Dortmund were the nowhere men of German football. They went nowhere, won nothing and went nowhere again the following season. If you didn’t support them, you wouldn’t notice them, and many were no longer offering their support. Something needed to be done.
There is reason to believe that the club elders thought very carefully about the Klopp appointment. They realised they couldn’t reflexively reach for what was to hand, managerially-speaking.
They had had three gaffers in four years – including Bert van Marwijk, from the Netherlands – and they couldn’t continue with this revolving door policy for very much longer.
It was costing the club credibility and confidence and money. It was wearisome for the fans, who were beginning to lose patience. Their Bundesliga glory years, in which they won the Bundesliga in consecutive seasons in the mid-1999s, was beginning to fade with their memories.
If Mainz 05 was Klopp’s playground, Borussia Dortmund was Klopp’s higher education. The use of the word “playground” isn’t incidental. Klopp played for Mainz 05 with tenacity and loyalty rather than with distinction. It was an intimate, almost family club, and Klopp was a family member. People fondly remember his brains, rather than his feet.
They remember his leadership ability and his social intelligence, which probably owes much to his father Norbert, a travelling salesman, who needed the gift of the gab to get by. Jürgen was the youngest of three children and Elisabeth and Norbert’s only son, so he was both under pressure and adored.
From his father he inherited his ability to communicate. To bring people along with him. To charm with a vision of the future. It has been his most priceless asset along with those sparkling teeth and his charisma.
After playing for Mainz 05, Klopp coached them. In his first eight weeks in charge he managed to stave off relegation. They avoided the drop with one game to go.
Their last fixture was away to Mannheim, a better team. Relief was in the air, because Mainz (and Klopp) knew they were staying up, so the club bosses hired 60 buses to transport 3000 Mainz fans to Mannheim. It transpired that Mainz lost 4-0 to Mannheim but it didn’t matter.
It was the end of the season and Klopp’s club stayed up. On a whim, the club management decided to dispense with the buses. Instead they hired a riverboat to laze down the Rhine with the travelling fans on it. Klopp and Christian Heidel, Mainz’s sporting director, sat in the prow of the boat and reflected happily on the fact that they had got Mainz out of jail.
“By the time we’d reached home after our boat trip down the Rhine two hours later the crate of beers was no longer full,” Heidel told The Guardian.
The following season they finished fourth. The season after that they finished fourth again, a heart-breaking moment for Klopp, the players and the fans because their promotion quest was decided on goal-difference on the very last day of the season. Klopp took to the town square and announced that he understood they were disappointed – he was disappointed too. He made them a promise: they would be promoted the following season.
Thousands of fans attended pre-season training and Mainz 05 were duly promoted. Klopp rates the achievement higher than Liverpool’s 2-0 Champions’ League win over Spurs in Madrid in 2019, higher than the Premiership title of the following year. “We had a small squad and strong opponents when I was at Mainz. What I did there cannot be topped.”
Let’s get back to the powerful men of Dortmund at this point, whom we shouldn’t under estimate because they, after all, had saved the club from bankruptcy. Saviours have their reputation to consider. Like goal-keepers, they can’t be a saviours for ever, sooner or later they need to do some saving. What was in need of saving at Dortmund this time round?
The short answer to the question is that the club’s reputation needed saving. Results were poor. The club had been going backwards for some time. Those back-to-back Bundesliga victories looked a long, long way away.
So choosing the right new manager was crucial. The Dortmund higher-ups had noticed that Klopp promised promotion to the Mainz fans and delivered on his promise. They liked his vaulting ambition and they liked his pride. There’s also a far more mundane fact to the saviours liking him: they switched on their TVs and there Klopp was, being a pundit during the 2006 European Championships.
With his last-ever home game for Liverpool coming up against Wolves after last weekend’s away draw to Aston Villa, much speculation has revolved around whether Klopp, after putting his feet up for a day or two, will ultimately return to punditry.
He didn’t come cheap but neither was he super expensive. He was German, too, and this they liked. There was something boy-next-door about Klopp, something unaffected. The saviours didn’t know it then but this was something upon which Klopp played. At his first Liverpool press conference many years later, he referred to himself as “the normal one”. It was a jibe, of course, at José Mourinho.
Klopp’s boy-next-door qualities were reinforced literally: Mainz and Dortmund aren’t neighbours, but they’re only 180 kilometres apart. Klopp felt like one of them – well, almost. He was a manager on a human scale, not some superstar manager from the Iberian Peninsula who didn’t even think like a German.
Occasionally, Klopp could be a bit of a buffoon. This they liked, too, because it proved his humanity. On the afternoon Mainz secured promotion to the Bundesliga for the first time in the club’s history, Klopp celebrated Mainz’s winning goal by jumping out of the dug-out and sprinting down the side-line.
At the corner flag he turned and continued running past the back of the opposition’s goal. Here he tripped, and was momentarily spread-eagled on hands and knees, but had the composure the right himself and sprint to the other corner flag to join the Mainz celebrations. They were wild.
Once offered the Borussia Dortmund job, Klopp didn’t think twice. It was a significant step-up. Importantly, Klopp’s immediate predecessor, Doll, had finished 13tth, so Klopp was starting at the bottom. Expectations were high but the bar of results was set pretty low, so Klopp had room to breathe. Initially, Klopp was given two years to see whether he could work the Mainz magic at Dortmund.
As my close friend, Ian Hawkey, always says, coaches have their dogma. Klopp’s dogma was the high press and run, run, run. He called it “heavy metal” football.
He argued that the opposition are at their most vulnerable to losing the ball after having just won it because they are looking for the best way to make use of the ball they now have.
He has said in interview that he is indebted to the former Italian manager, Arrigo Sacchi, for his thoughts on the press and the need for hard-running team to work like demons when they don’t have the ball.
As he told his biographer, Rafael Honigstein: “We want to run incessantly. That’s our coat of arms. We are the vanguard of the regular guys in the pub. They want us to run and fight. If one guy leaves the stadium thinking, ‘they should have run and fought more today’, we got it completely wrong.”
In Klopp’s first season in charge at Dortmund they lost only five matches, lower than the seven lost by Wolfburg and Bayern Munich, who finished first and second respectively.
Dortmund themselves finished sixth, only ten points adrift of winners Wolfsburg, conceding amongst the lowest number of goals and drawing amongst the highest – 14. Already it was an improvement on 13th – Klopp was beginning to justifying the faith the saviours had shown in him by becoming a bit of a saviour himself.
The following season Dortmund did one better, finishing fifth. They actually secured two less points than they had in Klopp’s first season in finishing a place higher, although this was offset by the fact that they played out fewer draws. Klopp was beginning to make his mark with his high-pressing philosophy.
After two years, Klopp had restored credibility to Borussia Dortmund, the heavy-metal wonders of the Ruhr. Credibility, however, has a slightly vague, almost insipid, feel, a nice-to-have rather than a have-something-in-the-trophy cabinet kind of thing.
Given that there was nothing in the trophy cabinet, Klopp went about remedying that. In 2010/11, Dortmund won the Bundesliga title by seven points over Bayer Leverkusen and ten over perennial foes, Bayern Munich. They won 23 of their 34 matches and although Bayern scored more goals, Dortmund’s goal difference was more impressive.
Part of the reason for the improvement – and goal-scoring improvement – was the recruitment in July, 2009 of Lucas Barrios, the striker from Paraguay. Eleven months later, Klopp bought Robert Lewandowski, as Barrios and Lewandowski tussled to become the club’s top striker.
In later seasons, were added Ivan Perešić from Club Brugge and Ilkay Gundogan from Nuremburg, amongst others. Klopp was beginning to scan the horizon. A German title had made the saviours happy. He wanted more. Europe now beckoned.
Despite winning back-to-back Bundesliga titles, Dortmund’s Champions League form had been indifferent. In 2011/12 for example, the years of their second Bundesliga title, their European form was indifferent. They had won only one Champions League game, beating Olympiakos, finishing bottom of their group and vowing to do better the following season.
This they did – and handsomely so. They were drawn in a tough group, alongside Real Madrid, Ajax Amsterdam and Manchester City.
With a win and a draw against second-placed Real Madrid, they topped the group, meeting Mourinho’s men again in the semi-final.
It was the Special One against the Normal One, the fable of the boy-next door against the boy-on-the-pedestal-up-above-him. In the end, normality prevailed, and Dortmund progressed to the final after their 4-1 home victory in the first leg.
They met Bayern Munich in London in that year’s final, losing two-one. For Klopp’s team, Lewandowski scored 10 goals in the competition, two less than Real’s Cristiano Ronaldo, the competitions leading scorer.
Klopp hadn’t won the Champions League but he had twice won the Bundesliga, taking over from a club that went through managers like bin-liners. Yet after the second Bundesliga win and the Champions League final defeat, matters began to sour.
Perešić, whose international form for Croatia tells us what a fine footballer he is, and Klopp never drank beer together in the prow of a boat heading down the Rhine. Lewandowski soon signalled his intentions to move to Bayern and Mario Götze went to Bayern too, and this at a time Klopp found more than a touch inconvenient given that Dortmund were in the midst of their strapping 2012/13 Champions League run.
In a sense, Klopp had saved the saviours. In so doing, he had become a saviour himself. But he had become more. He had become truly successful to a degree he could never have dreamed of at Mainz. He had become Pan-European. He was no longer simply German. And so other clubs duly came knocking, amongst them, Liverpool, for whom he signed in 2015.
Again, as he had done at Dortmund when they had finished 13th, he took over from previous incumbent, Brendan Rodgers, at a good time. Liverpool finished sixth in the league in Rodgers’s last season in charge, although that’s only half the story.
The other half of that story is that sixth spot was 25 points adrift of that season’s champions Chelsea. Under Rodgers Liverpool won only 18 matches out of 38; they only scored 52 goals compared to Chelsea’s 73 goals and second-placed Manchester City’s 83. A manager as astute as Klopp was never going to struggle to do better.
The Klopp reviews as he calls it a day on a stellar career have stressed his loyalty, which is absolutely true. Whether he was player or coach at Mainz, he was there for 11 years, playing as either striker or defender for the club 325 times.
Unlike José, who parks the bus, Jürgen parks his car in a parking bay with his name on it. The bay stays his for an awfully long time.
But there’s a far more intangible, difficult to put-your-finger-on quality with Klopp. Might we call this quality serendipity? Instinct? Might we call it luck? Or is to call it luck to do disservice to Klopp’s instinct for making the right move at the right time.
Both Dortmund and Liverpool provided Klopp with an opportunity to lift them away from comparative under-achievement. Here were clubs in need of saving. I very much doubt that was an accident in either case.
Saving is one thing, winning trophies is quite another, and into his fifties, Klopp didn’t seem to have much Champions League luck. Two moments stand out with Klopp at Liverpool, the Champions League semi-final defeat of Barcelona at Anfield, where they turned a 3-0 away deficit into a 4-0 win, and their winning of the Premiership title the following season.
At half-time at Anfield, in the semi-final Liverpool held a slender 1-0 lead after Barcelona had won 3-0 at the Camp Nou. Klopp pulled defender, Andrew Robertson off at the beginning of the second-half for a rampant Georgi Wijnaldum, who scored Liverpool’s second and third goals, the third a header in which he ghosted between two slightly dipsy defenders.
The fourth goal, if you remember, was a corner taken quickly by Trent Alexander-Arnold met by Divock Origi from close range. Looking back on the replays it looks a little as if the Barcelona defenders were discussing who had a window seat and who was sitting on the aisle on the flight home. They shouldn’t have got side-lined, they were going home anyway.
Liverpool won 4-3 on aggregate, and Sadio Mané said afterwards that Klopp’s belief that Liverpool could do it was incredibly infectious. They duly won the final – beating Spurs in the with a fit-again Mohamed Salah scoring one of Liverpool’s two goals – in a match where they had significantly less than half of the possession.
You don’t often hear the word I’m about to utter in sport but the Champions League victory seemed to usher in a period of unrivalled happiness at the club. It was as though they were playing on air. The won the Premiership title the following season – the first since the 1989/90 – with a gobsmacking seven matches to spare.
With 32 wins out of a possible 38, they amassed 99 points, 18 more than second-placed Manchester City and – get this – a full 33 points more than third-placed Manchester United and fourth-placed Chelsea.
If this was heavy metal, Klopp’s men were playing with five and six guitars. Everyone played a solo but there were no soloists as such. Look at the scorers.
Their best effort was Salah in fifth place with 19 goals. Sadio Mane scored 18 goals, with Roberto Firmino scoring nine; there were five for Virgil van Dijk, and four-a-piece for Alexander-Arnold, Jordan Henderson, Wijnaldum, Origi, and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain.
Happiness doesn’t just arrive one day to spread its good cheer. The conditions for happiness need to be created.
In Klopp’s case there were some ground rules at Liverpool, the distillation of what he had learned at Mainz and Borussia Dortmund. Famously, one of his strictest rules at Liverpool was that his players needed to remain for an hour or two after a tough defeat, particularly if the defeat was at Anfield. Players had to socialise with the team, which Klopp believes builds and maintains cohesion. Henderson has also revealed – surprise, surprise – players aren’t allowed to show that they’re tired. The entire team needs to keep running for the full ninety.
There will be a great deal said and written before and after Liverpool play Wolves on Sunday. I look at the tiredness in Klopp’s eyes and know that he needs a holiday. The hard press has been hard on him too. He’s said as much, although not in so many words. A couple of days ago at a Liverpool press conference he said: “I’m not an outside person.”
It doesn’t look like much, that quote, but it tells you that the presence of the microphones and cameras can take the shine off the day for the most polished man.
