Bring the Noise: The Jürgen Klopp Story | Raphael Honigstein

I recently completed reading the book by Raphale Honigstein about Jürgen Klopp: Bring the Noise: The Jürgen Klopp Story. It is not a great biography but it still has great quotes to keep in mind. Here we go: 

It ain’t where you from, it’s where you at. - Eric B. and Rakim

If you need someone in a suit and in a tie, don’t get Jürgen Klopp. But if you want a top coach, you’ll have to get him. It wasn’t a case of making an immediate decision but I know that Dortmund were looking at him a bit more closely from that day on. But they still weren’t entirely convinced. Watzke kept on calling me, I don’t know how many times. I always said: “Go for it, go for it. You will never regret the day you sign Jürgen Klopp.”’

‘Once, Mainz drew 1-1 with us, in Dortmund, and I congratulated him on winning a point. To draw at Dortmund was a success for Mainz, wasn’t it? But he just looked at me and said: “Congratulations to you too.” That was classic Klopp.

‘It’s always about making the crowd happy, it’s about producing games with a recognisable style,’ he vowed. ‘When matches are boring, they lose their rationale. My teams have never played chess on the pitch. I hope we will witness the odd full-throttle occasion here. The sun won’t shine every day in Dortmund, but we have a chance to make it shine more often.’

Christian Heidel says Klopp had only one reservation: his English. ‘We talked about it for a long time. He asked me: “Should I do it?” I said: “The spoken word is your weapon, you know that. You have to decide if you can get across what’s important in English. If you let others talk for you, it won’t work. You’re only 70 per cent Klopp then. You need to be sure.” And then he said: “I’ll manage it. I’ll study now, and I’ll get there.”

Klopp told the FSG executives that football was ‘more than a system’, that it was ‘also rain, tackles flying in, the noise in the stadium’. Most of all, he said, the Anfield crowd had to be ‘activated’ by the style of performance, to spur on the team and vice versa in a self-amplifying cycle of exuberance.

‘Dortmund weren’t stupid,’ says former press Schneck: ‘When somebody in marketing told Klopp that a few corporate customers had given up their VIP seats, he said he would call them to see if they changed their mind. He went into the office, picked up the phone and said: “Schönen guten Tag, hier ist Jürgen Klopp. I am the new coach of Borussia Dortmund. I’ve been told you want to cancel your tickets. Don’t you think you should reconsider?” Some of them were so gobsmacked, they said: “Okay, we’ll think it over.” He reeled them back in. Can you imagine any other coach doing that? That was Jürgen. He stole everybody’s hearts.’

But there was an unspoken consensus that better teams, with more quality, didn’t have to work and think as hard. ‘Tactics is for bad players,’ the former VfB Stuttgart and FC Bayern manager Felix Magath had memorably proclaimed a couple of years earlier.

“A coach who doesn’t love his players can’t be a good coach.”’

Tactical behaviour is not like riding a bike, unfortunately. You have to practise, again and again.

Motion and motivation have the same Latin root. One cannot exist without the other. Klopp’s very first message to Liverpool supporters, that they had to turn ‘from doubters into believers’, was repeated to the players at Melwood ahead of the debut training session. ‘He talked a lot about the team trusting itself, about belief, and not fearing any other team,’ Lallana says. ‘He definitely had that confidence himself, that aura and belief that he is a top manager. He walked through the door and you could feel it. And I think that automatically filters through to his players.’

Hummels. ‘We knew exactly what the coach wanted us to do, and it was actually fun to play that way, almost addictive. His classic phrase was: “Run like there is no tomorrow.” It came easily to us.’

‘There’s an old saying in football: “You have to be eleven friends.” It’s not totally wrong. If there are eight friends in the team, that’s already quite good.’

I’ve never met any other coach like him. He asked me: “What would be your targets if you came to us?” I said: “To play as often and well as possible.” “You see, that’s already the first mistake,” he replied. “It’s not about playing often but making the most of your time on the pitch. I can’t promise that you’ll play often. That’s not possible. But I can promise that you will learn an incredible amount, and that we will be extremely successful if you all bring your potential to bear.” I remember that clearly. That was the first time in football that somebody didn’t promise me the stars but was open and honest with me. I found that fascinating.’

‘You win and you lose, but you’re with people you like. You’re at home, you belong. That’s what we all want. Ten million people want to belong here. ‘

“Football is like chess, but with dice.” What I mean by that: every coach spends an incredible amount of time pondering about all the different factors, about the opponent, the weather, and so on, knowing full well that total control of the ball is unattainable. All you can really do then is to find a general order, a system of orientation for your own players that brings out the best of your specific squad. Successful combination football depends on two people having the same idea at the same time. One has the ball, the other starts making a move. A coach’s job is to practise these sequences to instil an idea, repetition and situations, to increase the chance that they will work under real live conditions, when there’s pressure and an opponent interfering. The alternative is to rely on total individual quality, on being simply superior. But that’s not our approach. We can’t afford these players; we have never been able to afford these players at any of the clubs we have worked for. That’s why the idea always takes precedence for us.’

A late blunder from Loris Karius in the 4-3 defeat at Bournemouth in early December put an end to Liverpool’s unbeaten run and led to the young German getting dropped for Simon Mignolet for the remainder of the term. The timing of the awful result–the Reds had been 3-1 up with fifteen minutes to go–couldn’t have been much worse, either: the team were scheduled to fly to Spain for a Christmas party. Klopp was unperturbed, however. ‘When we landed in Barcelona, music came on in the plane and he got on the microphone,’ Lallana recalls with a huge smile. ‘He was like: “Listen, lads. If we can party when we win, we can party when we fucking lose.” So everyone got off the plane thinking: “You are right, it is the time to party. Let’s party. Let’s have drink.” Which just shows: there is more to life than football. Yeah, we did our best; we lost. And yeah, it feels shit to lose, but there is more to that. The older you get, I think the more it hurts, but the quicker you get over it.’

In life, you cannot ignore the negative things that have happened. If you can change them, change them: if you can’t change them, ignore them. That’s how it is. It’s all about the reaction. In football, and in life. If you get up in the morning and the first hour is bad, does that mean you go back to bed? No, it means let’s try another one.’

Klopp readily admitted that he hadn’t been the best of players, more of a second division warhorse. But why should that disqualify him as a coach? ‘Yes: I teach them more than I ever knew,’ he cheerily agreed with Brückner.

‘Most things I learned in life I learned because somebody gave me the right advice in the right moment, without me asking,’ he would tell the Sunday Times years later. ‘I was a lucky guy. I met some nice people in the beginning: teachers, coaches. And of course my parents and all that stuff. I think that’s what life should be: that you make your own experiences and whether they’re good or bad you share them–so somebody else can avoid the same mistakes. That’s how I think football should work too.’

Success was always a question of reconnecting with your own, inherent strengths. The right answer was already there. It just needed to be properly implemented. ‘The problem isn’t our problem but the solution is,’ he insisted. Keeping calm when confronted by a chorus of criticism was tough, especially since he considered most of the negativity unwarranted.

‘It’s not important what people think of you when you arrive, it’s important what they think of you when you leave.’