In this extract from his new book Klopp: Bring The Noise, Raphael Honigstein explains the process of how Jurgen Klopp ended up becoming Liverpool’s manager, three years after FSG first wanted him to take the job.
Klopp’s name had first cropped up at Anfield in the spring of 2012, as possible successors to Kenny Dalglish were being sounded out. A middle-man got in touch with the Dortmund coach but was told in no uncertain terms that Klopp had no intention of leaving. He was on the way to winning a historic double.
In September 2015, things got much more serious, rapidly. Brendan Rodgers’ poor start to the season had prompted Boston-based Fenway Sports Group (FSG), Liverpool FC’s owners, to scour the market for the next manager.
FSG president Mike Gordon explained:
We were thinking about someone who had experience and success at the highest level, Jürgen had done that domestically, obviously in the Bundesliga. He really had done that, apart from maybe one or two kicks, in the Champions League, too. I think his credentials as one of the best managers, if not the best, were apparent for all. And we liked the type of football he played. Both the energy and the emphasis on attacking: high-electricity, high- wattage football with an appeal. So from a football sense it was a relatively easy and straightforward decision.
While there were ‘obvious grounds for support’ for Klopp, as Gordon puts it, FSG’s point man for Liverpool conducted due diligence on the German to see whether the hype was borne out by reality.
I tried to set aside his popularity in the football world and his charisma, for an unbiased analysis. I did a fair amount of research along with the people inside the club, determining how he should be evaluated, purely in an analytical and football sense. The process was much the same you would undergo in the investment business before taking a big position. I am happy to say – and it is self-evident at this point – that however high and elevated his reputation was in the football world, the facts were actually more compelling and more persuasive still.
Gordon’s research pointed to Klopp having had ‘a decidedly positive effect, in a quantifiable sense, relative to what you might otherwise expect’ on Mainz and Dortmund. Put more simply, the Swabian had outperformed. The appeal to Liverpool, whose strategy is based on a smarter use of resources, in comparison with some of their more financially potent rivals in the Premier League, was clear.
In a football sense, it was pretty straightforward, but of course, I didn’t know if philosophies and personalities, that of the club and Jürgen’s, would mesh. It had to be a mutual fit. We also needed to know whether Jürgen wanted to lead the football programme and project of Liverpool. Those were very important pieces that needed to be determined.
A meeting was scheduled in New York on 1 October. Klopp’s and Kosicke’s attempt at secrecy got off to a very bad start, however. In the Lufthansa lounge at Munich airport, one of the staff asked Klopp – whose baseball cap didn’t make for much of a disguise – why he was going to JFK. ‘We’re watching a basketball game,’ he replied. A plausible explanation, except for the fact that the start of the NBA season was another four weeks away.
An hour after their arrival in Manhattan, the two Germans were rumbled again. As luck would have it, the receptionist at the Plaza Hotel on 5th Avenue hailed from the coach’s footballing hometown. ‘My word, it’s Kloppo!’ he exclaimed in broad Mainz dialect. Somehow, news of the clandestine trip never leaked.
FSG’s principal owner John W. Henry, LFC chairman Tom Werner, and Gordon met with Klopp and his agent at the offices of law firm Shearman & Sterling on Lexington Avenue, a few blocks to the east.
My first impression was that he was very tall. And I am not! It was very late but we had this very lengthy and substantive talk, and then we adjourned until the next day and met for more lengthy and substantive talks at the hotel. I want to emphasise: these were very much two-way conversations. This was about Jürgen being right for Liverpool FC and Liverpool FC, us as owners, being right for Jürgen.
Klopp’s charisma, as suspected, was of a similar size to his frame (‘he uses his personal skills, and his way of relating to people, to get across his message’) but what Gordon was struck by most was ‘the enormity of substance’ he detected behind the toothy smile and super-sized persona. It wasn’t about “boy, this guy is really charming, he is going to do wonderfully at press conferences and as a representative of a club”.
Very quickly, what came across was his breadth of talent: not just the personal side, but the level of intelligence, the kind of analytical thinking, the logic, the clarity and honesty, his ability to communicate so effectively even though English was not his first language. That side I think he doesn’t always get full credit for because people are so taken with him as a person in the flesh.’
Klopp told the FSG executives that football was ‘more than a system’, that it was ‘also rain, tackles flying in, the noise in the stadium’. Most of all, he said, the Anfield crowd had to be ‘activated’ by the style of performance, to spur on the team and vice versa in a self-amplifying cycle of exuberance.
It was very hard to find anything that was in any way deficient and that is the honest truth. What I am saying is: it was clear that Jürgen, as a football manager, really was on the same level as a corporate leader or someone you would choose to run your company. I say this as someone who’s spent twenty-seven years as an investor, engaging with some of the very top CEOs and leaders of business in America and Europe. At that point it was obvious to me that he was the right person. So we decided to discuss parameters and that’s when Jürgen excused himself.
While Kosicke continued to discuss remuneration, Klopp walked around Central Park. The stroll would last longer than anticipated. Both sides were initially rather far apart, financially, but the outline for an agreement was eventually found.
After Klopp had returned to Germany, Gordon sent him a text message. ‘Words cannot express how excited we are,’ it read. In his reply, Klopp apologised that he didn’t have the right vocabulary either. But he did know one word that summed up his feelings: ‘Woooooooooooow!!!’
Raphael Honigstein’s Klopp: Bring the Noise is out on 16th November 2017. Order your copy here.
