Long before Liverpool and Borussia Dortmund, Jurgen Klopp was a middling defender playing
in front of a few thousand people in the second-tier of German football.
What happened next is quite a story.
Between 1995 and the beginning of 1997, Mainz were coached by Wolfgang Frank. They were a
rust-bucket club bouncing along the bottom of the 2.Bundesliga, and he was an unusual character
who was obsessed with Arrigo Sachi and believed in zonal marking, high-pressing and playing
without a sweeper, everything that German football stood against. In two separate coaching spells,
his football would inspire an unlikely rejuvenation and, while it wouldn’t quite
earn promotion, it would be the most profound influence on Jurgen Klopp and his teammates.
But by the Easter of 2001, Frank was long gone and the club were again circling
the 2.Bundesliga drain. Mainz had re-embraced coaching orthodoxy and that lack of originality
left them in the relegation zone and needing a dramatic solution.
Sporting director Christian Heidel found one, dismissing coach Eckhart Krautzun and replacing
him with… nobody. Heidel wanted Frank’s football, but he needed someone who could teach it. With
a team still largely populated by players who understood Frank’s pressing and zonal marking,
and who knew how to play a back-four, he reasoned that it could probably coach itself.
But Heidel needed a leader in the group and that led him to Klopp, the side’s veteran right-back.
The team responded. Back came the back-four and the zonal marking, and training was
again dominated by positional drilling and a determination to outrun the weekend’s opponent.
By the end of the season, Klopp had hauled them far enough up the table to avoid relegation
and at 34, he was offered his first full-time managerial contract.
The next season would be quite remarkable. Mainz’s
first team was reinforced solely from the free-transfer market
and yet a club who had never played in the Bundesliga came within a game of promotion.
The next season, another near-miracle: for the cost of less than £600,000 –
and after selling Manuel Friedrich and Blaise Nkufo to Werder Bremen and
Hannover for a combined £3.5m – Mainz lost out on promotion on goal-difference alone.
Klopp’s emphasis on system over individuals was not only sponsoring unlikely improvement,
but also reducing the effect of inevitable departures.
And Klopp’s managerial personality was also beginning to reveal itself.
Always an outgoing and opinionated player, he was an equally gregarious and sociable coach.
At the end of his first season, as recalled in Raphael Honigstein’s biography of Klopp,
he and Heidel had organised for a huge boat to take the team,
the coaches and the fans back down the Rhine after the final game at Waldhof Manheim.
The next year, when promotion had evaded them, it was Klopp leading the defiant
speeches in front of nearly 10,000 Mainz supporters in the city centre.
Such character main difference between Klopp and Frank. Speaking to the club’s YouTube channel in
2021, Klopp described Frank as “the best coach I ever had” and as the figure “who initiated
the development of this great club”. Profound influence though Frank was, personality wise he
was introverted and self-critical, and sometimes struggled to develop bonds with his players.
For Klopp, communication was a strength. His man-management had its quirks,
including on one occasion a team-building retreat to the Swedish wilderness,
but the connections formed were deep, and devotion followed.
As would promotion in 2004 - and it was well-timed.
That summer, Germany suffered a humiliating exit from the European Championship
and the Bundesliga was still a ponderous, individual-led league.
Klopp wasn’t the only opposition to that – Ralf Rangnick’s upstart Hoffenheim were
also part of that movement – but he had a charisma and a likability that others didn’t.
The public liked him. For their coverage of the 2005 Confederations Cup,
German broadcaster ZDF used Klopp as a pundit, as they would for the 2006 World Cup. Klopp’s
in-studio analysis, with its tactical emphasis and infectious enthusiasm, caught the mood of
a country who wanted something different, beyond platitudes and famous ex-players.
None of which would have mattered had Mainz sunk without trace in the Bundesliga.
They didn’t. In their first season, they sank as low as 15th,
but recovered to finish eleventh. After the game which clinched their survival,
a spirited loss to Bayern Munich, Klopp was spotted drinking in a local pub with the fans.
Courtesy of the Fair Play award, Mainz would also earn an unlikely
spot in the then-UEFA Cup at the end of that first season – and yet the
extra burden wouldn’t affect them. Despite a wage bill of just €13m,
around half the Bundesliga’s average, Mainz would survive again in eleventh place
and the 2005-06 season would finish with Klopp celebrating in the stand with the supporters.
This was a fairytale playing out in Germany’s carnival town. And Klopp was the star. Part of
Mainz’s recruitment during the period depended on prospective new signings’ willingness to
be bent to his will and to be enraptured by the team’s hard-running, well-built system.
Mainz were a movement as much as a football team, and such due diligence protected their chemistry.
It’s also why as desirable as their players were to other clubs
and as willing as sides were to snatch them way, those transfers were rarely successful.
Then, as before, Heidel and Klopp would replace what had been lost with unheralded players. Ahead
of the 2007-08 campaign, Mainz spent just £1.65m on five permanent transfers, with centre-back
Bo Svensson – today Mainz’s head-coach– the only one signed directly from the Bundesliga.
The turnover was miraculous, but it would prove unsustainable.
A disastrous beginning to the 2006-07 season saw Mainz bottom of the Bundesliga
for seven straight games and, although there was a resurgence following the winter break,
they would slump back into the relegation zone with six games left and – this time – there
was no escape. The miracle was out of magic and the 2.Bundesliga was beckoning.
But Klopp would accompany them. His profile was well beyond that
of the second tier coach in 2007 and yet he was total in his commitment.
“I don’t have the right to stop now”, he said after relegation had been confirmed.
“I want to make sure I can live in Mainz after I retire… without there being any open questions.”
He pledged to remain at the club as long as they could win immediate promotion back to the
Bundesliga. They would finish fourth in strong division, though, and Klopp – of course – was
in demand. Northern giants Hamburg took an interest, but dithered in making a decision.
Bayern Munich had also been paying attention. Ultimately,
they opted for Jurgen Klinsmann instead in what was later acknowledged a bad mistake.
Borussia Dortmund had fewer doubts. Hans-Joachim Watzke had rescued the club from near bankruptcy
and had watched the Westfalenstadion tire of the pedestrian football coached by Thomas Doll.
In Klopp, he saw someone who could bring energy and life to Dortmund and also great personality
to the touchline, but also a system which would allow the club to compete beyond its means.
When the news broke that club was leaving, Mainz mourned the end of era – almost twenty
years of Jurgen Klopp. He shed tears at the stadium as the fans sang him farewell,
and again in the city centre, when 30,000 people turned up to thank him and wave him goodbye.