Got my hands on:
Would love to share some of the contents which I thought are rather interesting and/or insightful. The posts are going to be long and chunky though, so please bear with it. I am also not going to 'binnify' the contents for 2 reasons - 1. it'll be unfair if I didn't bold information that may be of interest to you 2. the selected chapters are pretty rich in content - I'll end up bolding majority of the text!
----------------------------------------
Inspiration not Imitation: Klopp's Training Method (Part 1 of 2)
Though the greatest inspiration for Jurgen Klopp's managerial career has been Wolfgang Frank, he was not the only manager he had learned from. In his eleven years at Mainz as a player, he played under another nine coaches: Robert Jung, Josip Kuze, Hermann Hummels (the father of Mat Hummels), Horst Franz, Reinhard Saftig, Didi Constantini, Dirk Karkuth, Rene Vandereycken and Eckhard Krautzun.
Even as a player, Klopp had finely turned antennae and a natural 'filter' that allowed him to 'pick out the right things. You could learn something from every manager. For me it was less about the training drills we did than what the manager was like as a personality. What's his philosophy and how does he get it across? Those were the things I always paid attention to.' Not that Klopp has any records of those training sessions, having made a conscious decision not to keep notes: 'I've always thought, I can remember the important stuff and forget the rest.'
One a manager, Klopp has taken a similar approach to the latest advances in football management. Klopp is sometimes considered the embodiment of the modern manager, thanks to his understanding of the game and ability to see beyond the traditional, but he is no blind follower of the latest trends. As with observing his different managers at Mainz, he has the knack of taking on board what is useful and discarding the unhelpful.
In recent years, professional football has been subject to an ever greater influence from sports science. Managers have been turning into new methods that are often reliant on information technology. The field of statistical analysis in particular, whether the data is taken from training or from a match, has seen exponential growth thanks to technological developments. Today's managers have number at their fingertips their predecessor never had: How many kilometres has a player run? How many tackles completed? Who has had how many touches of the ball? There are any number of specialists in charge of different areas that a modern manager can call upon: conditioning trainers, goalkeeping coaches, video analysts, scouts and so forth.
Yet, for all these possibilities, Klopp has always been circumspect in his use of new technology, particularly the roles of statistics. Take his opinion on the work of sport scientist Dr Roland Loy, an authority on the use of statistics in football. He has written a number of books on the subject, as well as developing databases for the football show ran on German channel Sat1 and advising the sports department of the broadcaster ZDF. For his research, Loy has analysed more than 3000 football matches in the last twenty years, in the process disproving many common assumptions. For example, he discovered that the hardest tackling team doesn't always win (only in 40 percent of matches); and rather than the received wisdom that attacking down the wings is more likely to lead to a goal than going through the middles, his analysis showed that both roues are equally likely to lead to a goal. Klopp, however, has limited interest in Loy's work: 'I know Roland, we worked together in [TV presenter] Johannes Kerner's team at the World Cup in South Africa. I place 0.0 per cent faith in his statistics and he knows it too. I've said it to his face so I feel perfectly comfortable saying it in public.'
Klopp isn't dismissive of statistics per se, adding that, 'I'm a huge fan though of stats that look at the last game or maybe evaluate the entire season.' But certainly he puts a lot of faith in his observations, rather than numbers on a spreadsheet: 'I'm a big proponent of the idea that you have to see for yourself. Most of the time, I'll know if our build-up play is too slow before anyone hands me any date. After all, I've got nothing else to do but train a team and deal with football day in day out. I don't need any hard numbers for that. I've been trained to spot these things myself.'
One area where Klopp puts more faith in scientific methods is on the question of stamina. Advances in sports science have made it possible to tailor training regimes to the fitness level of individual players.A player who's 'raring to go' can be handled differently from one recovering from injury, who's just returning to full training after a long period of convalescence. Klopp's maxim is that no player should have too much - or too little - asked of them in training. To make sure this happens, Klopp uses lactate tests: lactate is produced as a metabolic breakdown during exercise, as soon as the muscles can no longer produce enough energy from aerobic oxygen; lactate concentrations therefore offer a guide to the stamina levels of the player. Lactic acid levels can be determined by taking a blood sample from an earlobe. The relative simplicity of the tests makes them an ideal aid during pre-season as the players undergo fitness training.
Felix Magath, who won the Bundesliga with Wolfsburg in 2009, has the same attitude to lactate tests as Klopp does to statistics: 'I don't need to do a lactate test to know whether a player is fit or not.' Kloop might agree with the sentiment, but thanks to the tests he knows 'where we need to place a player to do the right intensity of training. Because it would be foolish to go through a training session that was perfectly tailored to three of them, when for the rests it's either too intense or not intense enough.'
Such personalised training regimes were also made easier by the increasing resources available to coaches. Klopp offers one small example: 'You used to have one heartrate monitor for twenty players, now you have forty heartrate monitors for ten players. That opens up new possibilities and it's also easier working that way.' Together with the new scientific methods, then, there's also a much deeper well of information to draw from than earlier generations of coaches enjoyed. This greater depth of knowledge is ultimately of great benefit to the players, who are able to push the limits of their fitness.
Klopp is clear on the difference between training practices now and those he experienced as a player: 'I think that many of my generation of players were definitely trained a bit too hard. It was unbelievable how much we did in training. It was crazy how long we spent on the pitch, how much running we had to do and how hard we had to run. One of the main indicators as to whether training session had been hard enough was when at least one of the players threw up on the pitch. In contrast, the current training model has a much more nuanced understanding of effort and rest, of tension and relaxation.'
That Klopp is particularly focused on stamina training can come as no surprise. After all, stamina is crucial to the pressing style that is fundamental to his system. The importance of running was confirmed in Klopp's mind right at the start of his time at Dortmund: in July 2008 at the T-Home Supercup match against Bayern Munich, which Dortmund won 2-1. Klopp observed later that 'As a team we ran a total of 121 kilometres. That didn't say all that much to me at the time, because I hadn't used these values as part of my work before.' Yet during the course of the 2008-09 season, when Dortmund failed to win a single match from the first seven games that followed the winter break, Klopp brought the statistic back into his calculations: 'I discovered that we hadn't got further than 113 kilometres in these games.'
Klopp had some time to work with the squad at a training camp: 'I made a deal with the players there: if you can manage to run more than 118 kilometres in nine out of ten games, you'll get three extra days' holiday. And the players actually went out and did it.' Freshly motivated, the players finally broke their bad run against Werder Bremen. Alexander Frei's spot-kick gave the Borussians their first win of the Ruckrunde, the second half of the season. This was just the beginning: those seven winless games were followed by seven victories in a row as Dortmund chalked up twenty-one points.
At the start of his tenure, Klopp was concerned with doing 'more' than the opposition, with literally running them ragged. As time went on, the 'how' became more important: ' We've started being much cleverer with our runs now. We have more of the ball and we don't need to run so far when the opposition has it.' The chances of winning a game aren't derived from the number of kilometres the players have put behind them alone. Dortmund went on to have some great performances without particularly impressive running stats, and they also had poor performances with enormous distances run. Nevertheless, it's a piece of information that Klopp is still fond of turning to, especially when the team is going through a bad patch.
It's a statistic some other managers have commented on to humorous effect. During the International Coaching Congress in Bochum in 2011, Hannover 96 manager Mirko Slomka offered a different reason for Dortmund's high mileage - suggesting that the Dortmund numbers were being massaged by the addition of the mileage generated during their collective goal celebrations. After all, they had sixty-seven occasions to celebrate in the 2010-11 season compared to a 'mere' forty-nine for fourth-placed Hannover. Klopp responded to the suggestion in kind: ' That's right, against Hannover alone we scored four goals on two occasions, that's an extra 400 kilometres ...'
Managerial banter aside, the emphasis on running at Klopp's Borussia Dortmund is made clear by a look at the numbers. In the first game of the 2011-12 season, at home against Hamburg, the Bundesliga database IMPIRE revealed the following interesting points: with 58 per cent possession, the Borussians ran a total 124.67 km, Sven Bender proved himself once again a tireless worker bee. Klopp's team were also superior to the opposition when it came to sprints, with 193 compared to 150. The number of misplaced passes also reflected the one-sidedness of the encounter. While nearly a quarter of Hamburg's passes (23.6 per cent) failed to find their target, the home team's passes failed to find a teammate only 13.6 per cent of the team.
The revealing nature of this mountain of data - which was accessible not just to the clubs but also the media and hence the public - provoked some criticism at the start of that season. There were fears that players were reduced to living spreadsheets who would be judged entirely on their 'km run' - leaving less mobile players to be 'singled out', although how much a player runs is very much dependent on their position and role in the team.As such information has become more commonplace, it feels as if a more nuanced and realistic appraisal of such statistics has become the norm.
Jurgen Klopp is open-minded in the best sense of the word: always ready to listen to new ideas that might give him and his team that extra advantage. One of the most effective pieces of training equipment that Borussia Dortmund possess is the 'Footbonaut' at their Brackel training complex. During Klopp's appearance on ZDF Sportsudio in September 2012, a computer animation demonstrated how the piece of kit works. Similar to a tennis-ball machine, balls are fired at the player inside the Footbonaut cube . He then has to shoot it as quickly as possible into one of the seventy-two target squares that light up. There are two football guns in each wall, meaning the ball could come from one of eight possible places. Speed and swerve can be adjusted. As a result, it's possible to closely simulate a real playing situation, training reactions, precision, control and placement. At the time of the TV appearance, the device was still being trialled, but went on to be a permanent and flagship addition to the training facilities.
Another part of Klopp's training regime at Dortmund came about by chance. Klopp was watching TV when he came across Life Kinetik, the mental training system developed by sports instructor Horst Lutz. And he was clearly enthusiastic about the system: 'Life Kinetik is incredibly exciting, it's a real eye-opener. For managers, it's something you really need to look into.'
Life Kinetik is a training system designed to improve brain function by challenging the body to complete complex tasks. According to its website, 'Life Kinetik is a fun exercise program based on motion to enhance mental capabilities. Life Kinetik training forces all brain areas to actively take part and master the given movement challenges and therefore it creates new connections in our brain. The training works by simultaneously combining exercises of different movement patterns, visual tasks and cognitive elements. Life Kinetik accomplishes this with the help of ever changing exercises that scale the difficulty level to the ability of each person.'
Employing training methods like Life Kinetik helps Klopp to increase his player's (mental) flexibility. A practical exercise might look like this: a ball is thrown towards a player while at the same time he's told a certain colour. Each colour stands for a particular action: trap the ball with your left or right foot, head the ball back, or control it on your chest. More demanding exercises such as juggling the ball or catching it with crossed arms are also part of the programme. The tasks are hard to come to grips with, and that's intentional - this forced coordination is a learning process designed to generate new synapses.
The added value for footballers lies in sharpened perception and faster reaction times - qualities that are essential in modern high-tempo football. The first improvements should be noticeable after two to eight weeks of training for an hour a week. Life Kinetic has another bonus for professional footballers as well. As Klopp says, 'How can I work with the lads without asking too much of them physically? I'd like to conduct training sessions eight hours a day, but that's not possible ... so we think about things we can do with them off the pitch.' It's a low-intensity programme that allows for additional training without overloading the players.
Klopp is convinced that you have to keep improving all the time, as his use of such innovative methods shows. 'It's all about keeping informed. That's my job as a manager. You get bombarded with huge amounts of information, and most of it you can happily discard right away. But if there's 20 per cent among that that's really worth working with, then it's completely worth the effort.'
Would love to share some of the contents which I thought are rather interesting and/or insightful. The posts are going to be long and chunky though, so please bear with it. I am also not going to 'binnify' the contents for 2 reasons - 1. it'll be unfair if I didn't bold information that may be of interest to you 2. the selected chapters are pretty rich in content - I'll end up bolding majority of the text!
----------------------------------------
Inspiration not Imitation: Klopp's Training Method (Part 1 of 2)
Though the greatest inspiration for Jurgen Klopp's managerial career has been Wolfgang Frank, he was not the only manager he had learned from. In his eleven years at Mainz as a player, he played under another nine coaches: Robert Jung, Josip Kuze, Hermann Hummels (the father of Mat Hummels), Horst Franz, Reinhard Saftig, Didi Constantini, Dirk Karkuth, Rene Vandereycken and Eckhard Krautzun.
Even as a player, Klopp had finely turned antennae and a natural 'filter' that allowed him to 'pick out the right things. You could learn something from every manager. For me it was less about the training drills we did than what the manager was like as a personality. What's his philosophy and how does he get it across? Those were the things I always paid attention to.' Not that Klopp has any records of those training sessions, having made a conscious decision not to keep notes: 'I've always thought, I can remember the important stuff and forget the rest.'
One a manager, Klopp has taken a similar approach to the latest advances in football management. Klopp is sometimes considered the embodiment of the modern manager, thanks to his understanding of the game and ability to see beyond the traditional, but he is no blind follower of the latest trends. As with observing his different managers at Mainz, he has the knack of taking on board what is useful and discarding the unhelpful.
In recent years, professional football has been subject to an ever greater influence from sports science. Managers have been turning into new methods that are often reliant on information technology. The field of statistical analysis in particular, whether the data is taken from training or from a match, has seen exponential growth thanks to technological developments. Today's managers have number at their fingertips their predecessor never had: How many kilometres has a player run? How many tackles completed? Who has had how many touches of the ball? There are any number of specialists in charge of different areas that a modern manager can call upon: conditioning trainers, goalkeeping coaches, video analysts, scouts and so forth.
Yet, for all these possibilities, Klopp has always been circumspect in his use of new technology, particularly the roles of statistics. Take his opinion on the work of sport scientist Dr Roland Loy, an authority on the use of statistics in football. He has written a number of books on the subject, as well as developing databases for the football show ran on German channel Sat1 and advising the sports department of the broadcaster ZDF. For his research, Loy has analysed more than 3000 football matches in the last twenty years, in the process disproving many common assumptions. For example, he discovered that the hardest tackling team doesn't always win (only in 40 percent of matches); and rather than the received wisdom that attacking down the wings is more likely to lead to a goal than going through the middles, his analysis showed that both roues are equally likely to lead to a goal. Klopp, however, has limited interest in Loy's work: 'I know Roland, we worked together in [TV presenter] Johannes Kerner's team at the World Cup in South Africa. I place 0.0 per cent faith in his statistics and he knows it too. I've said it to his face so I feel perfectly comfortable saying it in public.'
Klopp isn't dismissive of statistics per se, adding that, 'I'm a huge fan though of stats that look at the last game or maybe evaluate the entire season.' But certainly he puts a lot of faith in his observations, rather than numbers on a spreadsheet: 'I'm a big proponent of the idea that you have to see for yourself. Most of the time, I'll know if our build-up play is too slow before anyone hands me any date. After all, I've got nothing else to do but train a team and deal with football day in day out. I don't need any hard numbers for that. I've been trained to spot these things myself.'
One area where Klopp puts more faith in scientific methods is on the question of stamina. Advances in sports science have made it possible to tailor training regimes to the fitness level of individual players.A player who's 'raring to go' can be handled differently from one recovering from injury, who's just returning to full training after a long period of convalescence. Klopp's maxim is that no player should have too much - or too little - asked of them in training. To make sure this happens, Klopp uses lactate tests: lactate is produced as a metabolic breakdown during exercise, as soon as the muscles can no longer produce enough energy from aerobic oxygen; lactate concentrations therefore offer a guide to the stamina levels of the player. Lactic acid levels can be determined by taking a blood sample from an earlobe. The relative simplicity of the tests makes them an ideal aid during pre-season as the players undergo fitness training.
Felix Magath, who won the Bundesliga with Wolfsburg in 2009, has the same attitude to lactate tests as Klopp does to statistics: 'I don't need to do a lactate test to know whether a player is fit or not.' Kloop might agree with the sentiment, but thanks to the tests he knows 'where we need to place a player to do the right intensity of training. Because it would be foolish to go through a training session that was perfectly tailored to three of them, when for the rests it's either too intense or not intense enough.'
Such personalised training regimes were also made easier by the increasing resources available to coaches. Klopp offers one small example: 'You used to have one heartrate monitor for twenty players, now you have forty heartrate monitors for ten players. That opens up new possibilities and it's also easier working that way.' Together with the new scientific methods, then, there's also a much deeper well of information to draw from than earlier generations of coaches enjoyed. This greater depth of knowledge is ultimately of great benefit to the players, who are able to push the limits of their fitness.
Klopp is clear on the difference between training practices now and those he experienced as a player: 'I think that many of my generation of players were definitely trained a bit too hard. It was unbelievable how much we did in training. It was crazy how long we spent on the pitch, how much running we had to do and how hard we had to run. One of the main indicators as to whether training session had been hard enough was when at least one of the players threw up on the pitch. In contrast, the current training model has a much more nuanced understanding of effort and rest, of tension and relaxation.'
That Klopp is particularly focused on stamina training can come as no surprise. After all, stamina is crucial to the pressing style that is fundamental to his system. The importance of running was confirmed in Klopp's mind right at the start of his time at Dortmund: in July 2008 at the T-Home Supercup match against Bayern Munich, which Dortmund won 2-1. Klopp observed later that 'As a team we ran a total of 121 kilometres. That didn't say all that much to me at the time, because I hadn't used these values as part of my work before.' Yet during the course of the 2008-09 season, when Dortmund failed to win a single match from the first seven games that followed the winter break, Klopp brought the statistic back into his calculations: 'I discovered that we hadn't got further than 113 kilometres in these games.'
Klopp had some time to work with the squad at a training camp: 'I made a deal with the players there: if you can manage to run more than 118 kilometres in nine out of ten games, you'll get three extra days' holiday. And the players actually went out and did it.' Freshly motivated, the players finally broke their bad run against Werder Bremen. Alexander Frei's spot-kick gave the Borussians their first win of the Ruckrunde, the second half of the season. This was just the beginning: those seven winless games were followed by seven victories in a row as Dortmund chalked up twenty-one points.
At the start of his tenure, Klopp was concerned with doing 'more' than the opposition, with literally running them ragged. As time went on, the 'how' became more important: ' We've started being much cleverer with our runs now. We have more of the ball and we don't need to run so far when the opposition has it.' The chances of winning a game aren't derived from the number of kilometres the players have put behind them alone. Dortmund went on to have some great performances without particularly impressive running stats, and they also had poor performances with enormous distances run. Nevertheless, it's a piece of information that Klopp is still fond of turning to, especially when the team is going through a bad patch.
It's a statistic some other managers have commented on to humorous effect. During the International Coaching Congress in Bochum in 2011, Hannover 96 manager Mirko Slomka offered a different reason for Dortmund's high mileage - suggesting that the Dortmund numbers were being massaged by the addition of the mileage generated during their collective goal celebrations. After all, they had sixty-seven occasions to celebrate in the 2010-11 season compared to a 'mere' forty-nine for fourth-placed Hannover. Klopp responded to the suggestion in kind: ' That's right, against Hannover alone we scored four goals on two occasions, that's an extra 400 kilometres ...'
Managerial banter aside, the emphasis on running at Klopp's Borussia Dortmund is made clear by a look at the numbers. In the first game of the 2011-12 season, at home against Hamburg, the Bundesliga database IMPIRE revealed the following interesting points: with 58 per cent possession, the Borussians ran a total 124.67 km, Sven Bender proved himself once again a tireless worker bee. Klopp's team were also superior to the opposition when it came to sprints, with 193 compared to 150. The number of misplaced passes also reflected the one-sidedness of the encounter. While nearly a quarter of Hamburg's passes (23.6 per cent) failed to find their target, the home team's passes failed to find a teammate only 13.6 per cent of the team.
The revealing nature of this mountain of data - which was accessible not just to the clubs but also the media and hence the public - provoked some criticism at the start of that season. There were fears that players were reduced to living spreadsheets who would be judged entirely on their 'km run' - leaving less mobile players to be 'singled out', although how much a player runs is very much dependent on their position and role in the team.As such information has become more commonplace, it feels as if a more nuanced and realistic appraisal of such statistics has become the norm.
Jurgen Klopp is open-minded in the best sense of the word: always ready to listen to new ideas that might give him and his team that extra advantage. One of the most effective pieces of training equipment that Borussia Dortmund possess is the 'Footbonaut' at their Brackel training complex. During Klopp's appearance on ZDF Sportsudio in September 2012, a computer animation demonstrated how the piece of kit works. Similar to a tennis-ball machine, balls are fired at the player inside the Footbonaut cube . He then has to shoot it as quickly as possible into one of the seventy-two target squares that light up. There are two football guns in each wall, meaning the ball could come from one of eight possible places. Speed and swerve can be adjusted. As a result, it's possible to closely simulate a real playing situation, training reactions, precision, control and placement. At the time of the TV appearance, the device was still being trialled, but went on to be a permanent and flagship addition to the training facilities.
Another part of Klopp's training regime at Dortmund came about by chance. Klopp was watching TV when he came across Life Kinetik, the mental training system developed by sports instructor Horst Lutz. And he was clearly enthusiastic about the system: 'Life Kinetik is incredibly exciting, it's a real eye-opener. For managers, it's something you really need to look into.'
Life Kinetik is a training system designed to improve brain function by challenging the body to complete complex tasks. According to its website, 'Life Kinetik is a fun exercise program based on motion to enhance mental capabilities. Life Kinetik training forces all brain areas to actively take part and master the given movement challenges and therefore it creates new connections in our brain. The training works by simultaneously combining exercises of different movement patterns, visual tasks and cognitive elements. Life Kinetik accomplishes this with the help of ever changing exercises that scale the difficulty level to the ability of each person.'
Employing training methods like Life Kinetik helps Klopp to increase his player's (mental) flexibility. A practical exercise might look like this: a ball is thrown towards a player while at the same time he's told a certain colour. Each colour stands for a particular action: trap the ball with your left or right foot, head the ball back, or control it on your chest. More demanding exercises such as juggling the ball or catching it with crossed arms are also part of the programme. The tasks are hard to come to grips with, and that's intentional - this forced coordination is a learning process designed to generate new synapses.
The added value for footballers lies in sharpened perception and faster reaction times - qualities that are essential in modern high-tempo football. The first improvements should be noticeable after two to eight weeks of training for an hour a week. Life Kinetic has another bonus for professional footballers as well. As Klopp says, 'How can I work with the lads without asking too much of them physically? I'd like to conduct training sessions eight hours a day, but that's not possible ... so we think about things we can do with them off the pitch.' It's a low-intensity programme that allows for additional training without overloading the players.
Klopp is convinced that you have to keep improving all the time, as his use of such innovative methods shows. 'It's all about keeping informed. That's my job as a manager. You get bombarded with huge amounts of information, and most of it you can happily discard right away. But if there's 20 per cent among that that's really worth working with, then it's completely worth the effort.'
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