United and having an unlimited budget would jar with a life shaped by scaling adversity and making the most out of little.
Klopp’s formative years in Glatten, a tiny but picturesque town in the Black Forest, were simple. His late father, Norbert, who had been a promising goalkeeper and earned a trial at Kaiserslautern as a teenager, worked as a salesman specialising in dowels and wall fixings. He was a ruthless competitor, extracting the maximum from his son by never taking it easy on him, whether it came to skiing, tennis, football or sprints across the field. Norbert impressed on him that it wasn’t worth doing anything without full dedication. He taught his son that ‘attitude was always more important than talent’, promoted a ferocious work ethic and schooled him in the art of resilience.
Klopp junior, a Stuttgart fan, had an unsuccessful trial with his boyhood club and did not become a professional footballer until he was 23. In the interim, he turned out for Pforzheim, Eintracht Frankfurt II, Viktoria Sindlingen and Rot-Weiss Frankfurt while working part-time in a video rental store and loading lorries. He juggled that with taking care of his toddler, Marc, while also studying for a degree in sports business at Goethe University Frankfurt.
‘Life took me a few places and gave me a few jobs,’ Klopp noted. ‘It wasn’t about where I could be, but about doing what I had to do, because I was a young father and needed to provide.’ After finally landing a pro contract with Mainz in 1989 as an industrious but technically-limited striker, Klopp still took steps to invest in his future for the benefit of his family. Earning just £900 a month, he signed up to the legendary Erich Rutemöller’s coaching school in Cologne. Twice a week, he would undertake the 250-mile round trip to enhance his tactical understanding of the game.
Klopp also sponged off Wolfgang Frank, the late Mainz coach who was inspired by Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan. He would spend hours talking to him about systems and the secrets to overpowering better resourced opponents. ‘Under Wolfgang Frank, for the first time in my career, I had the feeling that a coach has a huge impact on the game,’ Klopp would reveal. ‘He made us aware that a football team is much more independent of the class of individual players than we thought at the time. We have seen through him that it can make life very difficult for the opponent through a better common idea.’
Frank was one of the first German managers of the era to shun using a sweeper, which was the norm, opting for a four-man zonal defence and a midfield diamond shape. He espoused high-pressing, attacking from inside, offensive protection and overloading the flanks — all hallmarks of Klopp’s teams to the present-day Liverpool.
Those tactics became the blueprint for Mainz in February 2001 when manager Eckhard Krautzun was sacked by the club on the eve of an away game and sporting director Christian Heidel called an emergency summit with senior players. It was decided at the meeting that Klopp, who had been converted to a defender from a striker, would undergo another transformation and become their new manager. The choice was unanimous and as with his playing career, the need to defy convention and recover from setbacks would be the driving force in his new managerial setup.
Klopp is unrivalled in dealing with massive disappointments and moulding them into both lessons and motivation. ‘Even when you don’t want defeats, when you have it, it is very important to deal with it in the right way,’ he said on looking back at his career in the game. ‘I had to learn that early in my life, especially my coaching life. We had so many close failures: like with Mainz not going up by a point, not going up on goal difference, then getting up with the worst points tally ever; Dortmund not qualifying for Europe, then losing a Champions League final. I am a good example that life goes on. I would have had plenty of reasons for getting upset and saying, “I don’t try anymore.”
‘Obviously, it is not easy to go through these moments, but it is easier to deal with it because it is only information, and if you use it right the feeling is good.’
That is pure Klopp. And it was why Hans-Joachim Watzke, Dortmund’s CEO, was convinced he would reject United’s offer. Their money-based pitch clashed with rather than complemented the manager’s make-up. In the second week of April 2014, Klopp told Watzke he’d be swerving the chance to take charge at Old Trafford. As he once summarised: ‘You can be the best in the world as a coach, but if you are in the wrong club at the wrong moment, you simply don’t have a chance.’
Enquiries from Manchester City and Tottenham would both also be rebuffed a few months later. A year after shunning United, however, Klopp’s circumstances at Signal Iduna Park changed considerably.
With Dortmund regularly ceding their greatest talents to European football’s apex predators — chiefly Bayern — they found that continuing to usurp their powered-up rivals in the Bundesliga was becoming too taxing. BVB’s results were no longer as good as their performances, with staleness and a sense of comfort creeping in. During a press conference that reverberated around the world on 15 April 2015, Klopp announced he would be leaving Dortmund at the end of the season. At the time, the club were 10th, 37 points behind Bayern. The city in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia was enveloped in sadness.
‘I always said in that moment where I believe I am not the perfect coach anymore for this extraordinary club I will say so,’ Klopp stated. ‘I really think the decision is the right one. I chose this time to announce it because in the last few years some player decisions were made late and there was no time to react.’
Fast forward five months and the atmosphere couldn’t have been more of a contrast in an expansive boardroom at the New York offices of Shearman & Sterling, where over the course of four hours, Klopp sketched his plan to restore Liverpool as a global and continental powerhouse.
He addressed the lack of an on-pitch identity, which would be the first facet to rectify, and also pointed out the importance of harnessing the emotional pull of the fans. From the academy through to the first-team operation at Melwood, Klopp outlined a blueprint for the club’s playing style and standards to be aligned. For Liverpool to have any chance of becoming a force again, he reasoned, they would have to operate as one formidable unit.
Mike Gordon remembers being ‘in awe’ of Klopp, not on account of his magnetic personality, but the substance of his strategy and the concise yet convincing way he delivered it in a second language.
It is why, just an hour into spelling out his vision, FSG told Klopp’s agent, Marc Kosicke, that their lawyers had begun drafting his contract of employment. When the juncture came to discuss personal terms at the end of the talk, the manager excused himself and took a walk through Central Park. As Klopp stood soaking in the sights of the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, it dawned on him that it was not the type of surveying he had originally contemplated after his break from football.
As a player, he was fascinated by watching how managers work — from implementing their philosophies to handling different personalities, balancing squad dynamics and drafting plans that extended beyond match preparation. Klopp had resolved to travel around Europe to absorb as much knowledge as possible from coaches when he hung up his boots. However, his immediate transition from pulling on a shirt for Mainz to becoming their manager paused that idea for seven years. Switching from the Opel Arena to Dortmund further shelved it for the same amount of time and now Klopp was fresh off a four-month sabbatical and about to become Liverpool manager.
That night, when he returned to his suite at the Plaza Hotel, he thought about how he wouldn’t change anything about his path, his choices or the timing of them, relating as much to his wife, Ulla Sandrock.
That same evening, Liverpool stumbled to yet another dispiriting draw at Anfield. The sound of the final whistle against FC Sion was met with booing for the third time in four games at the famed ground. Over in the Bronx, the Red Sox were defeated 4–1 by the Yankees, their greatest rivals. Yet those results couldn’t dilute FSG’s celebratory mood after finally securing the manager they
