[SIZE=6]Jürgen Klopp: Borussia Dortmund are ‘worth falling in love with’[/SIZE]
Jürgen Klopp on his similarities – and differences – with Arsène Wenger, his love of ‘fighting football’ and why the great Barcelona side are ‘not enough for me’
[U]Jürgen Klopp[/U][/URL] is pondering the similarities between himself and Arsène Wenger, between his [URL=‘http://www.theguardian.com/football/borussiadortmund’][U]Borussia Dortmund[/U] team and Arsenal which, on the face of it, appear to be numerous. Klopp, however, does not see it. “He likes having the ball, playing football, passes … it’s like an orchestra,” the Dortmund manager says, pretending to play the violin. “But it’s a silent song, yeah? I like heavy metal.”
Klopp’s every entrance ought to be accompanied by a cymbal crash and it is no great stretch to imagine him laying into the speakers with a guitar. There is a wildness about the Dortmund frontman; a high-octane, all-or-nothing passion that overtakes him on match days. It feeds his explosive team and the 80,645 supporters that pack the club’s Westfalenstadion, where 25,000 stand behind one of the goals to form the Yellow Wall. The place teems with energy and intensity. It is Klopp’s home from home.
“For me, he is Sir Arsène Wenger, he is really something, I love him,” Klopp adds, before miming a polite handshake. "But I’m this guy, with high fives. I always want it loud. I want to have this … " Klopp makes the sound of an exploding bomb. (An article with him demands stage direction).
"If Barcelona’s team of the last four years were the first one that I saw play when I was four years of age … with their serenity, winning 5-0, 6-0 … I would have played tennis. Sorry, that is not enough for me. What I love is that there are some things you can do in football to allow each team to win most of the matches.
"It is not serenity football, it is fighting football – that is what I like. What we call in German – English [football] … rainy day, heavy pitch, everybody is dirty in the face and they go home and can’t play football for the next four weeks. This is Borussia.
“When I watch Arsenal in the last 10 years, it is nearly perfect football, but we all know they didn’t win a title. In Britain they say that they like Arsenal but they have to win something. Who wins the title? Chelsea, but with different football, I would say. This is the philosophy of Arsène Wenger. I love this but I cannot coach this because I am a different guy. You think many things are similar? I hope so in some moments, but there are big differences, too.”
Klopp will face Wenger in Dortmund on Wednesday night, in [U]Champions League[/U] Group F, knowing that a repeat of the victory at Emirates Stadium the week before last would put his team in the driving seat to qualify. That 2-1 win was built on trademark pressing and quick transitions but what appeared to please Klopp the most was the statistic that said his players had run a collective 11.5km more than their opponents.
“Coaches will say that it’s not important for their team to run more and they prefer to make games the right way,” Klopp says. “I want to make games only the right way and run 10km more. It’s a rule to give all and it can make the difference if you work more. If you don’t have to give all and you still win, what’s this? You don’t like this game? It’s like this [Klopp yawns]. What, you can win Wimbledon like this?”
Klopp peppers the conversation with tennis references. He was not impressed when his own meltdown at the fourth official that saw him sent off in the Champions League defeat at Napoli in September was attributed, in some quarters, to the pressure he felt. “No, I make this fucking face when I play tennis. That’s the truth.”
The 46-year-old is a talker, and he adds flavour with anecdotes and detail; some insightful, others more off-the-wall. He admits to being rubbish at DIY, for example. “You’d be waiting 30 or 40 years for me to build a table,” he says. “I have more than two left hands.”
He remembers his one and only meeting with Sir Alex Ferguson as lasting for two minutes and coming “during the most shitty moment of my life”. He encountered Ferguson at Wembley after Dortmund had lost last season’s Champions League final to Bayern Munich. “He said ‘great season’ to me,” Klopp says, before indicating how his own chin had been on the floor.
It would be interesting to hear what Ferguson thinks of Klopp’s look – the jeans and trainers and black-rimmed spectacles – given his more traditional sartorial values. “I don’t think I have a chapter in his book,” Klopp says. "Chapter One: How is Klopp looking?
“I’m sorry, he is British,” Klopp continues. "You drink tea at four o’clock in the afternoon and nobody else knows why in the rest of the world. You drive on the wrong side of the road. We are different. But I’m sure I can have two days and two nights with Sir Alex Ferguson. I don’t know what he drinks. Red wine, OK. He can have his red wine. I prefer beer.
“But we are like we are. He worked with Ryan Giggs for 20-odd years and when Ryan Giggs hears Ferguson’s name, he doesn’t go like this [Klopp pretends to vomit]. That is the best you can do in your life. Every day, every year, all the talk … you know everything about this guy and you still like each other. That says everything about Sir Alex Ferguson.”
Klopp loves to laugh and his is a very big laugh. He jokes that his ugly face is one problem and he turns to the journalist from the Sun. “You have the same problem,” he says, uproariously. He has all the trimmings of the charismatic maverick and it is put to him that he would get on well with Zlatan Ibrahimovic, with whom he would like to work. “Crazy players love me,” Klopp says. “I don’t know why.”
He is relaxed and engaging when he does not have his must-win game-face on and it is easy to see why the Dortmund players like him and, to quote the midfielder Nuri Sahin, will “run through walls for him”. Most importantly, Klopp gets results. He has the highest points-per-game ratio of any Dortmund coach in history, together with two [U]Bundesliga[/U] titles and one German cup.
It has combined to make him an attractive proposition and the predators have sniffed, particularly from the Premier League. Klopp does not want to say that Manchester City and Chelsea wanted him before they appointed Manuel Pellegrini and José Mourinho respectively – to him it is in the past – but the references are almost matter of fact.
“I know that some clubs were interested, of course,” he says. “They thought about us. You know these clubs … they changed coaches last season. Man City? But I don’t say anything about this. From other countries, they were also interested.”
Many Arsenal fans believe that Klopp would be tailor-made as Wenger’s eventual successor. Like Wenger, he came from a small club (Mainz in 2008); he promotes young players; he is wedded to an entertaining style and he hunts for answers when key personnel depart. Klopp has lost Sahin, Shinji Kagawa and Mario Götze over the past three summers, although Sahin has since returned, and he will lose Robert Lewandowski as a Bosman free agent next summer. Klopp believes that renewal is essential for progress.
But Arsenal and anyone else would have to wait until 2018, at least, for Klopp. He signed a new contract at Dortmund last Wednesday and he could not have been clearer about his intention to honour it. He had previously been contracted to 2016 and there was no pressure from either side to agree to the extension. But they did it because they wanted to; because the partnership feels right.
“Borussia Dortmund is the only club in the world where if I speak to a young player, he knows that I am his coach for the next four-and-a-half years,” Klopp says. "We want to have this situation. The players are similar to the journalists. They always think: ‘Ah, he says this and then Real Madrid call and he is away.’ But this is the message: Everybody can call but nothing will happen. This is for sure and then we will see what’s with the players.
“It makes me proud to hear that some Arsenal fans might want me, but it’s not important for me to be proud. My mother is proud. It’s a better feeling than if nobody knows me but it doesn’t help me in the morning, it doesn’t help me in the evening and it doesn’t help me through the day.”
Klopp’s connection with Dortmund is total. He talks emotively about how the club is “worth falling in love with because this is pure football” and, also, the unique thrill of emerging from the dark and narrow tunnel at the Westfalenstadion, in which he has to stoop at various points, to be assailed by the colour and noise.
“It’s a little bit like when you are born and your mother is [Klopp makes a face like a woman in labour]. Then, you come out and you see the best of the world,” he says.
Klopp is the incurable romantic. To him Dortmund are the Rebel Alliance to Bayern’s Death Star, but his club can compete. The players have an average age of 25 and they will enter their prime years over the course of Klopp’s contract. “The important thing is new ideas, not money,” he says. “It is important to make the next step. You always want to be the team that can beat the one with more money.”
