After leading Liverpool to the Holy Grail of the Premier League title, Chris Williams gives us the inside story on Jurgen Klopp's management journey from Mainz to Merseyside.
“Those who only give me 99 percent in training will have huge problems. The team will have to work and push like it never has before.”
A snapshot of Jurgen Klopp, but not from when he arrived at Liverpool. Not after he had broken the dominance of Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga, not before the Champions League finals of 2013, 2018 or even 2019 - but on his first day at Borussia Dortmund.
Those who expected the journey in Dortmund to be a ride like the season before were about to be given the rudest awakening after the departure of Thomas Doll.
“It doesn’t make it any easier to run your heart out when you’ve just woken up in a five-star hotel. Too much comfort makes you comfortable.” With quotes like these you begin to see what spins the thoughts of Klopp.
Klopp the player
As a head coach and manager, he is lauded as one of the world's best - but as a player, he certainly wasn't in that bracket, by his own admission.
“I went to a trial at Eintracht Frankfurt and looked around. ‘Oh, they’re good’. I saw Andy Moller. Same age as me at the time, 19-years-old. I thought, ‘if that’s football, I’m playing a completely different game’. He was world-class. I was… not even class,” he told Raphael Honigstein in 2015.
A modest assessment and one perhaps knows that Klopp the player could not play under Klopp the manager, but despite downplaying his own abilities, the striker-cum-defender still sits as FSV Mainz 05's third highest goalscorer of all time, retiring on 56 goals across 340 matches.
It was at Mainz (more famous for its picturesque buildings and Rhine riverside location than it is for its football team) that captain turned into coach, overnight.
All journeys start with tales of chance and this is no different, with no experience Klopp went from a player in a relegation-threatened side to overseeing promotion to the Bundesliga, in three seasons.
His first thought was that he believed his players could avoid relegation, his first action was to make them buy into his feelings—the Klopp way was born.
Match one in the Mainz dugout ended in victory, a well earned 1-0 win over pre-match favourites MSV Duisburg, and it wasn't to end there.
Picking up 24 points from the remaining 36 on offer, the Stuttgart-born coach had taken his side from automatic relegation to survival, with the comfort of a three-point cushion.
At Mainz, he not only tasted the champagne of promotion, but also the tears of narrowly missing out, twice.