Ignat Manjoo's encounters with the so-called reinvention of German football, how it applies to the new Liverpool way, being mindful of entertainment vs real management
EDITORIAL By Ignat Manjoo
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What’s that? A distant, blonde, humanoid figure approaching me through the dark. Jurgen Klopp? No, it’s my wife. She says, that at this rate I’m never going to get some rest in time for the Bafana Bafana game against Costa Rica at 4am on Friday.
Reds fans have been spotting Klopp (or his spectre) around Liverpool even two days before he arrived in the city. What will they see when he really arrives? In flesh. When you’re in love, you imagine your beloved in every face walking by. Liverpool fans are in love without even meeting their new manager Klopp yet. Typical of the Internet age we live in.
The supporters worldwide that didn’t want to go outside (or to work) until the Klopp confirmation was official, repeatedly clicked the refresh button on Twitter and forums, spotting Klopp in random videos of any average man with a beard and cap. There’s a Klopp father lookalike in the backyard playing basketball on a swing. There’s reflections of Klopp photographed off moving cars, between the haze and the sunlight, we catch a beard through the glass. Is it a bird? I only haven’t found fans spotting Klopp in the formation of clouds on their airplane window. Yet, Reds followers were truly following Klopp’s plane from Germany to England, capturing the flight radar, cheering on through the moving landscapes and safe landing, as if we were receiving transmission from Apollo 13. What’s going to happen when it really does happen, when Klopp walks into a packed Anfield singing You’ll Never Walk Alone?
Hysteria. Why did that word pop in my mind first? Where did I hear it recently? Brendan Rodgers. He was right. There is a hysteria in Liverpool. Rodgers said two weeks ago… as if it was in another lifetime.
“Of course there's a lot of hysteria and I think that continues. I'm pretty confident that there's obviously a group of people who don't want me here as the manager,” said Rodgers after he beat struggling Aston Villa two weeks ago.
Yes, there was never a conspiracy. The fans simply preferred Klopp. They begged co-owner John Henry, even tweeting pictures of Klopp to Henry’s wife, such was the desperation. With Liverpool, you can count on a fairy tale ending, and the Internet meltdown was actually comparable to that night in Istanbul, without even kicking a ball. Henry played the red fairy, “Your wish is my command.” One might say it’s blasphemous to compare this to Istanbul 2005, but to Klopp’s advantage, the social media coverage has just taken hysteria to a new level.
Liverpool fans stalk Jurgen Klopp's plane from Germany to England
Where did this fairy tale begin? For me it began in 2006 when I first saw Klopp up close and personal, and I do mean for real. I was in Germany for the World Cup, where a young Klopp worked as a journalist. He was easily approachable at the Sony Center in Berlin. You might be wondering what he was doing in that gig. Well, it was even a risk for ZDF TV to hire him as a presenter in the open air studio because Klopp was relatively unknown to the football world then. To me, when Klopp was presenting his football analysis, he was just that guy talking next to Franz Beckenbauer and introducing us to the real big names, such as Pele. Klopp was just the quiet, almost shy analyst, busy with his new invention of the time (Yes, he got German engineers to create it for him), drawing arrows on the screen to illustrate tactics.
At the time in Germany he wasn’t a nobody, he was the young coach of struggling Bundesliga club Mainz. In keeping with the role of the big screen in football manager's fame, it was his biggest opportunity in front of the camera during the World Cup, which raised his profile for the likes of Dortmund, impressing the German public with his in-game pointers. The rest is history. Now, he is about to bask in front of the cameras at Liverpool, and the English media wouldn’t have seen anything like this, not since Jose Mourinho first walked in London.
The Portuguese is now the most famous coach in the world, not just because he won the Uefa Champions League with Porto or Inter Milan… others have done it twice too. See, it’s due to his entertainment value in the media. He (and his puppet parody) was just so funny, and effective too, as a puppet master speaker, drawing all the journalists’ negativity toward himself, releasing the pressure from his players, like a God absorbing the sins of his fellow players.
That’s why even rival players, the likes of Steven Gerrard dreamed of having Mourinho as a coach. Not because Mourinho was jealous of how Rafa Benitez masterminded his defeat on the pitch, but because of the illusionary persona the self-appointed Special One created for himself. When you hold a power comparable to Mourinho, which the German scribes have foreseen with Klopp for the English Premier League, you will attract class players… and you won’t need to be Rodgers “pissing in the wind” for Toni Kroos, as Gerrard revealed in his book.
Klopp will introduce a new type of humour in Liverpool, boasting witty punch lines and a cultured taste in the arts, but wait… this is not a theatrical review. This is football. Do not judge Klopp as a master of ceremony. Just as Gerrard shouldn’t judge a coach on the warmth of a hug, nor should you the journalist or fan, judge Klopp on how entertaining he is on television. Otherwise Henry should’ve brought in former Mexico coach Miguel Herrera. He’s available too, after punching a journalist, resulted in his axing for Mexico. Tragedy and comedy in one Danny DeVito sized package.
This energy you can feel beaming through Herrera, is bubbling out of him and rubbing off his players. It’s infectious. It reaches the spectators and bounces all over the stadium like a Mexican wave of positivity. It’s exactly what the recent morgue at Anfield needs through the living Klopp, to feed off this energy, and awake! To resurrect the mythical European nights where Liverpool were feared by all in Europe, written down in folklore by the likes of Benitez and Bob Paisley before him.
Not the script by Rodgers that failed to turn over Bulgarian, Turkish and Swiss clubs. The Klopp technique is not just entertainment for show. The psychology is real. Benitez never charged down the field to celebrate with his players. He wrote notes during goals. However his meditative Buddha pose rubbed off to calm his players to beat Chelsea in the 2006-7 Champions League semi-final shootout.
You can’t judge a coach sensibly whilst in a state of frenzy, otherwise when the results catch up on you, you won’t know what hit you. A few losses and the followers will fear the magic is lost. Then how should we judge a manager? When they take the wool out of their eyes, the media judges coaches by results only. So, we think. Actually, all coaches lose matches and go through bad spells, and if that said coach, doesn’t have a good relationship with the media, it’s not difficult to spin an unfortunate string of results back into being the manager’s fault. If Klopp’s on good terms with us (as you expect he will be), then writers will be ready to explain how it was the player/s to blame instead. If you break that pact with the media, you can even be on top of the table but criticised for player relationships, favouritism, languages spoken and foreign tactics. He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword, so when you play your game on the television/computer screen, if you stare long enough this is where heroes turn into villains in time.
Not just Mourinho. Look at when the new model of reinventing German football began. Researchers placed it around the year 2008 in club football (the national team was earlier) with Jurgen Klinsmann, dubbing it ‘Concept Coaching (Konzepttrainer)’.
Ironically, Klinsmann was linked with Liverpool around that time when they were owned by American Texas cowboys George Gillett and Tom Hicks. Klinsmann used to visit them in the United States, and you can imagine how he gave H & G an earful on his philosophies. While living in America, Klinsmann learnt the latest techniques from US athletes. When Liverpool fans caught wind of this, it was the beginning of the end for the former owners. How things have changed in the FSG era.
First, Bayern Munich soon bought into Klinsmann’s ideas, but when the going got tough, the faith required to hold onto this new religion was lost. One by one high profile players such as Philipp Lahm turned on him, even stating that Klinsmann made minimal tactical preparation.
How did everything suddenly go pear shaped? Remember, Klinsmann was the darling of Germany just before that, not just as a legendary scorer but as their head coach for 2006. The pundits proved that the real genius behind Germany’s rise was actually his assistant Joachim Low, who took over as head coach, and the rest became history.
What can Klopp learn from history? The Concept Coach requires strong faith for everyone to come on board. When I was in Germany and their journalists were talking to me about the new system they were developing (as if it was in the underground bunkers with high concepts), I was laughing at them (probably just like how Bayern laughed at Klinsmann thereafter). I could laugh because England’s 5-1 thrashing of Germany in their own backyard was still fresh in my mind even though it was a World Cup qualification campaign earlier.
Growing up with the English media in South Africa, in my mind there was no doubt that the English team was far superior to the Germans at the time. All this talk about how the Germans were implementing these strategies in their youth systems, sounded like a dream, or a lie that when you tell enough people, someone will believe it. I also spoke to university students in Berlin who compared Germany’s rise to football power with the nationalism of World War 2, but I easily concluded that these boys just didn’t like to watch football. Which Germans were getting carried away?
Maybe, coming from South Africa I’m used to hearing about pipe-dream development plans. Though, I was living nearby in Austria for two years and also covered the European Cups at U19 and U21 level, where I saw Germany repeatedly losing in the finals to Spain - a precursor for what was in store at senior level in years to come. I watched their youth teams first hand each year and was beginning to suspect there was something to these master plans after all.
From being linked with Klinsmann to Klopp: How times have changed and what Jurgen can learn from Jurgen's failure
The main point in how they succeeded is that the Germans didn’t care about the impact of short term results in their leagues, as long as they were all following the same blue-print from bottom to top, to benefit the national team. They were all singing from the same hymn sheet and I should’ve never doubted the Germans to mechanically pull that off.
It took years. They had converted me. Low was previously the coach, where I was based in Vienna at Austria Wien. Somebody had to bring Low to the Premier League. However club football is different and Low never left his national post, even after winning the World Cup last year.
The third coach in the holy trinity of Concept Coaching is Klopp, the only one to prove himself with it in the Bundesliga. So, Klopps a better fit for the Kop after all. By now, you already know how he won the title against the odds with Dortmund, and took them all the way to the Champions League final in 2013. Then critics point out at his final season, but if you want to earn your badges as a coach worth his salt, it’s also about how you cope with crisis. Even the celebrated Carlo Ancelotti struggled at times. The writing was already on the wall for the departing Klopp in Dortmund.
So, how did I judge that? I believe a coach is assessed by his philosophy, his system and how he implements that in time over various challenges such as injuries, new signings, generational changes and various other factors, that we the media and fans, all need to understand to allow them time for. It’s not just about winning trebles and Champions Leagues, but also how you deal with a rotten patch, whether you can find that solution for your team to turn the corner, or not. You can’t win the league every season, but you have to find that solution and show provable signs that you are back on the onward curve.
Contrast that with Rodger’s philosophy in his 180-page dossier, which was rewritten every few months, sometimes rewritten during games. In the end it was not even that Rodgers didn’t know how to implement his ideas, but he didn’t know what his system was nor which players he wanted to achieve anything.
The Liverpool board, and you the reader, already know what Klopp stands for and how he fits into FSG’s model. He’s not going to swing toward Pep Guardiola’s style one month and Mourinho’s the next… Klopp has his own identity that differentiates him from other Concept Coaches, Klinsmann and Low. The high-pressing, counter-attacking, heavy-metal football wasn’t Rodgers ideal initially. It doesn’t belong to any one coach, but Klopp has made it work to win trophies. Not just to lose them. Rodgers pointed out that he’s the same coach that nearly won the league. It’s the other way around. Rodgers is the same coach that lost the league title. Watch the Crystal Palace fiasco and the silly goals conceded all season.
Rodgers says he needed the tools (players) to make it happen, but he didn’t have his own tools (tactical knowledge or experience) to implement the tools of this philosophy. FSG wanted Klopp from day one to reinvent Liverpool and football in England, while Rodgers talked Klopp’s talk about new concepts. Now, Liverpool finally got the man who knows how to make it happen. It’s over to the players now, because we the media can first blame Rodgers or the Liverpool transfer committee’s signings, until it’s time to turn on Klopp one day.
Next time, I will tell you how Klopp can turn Liverpool around. I can write a 180-page dossier too, but I can’t do it for real.
What’s that? A distant, blonde, humanoid figure approaching me through the dark. Jurgen Klopp? No, it’s my wife. She says, that at this rate I’m never going to get some rest in time for the Bafana Bafana game against Costa Rica at 4am on Friday.
Reds fans have been spotting Klopp (or his spectre) around Liverpool even two days before he arrived in the city. What will they see when he really arrives? In flesh. When you’re in love, you imagine your beloved in every face walking by. Liverpool fans are in love without even meeting their new manager Klopp yet. Typical of the Internet age we live in.
The supporters worldwide that didn’t want to go outside (or to work) until the Klopp confirmation was official, repeatedly clicked the refresh button on Twitter and forums, spotting Klopp in random videos of any average man with a beard and cap. There’s a Klopp father lookalike in the backyard playing basketball on a swing. There’s reflections of Klopp photographed off moving cars, between the haze and the sunlight, we catch a beard through the glass. Is it a bird? I only haven’t found fans spotting Klopp in the formation of clouds on their airplane window. Yet, Reds followers were truly following Klopp’s plane from Germany to England, capturing the flight radar, cheering on through the moving landscapes and safe landing, as if we were receiving transmission from Apollo 13. What’s going to happen when it really does happen, when Klopp walks into a packed Anfield singing You’ll Never Walk Alone?
Hysteria. Why did that word pop in my mind first? Where did I hear it recently? Brendan Rodgers. He was right. There is a hysteria in Liverpool. Rodgers said two weeks ago… as if it was in another lifetime.
“Of course there's a lot of hysteria and I think that continues. I'm pretty confident that there's obviously a group of people who don't want me here as the manager,” said Rodgers after he beat struggling Aston Villa two weeks ago.
Yes, there was never a conspiracy. The fans simply preferred Klopp. They begged co-owner John Henry, even tweeting pictures of Klopp to Henry’s wife, such was the desperation. With Liverpool, you can count on a fairy tale ending, and the Internet meltdown was actually comparable to that night in Istanbul, without even kicking a ball. Henry played the red fairy, “Your wish is my command.” One might say it’s blasphemous to compare this to Istanbul 2005, but to Klopp’s advantage, the social media coverage has just taken hysteria to a new level.
Liverpool fans stalk Jurgen Klopp's plane from Germany to England
Where did this fairy tale begin? For me it began in 2006 when I first saw Klopp up close and personal, and I do mean for real. I was in Germany for the World Cup, where a young Klopp worked as a journalist. He was easily approachable at the Sony Center in Berlin. You might be wondering what he was doing in that gig. Well, it was even a risk for ZDF TV to hire him as a presenter in the open air studio because Klopp was relatively unknown to the football world then. To me, when Klopp was presenting his football analysis, he was just that guy talking next to Franz Beckenbauer and introducing us to the real big names, such as Pele. Klopp was just the quiet, almost shy analyst, busy with his new invention of the time (Yes, he got German engineers to create it for him), drawing arrows on the screen to illustrate tactics.
At the time in Germany he wasn’t a nobody, he was the young coach of struggling Bundesliga club Mainz. In keeping with the role of the big screen in football manager's fame, it was his biggest opportunity in front of the camera during the World Cup, which raised his profile for the likes of Dortmund, impressing the German public with his in-game pointers. The rest is history. Now, he is about to bask in front of the cameras at Liverpool, and the English media wouldn’t have seen anything like this, not since Jose Mourinho first walked in London.
The Portuguese is now the most famous coach in the world, not just because he won the Uefa Champions League with Porto or Inter Milan… others have done it twice too. See, it’s due to his entertainment value in the media. He (and his puppet parody) was just so funny, and effective too, as a puppet master speaker, drawing all the journalists’ negativity toward himself, releasing the pressure from his players, like a God absorbing the sins of his fellow players.
That’s why even rival players, the likes of Steven Gerrard dreamed of having Mourinho as a coach. Not because Mourinho was jealous of how Rafa Benitez masterminded his defeat on the pitch, but because of the illusionary persona the self-appointed Special One created for himself. When you hold a power comparable to Mourinho, which the German scribes have foreseen with Klopp for the English Premier League, you will attract class players… and you won’t need to be Rodgers “pissing in the wind” for Toni Kroos, as Gerrard revealed in his book.
Klopp will introduce a new type of humour in Liverpool, boasting witty punch lines and a cultured taste in the arts, but wait… this is not a theatrical review. This is football. Do not judge Klopp as a master of ceremony. Just as Gerrard shouldn’t judge a coach on the warmth of a hug, nor should you the journalist or fan, judge Klopp on how entertaining he is on television. Otherwise Henry should’ve brought in former Mexico coach Miguel Herrera. He’s available too, after punching a journalist, resulted in his axing for Mexico. Tragedy and comedy in one Danny DeVito sized package.
This energy you can feel beaming through Herrera, is bubbling out of him and rubbing off his players. It’s infectious. It reaches the spectators and bounces all over the stadium like a Mexican wave of positivity. It’s exactly what the recent morgue at Anfield needs through the living Klopp, to feed off this energy, and awake! To resurrect the mythical European nights where Liverpool were feared by all in Europe, written down in folklore by the likes of Benitez and Bob Paisley before him.
Not the script by Rodgers that failed to turn over Bulgarian, Turkish and Swiss clubs. The Klopp technique is not just entertainment for show. The psychology is real. Benitez never charged down the field to celebrate with his players. He wrote notes during goals. However his meditative Buddha pose rubbed off to calm his players to beat Chelsea in the 2006-7 Champions League semi-final shootout.
You can’t judge a coach sensibly whilst in a state of frenzy, otherwise when the results catch up on you, you won’t know what hit you. A few losses and the followers will fear the magic is lost. Then how should we judge a manager? When they take the wool out of their eyes, the media judges coaches by results only. So, we think. Actually, all coaches lose matches and go through bad spells, and if that said coach, doesn’t have a good relationship with the media, it’s not difficult to spin an unfortunate string of results back into being the manager’s fault. If Klopp’s on good terms with us (as you expect he will be), then writers will be ready to explain how it was the player/s to blame instead. If you break that pact with the media, you can even be on top of the table but criticised for player relationships, favouritism, languages spoken and foreign tactics. He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword, so when you play your game on the television/computer screen, if you stare long enough this is where heroes turn into villains in time.
Not just Mourinho. Look at when the new model of reinventing German football began. Researchers placed it around the year 2008 in club football (the national team was earlier) with Jurgen Klinsmann, dubbing it ‘Concept Coaching (Konzepttrainer)’.
Ironically, Klinsmann was linked with Liverpool around that time when they were owned by American Texas cowboys George Gillett and Tom Hicks. Klinsmann used to visit them in the United States, and you can imagine how he gave H & G an earful on his philosophies. While living in America, Klinsmann learnt the latest techniques from US athletes. When Liverpool fans caught wind of this, it was the beginning of the end for the former owners. How things have changed in the FSG era.
First, Bayern Munich soon bought into Klinsmann’s ideas, but when the going got tough, the faith required to hold onto this new religion was lost. One by one high profile players such as Philipp Lahm turned on him, even stating that Klinsmann made minimal tactical preparation.
How did everything suddenly go pear shaped? Remember, Klinsmann was the darling of Germany just before that, not just as a legendary scorer but as their head coach for 2006. The pundits proved that the real genius behind Germany’s rise was actually his assistant Joachim Low, who took over as head coach, and the rest became history.
What can Klopp learn from history? The Concept Coach requires strong faith for everyone to come on board. When I was in Germany and their journalists were talking to me about the new system they were developing (as if it was in the underground bunkers with high concepts), I was laughing at them (probably just like how Bayern laughed at Klinsmann thereafter). I could laugh because England’s 5-1 thrashing of Germany in their own backyard was still fresh in my mind even though it was a World Cup qualification campaign earlier.
Growing up with the English media in South Africa, in my mind there was no doubt that the English team was far superior to the Germans at the time. All this talk about how the Germans were implementing these strategies in their youth systems, sounded like a dream, or a lie that when you tell enough people, someone will believe it. I also spoke to university students in Berlin who compared Germany’s rise to football power with the nationalism of World War 2, but I easily concluded that these boys just didn’t like to watch football. Which Germans were getting carried away?
Maybe, coming from South Africa I’m used to hearing about pipe-dream development plans. Though, I was living nearby in Austria for two years and also covered the European Cups at U19 and U21 level, where I saw Germany repeatedly losing in the finals to Spain - a precursor for what was in store at senior level in years to come. I watched their youth teams first hand each year and was beginning to suspect there was something to these master plans after all.
From being linked with Klinsmann to Klopp: How times have changed and what Jurgen can learn from Jurgen's failure
The main point in how they succeeded is that the Germans didn’t care about the impact of short term results in their leagues, as long as they were all following the same blue-print from bottom to top, to benefit the national team. They were all singing from the same hymn sheet and I should’ve never doubted the Germans to mechanically pull that off.
It took years. They had converted me. Low was previously the coach, where I was based in Vienna at Austria Wien. Somebody had to bring Low to the Premier League. However club football is different and Low never left his national post, even after winning the World Cup last year.
The third coach in the holy trinity of Concept Coaching is Klopp, the only one to prove himself with it in the Bundesliga. So, Klopps a better fit for the Kop after all. By now, you already know how he won the title against the odds with Dortmund, and took them all the way to the Champions League final in 2013. Then critics point out at his final season, but if you want to earn your badges as a coach worth his salt, it’s also about how you cope with crisis. Even the celebrated Carlo Ancelotti struggled at times. The writing was already on the wall for the departing Klopp in Dortmund.
So, how did I judge that? I believe a coach is assessed by his philosophy, his system and how he implements that in time over various challenges such as injuries, new signings, generational changes and various other factors, that we the media and fans, all need to understand to allow them time for. It’s not just about winning trebles and Champions Leagues, but also how you deal with a rotten patch, whether you can find that solution for your team to turn the corner, or not. You can’t win the league every season, but you have to find that solution and show provable signs that you are back on the onward curve.
Contrast that with Rodger’s philosophy in his 180-page dossier, which was rewritten every few months, sometimes rewritten during games. In the end it was not even that Rodgers didn’t know how to implement his ideas, but he didn’t know what his system was nor which players he wanted to achieve anything.
The Liverpool board, and you the reader, already know what Klopp stands for and how he fits into FSG’s model. He’s not going to swing toward Pep Guardiola’s style one month and Mourinho’s the next… Klopp has his own identity that differentiates him from other Concept Coaches, Klinsmann and Low. The high-pressing, counter-attacking, heavy-metal football wasn’t Rodgers ideal initially. It doesn’t belong to any one coach, but Klopp has made it work to win trophies. Not just to lose them. Rodgers pointed out that he’s the same coach that nearly won the league. It’s the other way around. Rodgers is the same coach that lost the league title. Watch the Crystal Palace fiasco and the silly goals conceded all season.
Rodgers says he needed the tools (players) to make it happen, but he didn’t have his own tools (tactical knowledge or experience) to implement the tools of this philosophy. FSG wanted Klopp from day one to reinvent Liverpool and football in England, while Rodgers talked Klopp’s talk about new concepts. Now, Liverpool finally got the man who knows how to make it happen. It’s over to the players now, because we the media can first blame Rodgers or the Liverpool transfer committee’s signings, until it’s time to turn on Klopp one day.
Next time, I will tell you how Klopp can turn Liverpool around. I can write a 180-page dossier too, but I can’t do it for real.
