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Klopp Talk
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Hey thanks for posting this @gkmacca - Great read.Ignat Manjoo's encounters with the so-called reinvention of German football, how it applies to the new Liverpool way, being mindful of entertainment vs real management
EDITORIAL By Ignat Manjoo
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What’s that? A distant, blonde, humanoid figure approaching me through the dark. Jürgen Klopp? No, it’s my wife. She says, that at this rate I’m never going to get some rest in time for the Bafana Bafana game against Costa Rica at 4am on Friday.
Reds fans have been spotting Klopp (or his spectre) around Liverpool even two days before he arrived in the city. What will they see when he really arrives? In flesh. When you’re in love, you imagine your beloved in every face walking by. Liverpool fans are in love without even meeting their new manager Klopp yet. Typical of the Internet age we live in.
The supporters worldwide that didn’t want to go outside (or to work) until the Klopp confirmation was official, repeatedly clicked the refresh button on Twitter and forums, spotting Klopp in random videos of any average man with a beard and cap. There’s a Klopp father lookalike in the backyard playing basketball on a swing. There’s reflections of Klopp photographed off moving cars, between the haze and the sunlight, we catch a beard through the glass. Is it a bird? I only haven’t found fans spotting Klopp in the formation of clouds on their airplane window. Yet, Reds followers were truly following Klopp’s plane from Germany to England, capturing the flight radar, cheering on through the moving landscapes and safe landing, as if we were receiving transmission from Apollo 13. What’s going to happen when it really does happen, when Klopp walks into a packed Anfield singing You’ll Never Walk Alone?
Hysteria. Why did that word pop in my mind first? Where did I hear it recently? Brendan Rodgers. He was right. There is a hysteria in Liverpool. Rodgers said two weeks ago… as if it was in another lifetime.
“Of course there's a lot of hysteria and I think that continues. I'm pretty confident that there's obviously a group of people who don't want me here as the manager,” said Rodgers after he beat struggling Aston Villa two weeks ago.
Yes, there was never a conspiracy. The fans simply preferred Klopp. They begged co-owner John Henry, even tweeting pictures of Klopp to Henry’s wife, such was the desperation. With Liverpool, you can count on a fairy tale ending, and the Internet meltdown was actually comparable to that night in Istanbul, without even kicking a ball. Henry played the red fairy, “Your wish is my command.” One might say it’s blasphemous to compare this to Istanbul 2005, but to Klopp’s advantage, the social media coverage has just taken hysteria to a new level.
Liverpool fans stalk Jürgen Klopp's plane from Germany to England
Where did this fairy tale begin? For me it began in 2006 when I first saw Klopp up close and personal, and I do mean for real. I was in Germany for the World Cup, where a young Klopp worked as a journalist. He was easily approachable at the Sony Center in Berlin. You might be wondering what he was doing in that gig. Well, it was even a risk for ZDF TV to hire him as a presenter in the open air studio because Klopp was relatively unknown to the football world then. To me, when Klopp was presenting his football analysis, he was just that guy talking next to Franz Beckenbauer and introducing us to the real big names, such as Pele. Klopp was just the quiet, almost shy analyst, busy with his new invention of the time (Yes, he got German engineers to create it for him), drawing arrows on the screen to illustrate tactics.
At the time in Germany he wasn’t a nobody, he was the young coach of struggling Bundesliga club Mainz. In keeping with the role of the big screen in football manager's fame, it was his biggest opportunity in front of the camera during the World Cup, which raised his profile for the likes of Dortmund, impressing the German public with his in-game pointers. The rest is history. Now, he is about to bask in front of the cameras at Liverpool, and the English media wouldn’t have seen anything like this, not since Jose Mourinho first walked in London.
The Portuguese is now the most famous coach in the world, not just because he won the Uefa Champions League with Porto or Inter Milan… others have done it twice too. See, it’s due to his entertainment value in the media. He (and his puppet parody) was just so funny, and effective too, as a puppet master speaker, drawing all the journalists’ negativity toward himself, releasing the pressure from his players, like a God absorbing the sins of his fellow players.
That’s why even rival players, the likes of Steven Gerrard dreamed of having Mourinho as a coach. Not because Mourinho was jealous of how Rafa Benitez masterminded his defeat on the pitch, but because of the illusionary persona the self-appointed Special One created for himself. When you hold a power comparable to Mourinho, which the German scribes have foreseen with Klopp for the English Premier League, you will attract class players… and you won’t need to be Rodgers “pissing in the wind” for Toni Kroos, as Gerrard revealed in his book.
Klopp will introduce a new type of humour in Liverpool, boasting witty punch lines and a cultured taste in the arts, but wait… this is not a theatrical review. This is football. Do not judge Klopp as a master of ceremony. Just as Gerrard shouldn’t judge a coach on the warmth of a hug, nor should you the journalist or fan, judge Klopp on how entertaining he is on television. Otherwise Henry should’ve brought in former Mexico coach Miguel Herrera. He’s available too, after punching a journalist, resulted in his axing for Mexico. Tragedy and comedy in one Danny DeVito sized package.
This energy you can feel beaming through Herrera, is bubbling out of him and rubbing off his players. It’s infectious. It reaches the spectators and bounces all over the stadium like a Mexican wave of positivity. It’s exactly what the recent morgue at Anfield needs through the living Klopp, to feed off this energy, and awake! To resurrect the mythical European nights where Liverpool were feared by all in Europe, written down in folklore by the likes of Benitez and Bob Paisley before him.
Not the script by Rodgers that failed to turn over Bulgarian, Turkish and Swiss clubs. The Klopp technique is not just entertainment for show. The psychology is real. Benitez never charged down the field to celebrate with his players. He wrote notes during goals. However his meditative Buddha pose rubbed off to calm his players to beat Chelsea in the 2006-7 Champions League semi-final shootout.
You can’t judge a coach sensibly whilst in a state of frenzy, otherwise when the results catch up on you, you won’t know what hit you. A few losses and the followers will fear the magic is lost. Then how should we judge a manager? When they take the wool out of their eyes, the media judges coaches by results only. So, we think. Actually, all coaches lose matches and go through bad spells, and if that said coach, doesn’t have a good relationship with the media, it’s not difficult to spin an unfortunate string of results back into being the manager’s fault. If Klopp’s on good terms with us (as you expect he will be), then writers will be ready to explain how it was the player/s to blame instead. If you break that pact with the media, you can even be on top of the table but criticised for player relationships, favouritism, languages spoken and foreign tactics. He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword, so when you play your game on the television/computer screen, if you stare long enough this is where heroes turn into villains in time.
Not just Mourinho. Look at when the new model of reinventing German football began. Researchers placed it around the year 2008 in club football (the national team was earlier) with Jürgen Klinsmann, dubbing it ‘Concept Coaching (Konzepttrainer)’.
Ironically, Klinsmann was linked with Liverpool around that time when they were owned by American Texas cowboys George Gillett and Tom Hicks. Klinsmann used to visit them in the United States, and you can imagine how he gave H & G an earful on his philosophies. While living in America, Klinsmann learnt the latest techniques from US athletes. When Liverpool fans caught wind of this, it was the beginning of the end for the former owners. How things have changed in the FSG era.
First, Bayern Munich soon bought into Klinsmann’s ideas, but when the going got tough, the faith required to hold onto this new religion was lost. One by one high profile players such as Philipp Lahm turned on him, even stating that Klinsmann made minimal tactical preparation.
How did everything suddenly go pear shaped? Remember, Klinsmann was the darling of Germany just before that, not just as a legendary scorer but as their head coach for 2006. The pundits proved that the real genius behind Germany’s rise was actually his assistant Joachim Low, who took over as head coach, and the rest became history.
What can Klopp learn from history? The Concept Coach requires strong faith for everyone to come on board. When I was in Germany and their journalists were talking to me about the new system they were developing (as if it was in the underground bunkers with high concepts), I was laughing at them (probably just like how Bayern laughed at Klinsmann thereafter). I could laugh because England’s 5-1 thrashing of Germany in their own backyard was still fresh in my mind even though it was a World Cup qualification campaign earlier.
Growing up with the English media in South Africa, in my mind there was no doubt that the English team was far superior to the Germans at the time. All this talk about how the Germans were implementing these strategies in their youth systems, sounded like a dream, or a lie that when you tell enough people, someone will believe it. I also spoke to university students in Berlin who compared Germany’s rise to football power with the nationalism of World War 2, but I easily concluded that these boys just didn’t like to watch football. Which Germans were getting carried away?
Maybe, coming from South Africa I’m used to hearing about pipe-dream development plans. Though, I was living nearby in Austria for two years and also covered the European Cups at U19 and U21 level, where I saw Germany repeatedly losing in the finals to Spain - a precursor for what was in store at senior level in years to come. I watched their youth teams first hand each year and was beginning to suspect there was something to these master plans after all.
From being linked with Klinsmann to Klopp: How times have changed and what Jürgen can learn from Jürgen's failure
The main point in how they succeeded is that the Germans didn’t care about the impact of short term results in their leagues, as long as they were all following the same blue-print from bottom to top, to benefit the national team. They were all singing from the same hymn sheet and I should’ve never doubted the Germans to mechanically pull that off.
It took years. They had converted me. Low was previously the coach, where I was based in Vienna at Austria Wien. Somebody had to bring Low to the Premier League. However club football is different and Low never left his national post, even after winning the World Cup last year.
The third coach in the holy trinity of Concept Coaching is Klopp, the only one to prove himself with it in the Bundesliga. So, Klopps a better fit for the Kop after all. By now, you already know how he won the title against the odds with Dortmund, and took them all the way to the Champions League final in 2013. Then critics point out at his final season, but if you want to earn your badges as a coach worth his salt, it’s also about how you cope with crisis. Even the celebrated Carlo Ancelotti struggled at times. The writing was already on the wall for the departing Klopp in Dortmund.
So, how did I judge that? I believe a coach is assessed by his philosophy, his system and how he implements that in time over various challenges such as injuries, new signings, generational changes and various other factors, that we the media and fans, all need to understand to allow them time for. It’s not just about winning trebles and Champions Leagues, but also how you deal with a rotten patch, whether you can find that solution for your team to turn the corner, or not. You can’t win the league every season, but you have to find that solution and show provable signs that you are back on the onward curve.
Contrast that with Rodger’s philosophy in his 180-page dossier, which was rewritten every few months, sometimes rewritten during games. In the end it was not even that Rodgers didn’t know how to implement his ideas, but he didn’t know what his system was nor which players he wanted to achieve anything.
The Liverpool board, and you the reader, already know what Klopp stands for and how he fits into FSG’s model. He’s not going to swing toward Pep Guardiola’s style one month and Mourinho’s the next… Klopp has his own identity that differentiates him from other Concept Coaches, Klinsmann and Low. The high-pressing, counter-attacking, heavy-metal football wasn’t Rodgers ideal initially. It doesn’t belong to any one coach, but Klopp has made it work to win trophies. Not just to lose them. Rodgers pointed out that he’s the same coach that nearly won the league. It’s the other way around. Rodgers is the same coach that lost the league title. Watch the Crystal Palace fiasco and the silly goals conceded all season.
Rodgers says he needed the tools (players) to make it happen, but he didn’t have his own tools (tactical knowledge or experience) to implement the tools of this philosophy. FSG wanted Klopp from day one to reinvent Liverpool and football in England, while Rodgers talked Klopp’s talk about new concepts. Now, Liverpool finally got the man who knows how to make it happen. It’s over to the players now, because we the media can first blame Rodgers or the Liverpool transfer committee’s signings, until it’s time to turn on Klopp one day.
Next time, I will tell you how Klopp can turn Liverpool around. I can write a 180-page dossier too, but I can’t do it for real.
That last article is a bloody good read. Cheers.
Klopp watch:
I reckon he might be a bit of a pisshead-he's out on the town here and from the amount of water he guzzled at the press conference, I'd say he had a few the night before.
From the Sunday Times:
WHEN the door opened, his young colleagues were taken aback. In the Melwood gym, all alone, was Brendan Rodgers doing sit-ups. This was in Rodgers’ final few weeks: the staff thought he would be outside with the small group of first-team players who were going through their paces.
So that was Brendan: talented, hopeful, well-intentioned . . . and lost. He arrived preaching possession, communication and the practice pitch, but he finished up playing counterattack, not talking to the media, and delegating certain training. The Liverpool job can do that. Rodgers was just another to gaze into the deep pond of expectation surrounding the club until he couldn’t recognise the reflection.
If the key is being so big a personality that you’re immovable, enter Jurgen Klopp. In his first public statements as Liverpool manager on Friday, he didn’t so much press Kop buttons as — heavy metal fan that he is — turn them up to 11. “Don’t make me like Jesus and the next day say ‘No, he can’t walk on water’,” Klopp said, among many memorable soundbites. He wants “emotional football”, to “change doubters into believers”; his understanding of his new club and city’s psyche already seems uncanny.
Klopp connected when he brought Borussia Dortmund to Anfield for a 2014 friendly and started feeling its magnetism after Marc and Dennis, his sons, came home raving about a visit in September 2012, as guests of Nuri Şahin. Liverpool played Manchester United after findings of the Hillsborough independent panel were published and the stadium was at its rawest and most affecting.
Klopp said while on sabbatical, “I had no list. No, ‘If they call and if they call and if they call . . . ’ I didn’t care about that.
“It was, ‘If somebody calls I’ll see how I feel... ’ And when FSG [Liverpool’s owners, Fenway Sports Group] called it was a good moment, for me and my family. Two sons who are crazy about football, they are happy. They know everything about Liverpool. I don’t care if other clubs [might] fit me too.”
The Kop fits Klopp. A journalist is ever sceptical but it’s hard to see holes in this marriage. A key colleague of Klopp’s at Dortmund disclosed: “At Dortmund we know who we are and if Liverpool know who they are, it will be a special fit. Mainz [Klopp’s first club] was similar: a very emotional club. Liverpool is the perfect place for Jurgen, the absolute best place he could have chosen. That special stadium, special fans. It is made for him.”
When you boil down Klopp’s management, he nurtures winners by investing in them as people. Soundbites are usually artful but his gift is being simultaneously memorable and authentic. When, in a side room after Friday’s unveiling, he spoke about not aims or money but simply footballers, his softening of voice was unmistakable: finally, we were discussing his deepest passion.
What is the profile of a Jurgen Klopp player? “Character. Absolutely. Character. The will to improve. That’s it,” he said. “All the big players in the world, people all look at where they are now — well, it’s much more important to ask where do they come from? It’s not important who is the best in the world today, it is who is the best tomorrow? We all know the best players of today. Tomorrow we don’t, so we can work for this. The will to improve is the most important thing.”
He reminisced about a youngster who pushed and pushed and rose from the Polish third tier to become peerless: Robert Lewandowski. “I’ve had some not so bad players,” said Klopp, “but the biggest satisfaction you can get is when you take a player from Poland, from a small club, and watch him playing today.
“The difference between that player and the player today is unbelievable. I’m not self-confident enough to think I have a big role in his development, but of course I did [play a part at Dortmund]. And that’s what I enjoy.
“If a player is on a top level already and you can hold this for two or three years, then perfect. But the young guns are very interesting to me. When I manage a club each young player should smile because the chance is bigger than it ever was. The door is pretty wide open. Experience is an important point, but not the most important.”
Klopp constructed Dortmund by motivating young players who had the will to improve and has brought to Liverpool two key assistants from his seven years there: Zeljko Buvac, in charge of training, and Peter Krawietz, his video-analyst. “The three of us together make a really good coach,” Klopp has said.
Equally vital at Dortmund were sporting director Michael Zorc and chief scout Sven Mislintat, who worked with Klopp to make the remarkable run of signings that transformed a club who finished 13th before Klopp’s 2008 arrival.
Lewandowski, Ilkay Gundogan, Shinji Kagawa, Neven Subotic: the strike rate was remarkable. “We found our best solutions in the time we didn’t have any money,” said that same colleague. With recruitment, Klopp may want “The first word and the last word” but his management is open and collegiate. It’s why he sees Liverpool’s transfer committee as a potential asset, not a potential threat.
His unveiling over, Klopp was chauffeured straight to Melwood for the first time and has been there, mostly, since Friday lunchtime, watching video upon video of first-team games – breaking to attend an Under-18s match yesterday. Something else Rodgers preached was development, yet his final line-up contained not one single homegrown player and FSG regard Liverpool’s academy as a jewel. They want Klopp’s wide open door.
FSG also believe Liverpool’s squad is far better than performances suggest. One of Klopp’s first actions was to cancel a players’ day off for those not on international duty — including Daniel Sturridge, Philippe Coutinho, James Milner and Alberto Moreno — and start assessing them.
Klopp, who met principal owner John W Henry on mainland Europe before flying in to finalise his three-year deal — having been first sounded out in May — has vowed to be “a sponge”, soaking up what he can about Liverpool.
“Some things will change because I’m different to other managers, but we cannot change the whole world in one day,” he said. “I’m sure Liverpool fans are clever fans who understand we need time. I don’t want to use three years and then say, ‘Now we can start the rising’. No, I want to change many things soon.”
He even appealed directly to the journalists sat before him. “Don’t ask silly questions and you don’t get silly answers, maybe that is the first step,” he said. “I don’t think all my decisions are perfect but it’s football, you have to make decisions before you know if they’re right. So I am not interested [in criticism]. If you want to see Liverpool more successful than the past 24 years, you can do your small part.”
At Dortmund, “He caught a lot of people with his character and his presence and his intelligence,” said the colleague. “He was hard on the players but also their friend.” Klopp roused them to run and run and hunt and hunt and revolutionised Bundesliga tactical thinking with his Arrigo Sacchi-inspired “gegenpressing”.
Essentially it is countering the counterattack, by pressing ferociously to win the ball back straight after opponents have won it themselves. Gegenpressing, Klopp once said, is “the best playmaker there is” and, at Rodgers’s zenith, led by Luis Suarez, Liverpool were playing a similar way. Even when Dortmund were bottom of the Bundesliga last season, they were still in Europe’s top eight clubs for chance creation.
“I don’t have only one way of working,” said Klopp. But the Premier League appears perfect for his “full-throttle” style. “I wait no minute for anything. I’m not this type of person,” he said when asked whether he’d been tempted to wait until the Bayern Munich job became available.
“I left Dortmund in the best way you could leave a club. I do that for the second time in my life — I did it with Mainz. For the second time I could say, ‘Thank you, great time’ and then I could have a holiday. It was the first time I could [reflect on] how big the titles [I won] were — I never had time for this.
“Now I am prepared. I am ready for this now. And I hope we can enjoy a little bit our time here.” Klopp flashed those teeth and laughed that laugh, “At least for this week before we play Tottenham!”
WHEN the door opened, his young colleagues were taken aback. In the Melwood gym, all alone, was Brendan Rodgers doing sit-ups. This was in Rodgers’ final few weeks: the staff thought he would be outside with the small group of first-team players who were going through their paces.
So that was Brendan: talented, hopeful, well-intentioned . . . and lost. He arrived preaching possession, communication and the practice pitch, but he finished up playing counterattack, not talking to the media, and delegating certain training. The Liverpool job can do that. Rodgers was just another to gaze into the deep pond of expectation surrounding the club until he couldn’t recognise the reflection.
If the key is being so big a personality that you’re immovable, enter Jurgen Klopp. In his first public statements as Liverpool manager on Friday, he didn’t so much press Kop buttons as — heavy metal fan that he is — turn them up to 11. “Don’t make me like Jesus and the next day say ‘No, he can’t walk on water’,” Klopp said, among many memorable soundbites. He wants “emotional football”, to “change doubters into believers”; his understanding of his new club and city’s psyche already seems uncanny.
Klopp connected when he brought Borussia Dortmund to Anfield for a 2014 friendly and started feeling its magnetism after Marc and Dennis, his sons, came home raving about a visit in September 2012, as guests of Nuri Şahin. Liverpool played Manchester United after findings of the Hillsborough independent panel were published and the stadium was at its rawest and most affecting.
Klopp said while on sabbatical, “I had no list. No, ‘If they call and if they call and if they call . . . ’ I didn’t care about that.
“It was, ‘If somebody calls I’ll see how I feel... ’ And when FSG [Liverpool’s owners, Fenway Sports Group] called it was a good moment, for me and my family. Two sons who are crazy about football, they are happy. They know everything about Liverpool. I don’t care if other clubs [might] fit me too.”
The Kop fits Klopp. A journalist is ever sceptical but it’s hard to see holes in this marriage. A key colleague of Klopp’s at Dortmund disclosed: “At Dortmund we know who we are and if Liverpool know who they are, it will be a special fit. Mainz [Klopp’s first club] was similar: a very emotional club. Liverpool is the perfect place for Jurgen, the absolute best place he could have chosen. That special stadium, special fans. It is made for him.”
When you boil down Klopp’s management, he nurtures winners by investing in them as people. Soundbites are usually artful but his gift is being simultaneously memorable and authentic. When, in a side room after Friday’s unveiling, he spoke about not aims or money but simply footballers, his softening of voice was unmistakable: finally, we were discussing his deepest passion.
What is the profile of a Jurgen Klopp player? “Character. Absolutely. Character. The will to improve. That’s it,” he said. “All the big players in the world, people all look at where they are now — well, it’s much more important to ask where do they come from? It’s not important who is the best in the world today, it is who is the best tomorrow? We all know the best players of today. Tomorrow we don’t, so we can work for this. The will to improve is the most important thing.”
He reminisced about a youngster who pushed and pushed and rose from the Polish third tier to become peerless: Robert Lewandowski. “I’ve had some not so bad players,” said Klopp, “but the biggest satisfaction you can get is when you take a player from Poland, from a small club, and watch him playing today.
“The difference between that player and the player today is unbelievable. I’m not self-confident enough to think I have a big role in his development, but of course I did [play a part at Dortmund]. And that’s what I enjoy.
“If a player is on a top level already and you can hold this for two or three years, then perfect. But the young guns are very interesting to me. When I manage a club each young player should smile because the chance is bigger than it ever was. The door is pretty wide open. Experience is an important point, but not the most important.”
Klopp constructed Dortmund by motivating young players who had the will to improve and has brought to Liverpool two key assistants from his seven years there: Zeljko Buvac, in charge of training, and Peter Krawietz, his video-analyst. “The three of us together make a really good coach,” Klopp has said.
Equally vital at Dortmund were sporting director Michael Zorc and chief scout Sven Mislintat, who worked with Klopp to make the remarkable run of signings that transformed a club who finished 13th before Klopp’s 2008 arrival.
Lewandowski, Ilkay Gundogan, Shinji Kagawa, Neven Subotic: the strike rate was remarkable. “We found our best solutions in the time we didn’t have any money,” said that same colleague. With recruitment, Klopp may want “The first word and the last word” but his management is open and collegiate. It’s why he sees Liverpool’s transfer committee as a potential asset, not a potential threat.
His unveiling over, Klopp was chauffeured straight to Melwood for the first time and has been there, mostly, since Friday lunchtime, watching video upon video of first-team games – breaking to attend an Under-18s match yesterday. Something else Rodgers preached was development, yet his final line-up contained not one single homegrown player and FSG regard Liverpool’s academy as a jewel. They want Klopp’s wide open door.
FSG also believe Liverpool’s squad is far better than performances suggest. One of Klopp’s first actions was to cancel a players’ day off for those not on international duty — including Daniel Sturridge, Philippe Coutinho, James Milner and Alberto Moreno — and start assessing them.
Klopp, who met principal owner John W Henry on mainland Europe before flying in to finalise his three-year deal — having been first sounded out in May — has vowed to be “a sponge”, soaking up what he can about Liverpool.
“Some things will change because I’m different to other managers, but we cannot change the whole world in one day,” he said. “I’m sure Liverpool fans are clever fans who understand we need time. I don’t want to use three years and then say, ‘Now we can start the rising’. No, I want to change many things soon.”
He even appealed directly to the journalists sat before him. “Don’t ask silly questions and you don’t get silly answers, maybe that is the first step,” he said. “I don’t think all my decisions are perfect but it’s football, you have to make decisions before you know if they’re right. So I am not interested [in criticism]. If you want to see Liverpool more successful than the past 24 years, you can do your small part.”
At Dortmund, “He caught a lot of people with his character and his presence and his intelligence,” said the colleague. “He was hard on the players but also their friend.” Klopp roused them to run and run and hunt and hunt and revolutionised Bundesliga tactical thinking with his Arrigo Sacchi-inspired “gegenpressing”.
Essentially it is countering the counterattack, by pressing ferociously to win the ball back straight after opponents have won it themselves. Gegenpressing, Klopp once said, is “the best playmaker there is” and, at Rodgers’s zenith, led by Luis Suarez, Liverpool were playing a similar way. Even when Dortmund were bottom of the Bundesliga last season, they were still in Europe’s top eight clubs for chance creation.
“I don’t have only one way of working,” said Klopp. But the Premier League appears perfect for his “full-throttle” style. “I wait no minute for anything. I’m not this type of person,” he said when asked whether he’d been tempted to wait until the Bayern Munich job became available.
“I left Dortmund in the best way you could leave a club. I do that for the second time in my life — I did it with Mainz. For the second time I could say, ‘Thank you, great time’ and then I could have a holiday. It was the first time I could [reflect on] how big the titles [I won] were — I never had time for this.
“Now I am prepared. I am ready for this now. And I hope we can enjoy a little bit our time here.” Klopp flashed those teeth and laughed that laugh, “At least for this week before we play Tottenham!”
Spurs are probably shitting themselves.
Here's one thing that may or may not be agreed upon or whatever, loads of you here have loads more experience of this kinda thing and these are just observations that probs don't amount to much... but years ago I used to DJ loads round that part of the Rhineland, and when I first got there I was surprised at how massively British influenced their culture was, and how a lot of the locals used to talk in terms of Northern European culture that we were all a part of... which was weird for me as a kid from Liverpool, who'd always been taught Germans were weird and alien, unfunny and totally different to us. There are differences, but when I hear people saying they don't like Germans or Germany I always think you can't be too fond of what you see in the mirror either. We're very fucking alike. And the flight to Duss from Manchester is like an hour. The Manchester to Norwich bit takes longer than the Norwich to Duss bit. We're very close neighbours. I love it in that part of the world, because it's got loads of what's good about round here, but with a twist.
I forgot all this until I got a client in Brussels a while back which meant I was over in that kinda territory again quite a bit, and then when my mate banged his head he was in a neuro ward for six months and I was over in Duss weekly (god bless Ryanair), I ended up having a local boozer which had all the footy on. The local barman was a Liverpool fan, they had flags from teams from around the world but Liverpool was prevalent. The people at the bar, a mix of locals, Irish, brits whatever, the majority supported Liverpool, as a second team if not first. This is a big pub right in the middle of Dusseldorf, which is about 50 miles from Dortmund. I can't speak for that place but I doubt it's much different in that respect.
All the flyers they did for all the events I ever played at were in English. Promoters used to constantly ask how we could make it feel more like an British party... And the footy, even though they have it much better as fans than us now, they see England as the blueprint, even if we've lost our way. It's very easy on our island to think of ourselves as detached from Europe and quite different... whereas there they see us as part of the Anglo Saxon thing, in contrast to the Mediterranean thing. We're close neighbours and we share shit weather, starchy foods, harsh philosophy and work ethic, with heavy classical, hard rock and deranged techno popping out the arse of the mix.
I dunno what my point is, other than they we do have a very similar culture. When Klopp talks about coming here for the footy and fuck the weather or the amenities, this isn't new to him, this has been his whole life, he had the same problem and solution in Dortmund. He's coming from another Northern European industrial town, and there are far more similarities than differences between the two. Where I think we are different is... and this is speculative... is that our media narrative is driven by the lowest common denominator, so the debate about anything has lower standards, less nuance, etc. In Britain we sell a few million tabloid papers a day, only 5% of the population buy them, yet you turn the news on in the morning and all you hear are regurgitated headlines from scoops from the Sun or Mail or Mirror, the lowest quality shite leads the entire debate due to laziness and ease. It might take him a while to get his head round how much idiocy he's expected to pay lip service to. Maureen embraced it, he must have thought how easy it would be to be king of the dickheads rather than go against it. I doubt Klopp will lower himself, so it will be interesting to see what the outcome is when they turn on him. It's not some voyeuristic interest, they fucked Rafa the moment they knew he thought they were idiots so it's a real threat to Klopp's career here. Rafa gave that interview to a Spanish writer about how the English journos would meet up after a match to discuss what they were all going to say, so that they had a common message that the whole country would agree upon, and how pathetic it all was, and from then on they picked out his worst points, magnified them and talked about nothing else until they wrecked him. I can't see that working with Klopp, but we'll see.
I forgot all this until I got a client in Brussels a while back which meant I was over in that kinda territory again quite a bit, and then when my mate banged his head he was in a neuro ward for six months and I was over in Duss weekly (god bless Ryanair), I ended up having a local boozer which had all the footy on. The local barman was a Liverpool fan, they had flags from teams from around the world but Liverpool was prevalent. The people at the bar, a mix of locals, Irish, brits whatever, the majority supported Liverpool, as a second team if not first. This is a big pub right in the middle of Dusseldorf, which is about 50 miles from Dortmund. I can't speak for that place but I doubt it's much different in that respect.
All the flyers they did for all the events I ever played at were in English. Promoters used to constantly ask how we could make it feel more like an British party... And the footy, even though they have it much better as fans than us now, they see England as the blueprint, even if we've lost our way. It's very easy on our island to think of ourselves as detached from Europe and quite different... whereas there they see us as part of the Anglo Saxon thing, in contrast to the Mediterranean thing. We're close neighbours and we share shit weather, starchy foods, harsh philosophy and work ethic, with heavy classical, hard rock and deranged techno popping out the arse of the mix.
I dunno what my point is, other than they we do have a very similar culture. When Klopp talks about coming here for the footy and fuck the weather or the amenities, this isn't new to him, this has been his whole life, he had the same problem and solution in Dortmund. He's coming from another Northern European industrial town, and there are far more similarities than differences between the two. Where I think we are different is... and this is speculative... is that our media narrative is driven by the lowest common denominator, so the debate about anything has lower standards, less nuance, etc. In Britain we sell a few million tabloid papers a day, only 5% of the population buy them, yet you turn the news on in the morning and all you hear are regurgitated headlines from scoops from the Sun or Mail or Mirror, the lowest quality shite leads the entire debate due to laziness and ease. It might take him a while to get his head round how much idiocy he's expected to pay lip service to. Maureen embraced it, he must have thought how easy it would be to be king of the dickheads rather than go against it. I doubt Klopp will lower himself, so it will be interesting to see what the outcome is when they turn on him. It's not some voyeuristic interest, they fucked Rafa the moment they knew he thought they were idiots so it's a real threat to Klopp's career here. Rafa gave that interview to a Spanish writer about how the English journos would meet up after a match to discuss what they were all going to say, so that they had a common message that the whole country would agree upon, and how pathetic it all was, and from then on they picked out his worst points, magnified them and talked about nothing else until they wrecked him. I can't see that working with Klopp, but we'll see.
I suspect he may fall somewhere between the two stalls.
He won't pander to them & become a stereotype like maureen, but I think the fact he almost begrudgingly said 'the normal one... If that's what you want' was very telling for me.
It was like he was saying 'I can play the game, by my rules'. I think he'll understand the difference in the press & won't alow his personality to become a caricature to feed it, but rather may play up to them just enough to keep them onside. He's a bright man, & I'm sure he understands that the press & media can make or break someone here, so I doubt he'll be as defensive as Rafa unless he feels he is strong enough to do it (Ferguson often did this from a position of strength).
He won't pander to them & become a stereotype like maureen, but I think the fact he almost begrudgingly said 'the normal one... If that's what you want' was very telling for me.
It was like he was saying 'I can play the game, by my rules'. I think he'll understand the difference in the press & won't alow his personality to become a caricature to feed it, but rather may play up to them just enough to keep them onside. He's a bright man, & I'm sure he understands that the press & media can make or break someone here, so I doubt he'll be as defensive as Rafa unless he feels he is strong enough to do it (Ferguson often did this from a position of strength).
I love your insights into these things.
You're like a likeable Will Self that writes stuff I want to read.
If it gets a source added I'll read it.
You're a bit of diva there, cloggy. What colour flowers do you want in your dressing room?
It's seemingly from goal.com
It's seemingly from goal.com
There's one phrase in what Klopp says in that interview which particularly struck me, and which chimes in with the sense he gives off that he's delighted to be here. It's at the end of para.5, when he talks about his (and his family's) reaction when FSG came calling: "I don't case if other clubs fit me too."
The point about his family shouldn't be overlooked either. If they're chuffed to be here as well, that's bound to help. I'm sure it did with Rafa.
The point about his family shouldn't be overlooked either. If they're chuffed to be here as well, that's bound to help. I'm sure it did with Rafa.
I was always taught to look at the source before you start reading. It's a good rule. If it's goal.com I'll give it a miss.
Yeah. But with the proliferation of the media, obscure websites can often now throw up good writers. Though, in your defence here, that's generally not goal.com, admittedly.
A lad I know now has over a million views on his football writing. He writes mainly about Arsenal, has no links to the club whatsoever and is a terrible writer.
Yes. Not all obscure sites throw up good writers!
Copy a sentence. Paste it into google. It'll send you to the source.
Cloggy's your man.
That's usually what I do if it looks interesting enough. Too lazy today though and it's a pain having to do it on Tapatalk.
The author is goal.com chief editor. So the source is goal.com. It is actually worth reading imo.
Cloggy read it, you'll be happy you did.
All you have to do on a mac is press u and keep it held down. You'll then get the options numbered. Hit the number and hey presto ü.
It's a 2 for this one by the way.
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