‘You can’t behave like a star in a team’
LIVERPOOL MANAGER KLOPP SPEAKS OF HIS CONFIDENCE AND HIS RISE TO THE TOP
Jurgen Klopp recalls the days when he was just about making a living as a footballer in Mainz and the club’s visionary manager, the late Wolfgang Frank, was trying to introduce modern psychology to a battlehardened squad of Bundesliga 2 relegation strugglers.
“The first time I realised I was confident was in a meeting when they said ‘Come on, draw a tree’,” Klopp says. “And there were all these little trees and my tree was as big as the paper, but that was only because I couldn’t draw. And the guy taking the session looked at it and said: ‘That’s confidence!’ Since then confidence has been my hobby.”
Klopp chuckles at the memory in his office at the Melwood training ground, where his denim jacket hangs on a chair and the view is out to the same training pitches where Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley plotted their triumphs.
Klopp has a challenge of his own to consider: Liverpool face runaway Premier League leaders Manchester City on Wednesday, in the first leg of what is shaping up to be an epic Champions League quarterfinal.
Klopp is a very modern inheritor of an august job, but there are strong similarities with those of his illustrious Anfield predecessors, who had to fight for their place in the game.
Klopp only turned professional at the age of 23, by then a father, and an impecunious university student. He says that when he finished playing at 33 the choices were stark. “I had no money in my account. It was always enough to live, to survive, but nothing else. So it was ‘OK, what are we doing now?’”
Now 50, and one of the most famous managers in the world, it means he thinks differently about life. We discuss his Protestant faith, introduced to him in the little Black Forest town of Glatten where he grew up, adapted over the years and by his own admission not particularly strict. There is also his respectful opposition to Brexit, and his firmly held belief, as a child of West Germany, that the European Union is, for all its imperfections, “the best idea we had so far”.
Before all that, however, there is the small matter of Pep Guardiola’s City, and a European meeting of the Premier League’s two most attacking, high-pressing teams. Klopp likes to joke that he got more out of his limited abilities as a dogged forward-turned-defender at Mainz, than Guardiola did as Barcelona’s 1990s midfield maestro. “I think maybe I got more of the maximum from my playing career than Pep Guardiola. You have to ask him that! He was really good. I can say I got 100 per cent out of my career.”
Both Klopp and Guardiola ask some of the best players in the world to sacrifice themselves for the team, although to Liverpool’s manager that is second nature. “That’s how I understand football. You want to be part of a team, behave like part of a team. You can’t have all the benefits of being part of a team and then behave like a single star. If you want to do that, play darts.
Make one stronger
“The main thing is to make each other stronger. That is how I understand life, but in a football team it is especially like that. Help your mate to be the best he can be and he will help you to be the best.
“Being selfish is always easier than being unselfish. It’s a double-job, caring about yourself and another. Only from outside do people think ‘He’s so big, you cannot tell him anything’. There’s no player in the world like that.”
He pauses at this point and, tongue firmly in cheek, imagines a conversation with Lionel Messi — perhaps the one exception to that rule.
Klopp demands a lot from his players and it goes back to his past at Mainz, a broke secondtier German club in the mid1990s, who at that point had “never even had a toe in the Bundesliga”. “In those days, if nobody wanted you, it was like ‘Hmmm, maybe you can try Mainz’.”
For 11 years they battled relegation down to the last few days of every season and only when they were safe did they know they would be paid for the next 12 months. “That was pressure. I believe my life taught me to deal with pressure. I always had it. It’s good.”