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Jurgen Klopp brings a history of outlandish tales to Liverpool

By on October 8, 2015

The year was 2004, and Jurgen Klopp, a charismatic young manager led Mainz 05 into the German Bundesliga for the first time in the club’s history. In the modern world of football, players are subject to micro-management, from their diets to training regimes, to be built into maximally efficient machines. Even ten years ago, this was the norm, but Klopp went in another direction with his choice of preseason camp that summer.

In a 2013 interview with The Guardian, Klopp revealed that he took Mainz out to a remote lake in Sweden. There was no electricity and the players were not allowed to bring any food for the entirety of their five day stay. There were no treadmills, weight machines or even footballs involved. Klopp didn’t even have the players run. Instead, the team camped in tents and fished. “I wanted the team to feel that they can survive everything,” he says. “My assistant coach thinks I’m an idiot.”

They moved from island to island and the whole time it was raining. “You can speak about spirit – or you can live it,” Klopp philosophized. He now remembers that he called that team the “Special Forces.” Call it lunacy or brand Klopp a madman, but Klopp says, “we went into the Bundesliga and people could not believe how strong we were.” That season, Mainz went beyond expectations with an eleventh place finish.

Throughout his career, Klopp has toed this line of lunacy, then grit his teeth and run straight across it. At Mainz, he maintained a close bond with his players, who called him “Kloppo.” The German had played at the club for the entirety of his twelve-year professional career before taking an unusual path and streamlining right into management. As a player, he was a bullish center-forward and scored more than fifty goals, then abruptly moved to center-back in 1995.

Throughout his playing career, Klopp was striving for promotion to the Bundesliga with Mainz. The closest they came was a dramatic away meeting at VfL Wolfsburg in 1997. A win would send Mainz into Germany’s top division but anything less and Wolfsburg would go through.

The visitors went up early, but things quickly turned sour as they allowed three goals and went down to ten men before halftime. Yet it was Klopp who ignited a comeback with a second half goal and another brought Mainz level. Fate, however, added another cruel twist as Mainz made two poor mistakes, one committed by Klopp himself. Another late goal from Mainz was only a consolation when the final whistle blew with the scoreline 5-4 in Wolfsburg’s favor.

As a manager, Klopp finally managed to complete the mission.

Passion defines Klopp’s tactical ethos. The work rate of his teams and control Klopp maintains over his players is epitomized in his famous style of gegenpressing, requiring eleven men to maintain an all-out mentality of nonstop high pressing for ninety minutes.

This style was developed at Borussia Dortmund, where Klopp moved after leaving Mainz in 2008 following relegation from the Bundesliga after three seasons and failure to lead the club back up the following year. He speaks of his departure, via The Guardian, with heartfelt sadness: “I left Mainz after 18 years and thought: ‘Next time I will work with a little less of my heart.’ I said that because we all cried for a week. The city gave us a goodbye party and it lasted a week. For a normal person that emotion is too much. I thought it’s not healthy to work like this. But after one week at Dortmund it was the same situation. To find this twice, to be hit by good fortune, is very unusual.”

In Dortmund, Klopp took a mediocre mid-table team and injected a sense of youth an vibrancy back into his squad. It only took him a few years to build a legacy from his unkempt appearance and extravagant pitch-side celebrations, whether it be a title that has been won or goal that has been scored. Klopp certainly did a lot of both with Dortmund and won the Bundesliga two consecutive seasons before leading the underdogs all the way to the Champions League final.

A loss to Bayern Munich in the final signaled a fall in the table for Dortmund and although Klopp left last summer following a calamitous seventh place finish in the league, the departure was not sour, but bittersweet.

Ever since, Klopp has been linked with every imaginable club and has finally found a home at Anfield, where he takes over a struggling Liverpool side from Brendan Rodgers. The forty-eight-year-old will surely bring his trademark bite to Liverpool’s squad and even if it isn’t successful in the Premier League, my of my will his time at the club be entertaining.

The Daily Mail have their own Klopp story. Broadcaster Johannes B Kerner was interviewing Klopp and during their conversation, asked: “If I were one of your players, what would you do now to get my adrenaline pumping?” Klopp swiftly slapped Kerner across the face.

Homepage photo credit: By Tim.Reckmann (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.