Jurgen Klopp's ethos places the power of the collective over the financial might of Liverpool's rivals

Work ethic: Klopp must try and achieve sustained progress at Liverpool against the odds
John Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images
Raphael Honigstein16 October 2015

Jurgen Klopp promised “appealing” and “brave football” before his first League match in the new job, a tricky away appointment against rival Champions League contenders. His team delivered, instantly.

Borussia Dortmund edged a spectacular affair with a 3-2 win at Bayer Leverkusen and newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung praised the lanky, bespectacled coach for “firing up his players much more than his predecessors had been able to”.

That was in August 2008, at the beginning of a glittering seven-year reign at the Westfalenstadion that would bring two championships, a domestic cup and universal recognition by way of a Champions League Final berth at Wembley in 2013.

Tomorrow, Klopp returns to the capital as Liverpool manager with almost identical pledges in tow. The 48-year-old German has called on his men to play “with bravery” and “fun in their eyes” at White Hart Lane. “We want to open our chest. Run, fight and shoot. Defend together and attack together, do all the things to make it like the football in your best dream,” he vowed yesterday.

There hadn’t been enough time to make wholesale changes since his appointment a week ago, the self-declared Normal One cautioned, only the chance to “adjust a few screws in the right way”. But his latest press conference vision of a Liverpool fearlessly tearing up the pitch in pursuit of the ball, the way Dortmund were able to do at their best, has predictably ramped up expectations even higher from already staggering levels.

A midday, mid-table clash in mid-October can rarely have elicited as much excitement among Liverpool fans and neutrals alike. Klopp’s first domestic appearance in England is easily the most eagerly anticipated managerial debut in the Premier League since Jose Mourinho shacked up at Chelsea, all menace and swagger, in 2004.

While the German’s insistence that he didn’t read the newspapers would have been met with a knowing smile in his homeland — he had had many run-ins with journalists at Dortmund and beyond during his reign in Westphalia — his claim that he didn’t care “at all” about the incessant hype around him sounded more convincing. Klopp didn’t worry about external pressure, as the urge to succeed came “from within” he maintained before travelling down south with his squad.

A fiercely competitive streak was undoubtedly drummed into him early on in life by his late father, Norbert, a trained master saddler who excelled at sports. “He was a sportsman through and through, a coach through and through,” Klopp told Die Zeit a couple of years ago. “He taught me football, tennis and skiing and he was ruthless. He would just take off on the piste, leaving me, a novice, to go after his red anorak. He never waited.”

Norbert also beat his son heavily at tennis and forced him into mismatched sprinting duels on the football pitch, never once easing up to let him come out on top. “He would reach the box when I was still at the half-way line but he just didn’t care [about my feelings], he never allowed me to win,” Klopp junior remembered.

Jurgen Klopp arrives at Liverpool

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Born in Stuttgart, the home of carmakers Daimler-Benz and Porsche, Klopp grew up in a village in the Black Forest. Swabians, the people of that region, are renowned in Germany for their unrelenting work ethic, inquisitive mind and generally unsentimental approach to life. “To say nothing is praise enough,” a local saying goes.

Egged on by his fanatical father, Klopp overcame his technical limitations on the ball to embark on a career as a bruising defender and then striker for second division Mainz 05.

His tactical epiphany came when Wolfgang Frank took charge of the relegation-threatened side in 1995. “We were bottom and basically dead as a team,” Klopp recalled. Frank, however, convinced them a change from man-marking to a zonal system with four at the back and high-energy collective pressing would keep them up. Mainz duly amassed 32 points in the second half of the season — more than any club in the top two divisions — to finish in mid-table.

“Up until then, we had thought that, as the worst team, we would lose, but Frank showed us results could be achieved independently of individual talent, to an extent, by virtue of hard work and better organisation,” Klopp said.

Employing Frank’s innovative methods, a playing style essentially borrowed from Arrigo Sacchi’s great AC Milan team of the late Eighties, Klopp later won the first-ever promotion to the Bundesliga for little, inoffensive Mainz and then propelled a youthful Dortmund to silverware past the star-studded Bayern Munich of Louis van Gaal and Jupp Heynckes.

Klopp’s deeply ingrained belief in the power of the collective explains his dismissive attitude towards those who see the Premier League as a primarily financial contest. “We shouldn’t think about money, only about football,” he said at his unveiling last week.

Time will tell whether his Liverpool team can find sustained progress against the odds but one thing’s pretty certain: it will be a lot of fun watching them try.

Raphael Honigstein is the author of Das Reboot: How German football reinvented itself and conquerered the world. He will be appearing at the London Sports Writing Festival, November 12-15. For more information, please visit the website, londonsportswritingfestival.com or via Twitter @lswf15

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