Jurgen Klopp was giving a speech to the next generation of German coaches hoping to follow in his footsteps and the onlookers were rapt.
The talk was on leadership, an area Klopp knows pretty well after delivering Liverpool’s first Premier League title in three decades, a first Champions League trophy in more than a decade and much more, all while playing an energetic, exhausting and exciting style of football.
Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane and Virgil van Dijk – three of the world’s best players – were signed on Klopp’s watch and he explained how he will meet one-on-one with transfer targets before the final contract is signed. They will chat for up to four hours – about football, family, life – to ensure the player understands how important they are to his club and so he can be certain they will fit his ethos.
The Liverpool manager was giving the address last year to students on the Fussball-Lehrer (Football Teacher) training course run by the German football association (DFB), providing the sort of guidance that has helped to develop the rich crop of coaches who now dominate European football.
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Klopp remains a key part of the programme and gives as many as three talks a year to German national team coaches and the next generation in training, offering unique insights into his methods.
Manchester United boss Ralf Rangnick, another Fussball-Lehrer graduate, recalls Klopp giving a different talk in 2012 in front of 500 engrossed onlookers. Klopp revealed then that around 80 per cent of his tactical training focuses on what his players do without the ball, concentrating on how they win it back.
Rangnick believes Klopp sees the game “through the glasses” of the other team having the ball, as opposed to Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola who sees the game through the prism of his own team’s possession. But far from Klopp’s approach being interpreted as defensive, winning the ball back quickly and proactively can be aggressively offensive.
The history of the Fussball-Lehrer is far-reaching. First established in 1947 at the German Sport University in Cologne, the course predates even the Bundesliga (founded in 1963). Hennes Weisweiler trained coaches there from 1958 to 1970 before becoming one of the most successful managers in Europe in the 1970s. His pupils include two-time Champions League winner Jupp Heynckes and Euro 96 winner Berti Vogts.
In 2005 it became known as the Hennes Weisweiler Academy and was hosted and run by the German Sports University in Cologne until 2011, when it relocated to Hennef, a small town in west Germany.
This year will be the first time it is run from the DFB’s new home in the centre of Frankfurt – German football’s answer to St George’s Park – that opens officially in March. The bad news for rival nations is that it has recently been refined and improved based on analysis and feedback from German clubs and coaches.
Any coach wishing to become a first-team manager in the top three tiers of German football must complete the 11-month course, and places are extraordinarily hard to earn. It is football coaching’s equivalent of Oxbridge.
The DFB used to take 24 participants but found that while around half became first-team coaches, the other half first took jobs in youth football. Chelsea manager Tuchel is one example. He was first hired by Rangnick – who had been Tuchel’s coach at third-tier SSV Ulm before a knee injury cut short his playing career – as a youth coach at Stuttgart, where Tuchel won the Under 19 Bundesliga in 2005. His first job as a top flight manager came via promotion from Mainz 05’s academy.
It gives some idea of how often German coaches cross paths, how one subtly influences another along their journey to success. In between Stuttgart and Mainz, Tuchel coached Julian Nagelsmann in Augsburg’s reserves. He later finished top of his Fussball-Lehrer class and became the Bundesliga’s youngest manager, aged 28. When Tuchel was poached from Mainz by Borussia Dortmund it was to replicate the high-pressing football of his predecessor, Klopp, who had coincidentally followed the same path from Mainz to Dortmund.
Tuchel got Augsburg to pay for the Fussball-Lehrer course as part of his deal. Erich Rutemoeller, the DFB’s former head of coach training, found the astute, intelligent student, who was not a big personality and often quiet in lectures and discussions very much at odds with the manager who lost his temper with referees so often that Augsburg started making him pay his own fines.
Now the DFB has created the A+ Licence, run specifically for youth team coaches, while the Pro Licence focuses on first-team coaches, offering only 16 places a year. And the application process is more rigorous and “even harder than it used to be”, DFB academy director Tobias Haupt tells i. Hopefuls must submit an essay, attend a two-day assessment centre, face in-depth interviews and a live coaching session in front of assessors.
The course itself has changed, too. Whereas previously it was almost impossible to work while attending, it is now shaped around working coaches so they can put their theory and training straight into practice. But it remains a gruelling experience: Uefa stipulates that coaches taking the Pro Licence must complete a minimum of 360 hours of study, whereas the Fussball-Lehrer has always incorporated more than 800.
At the end of the 11 months, participants submit a final thesis based on their coaching philosophy, which is then used to inform the next year’s course. So there is a little bit of Klopp, who attended in 2004, in Tuchel, who attended in 2006, and a little bit of Rangnick, who attended before them, in both, and so on.
“The most important thing for us is to give them the best education we can give them but I’m convinced the education doesn’t stop the moment they receive their licence,” Haupt says.
Given rival coaches are fiercely competitive and guard secrets as though they were crown jewels, how has the DFB cultivated such an open ethos amongst its coaches? Haupt explains that, even though coaches such as Klopp have regularly given back, even until three years ago there was the perception that most coaches and clubs operated in isolation.
“I would say it’s a different culture we created the last years and we are really open minded, not only regarding our national coaches but our international exchange of ideas is so important for us,” Haupt says.
The DFB has in recent years collaborated with the FAs of the Netherlands and Belgium. Another talk to Fussball-Lehrer participants last year was given by Manchester City and Belgium midfielder Kevin De Bruyne and his national team manager Roberto Martinez.
“It was really interesting for our coaches and the participants to get to know the coach’s perspective and the perspective of the captain of the Belgian national team,” Haupt says. “To see how they were different, what they had in common, how they approached things, how they come to solutions. For me the best thing to see was they were so open minded. They wanted to share their ideas. It was a really cool experience and a really great culture we experienced there.”
Haupt remains in contact with Tuchel and it is hoped that after a few years of switching clubs he will soon be able to share his knowledge with Germany’s next generation. Klopp, meanwhile, appears as enthusiastic about discussing coaching as he is about coaching footballers.
When he finds the time to give talks at conferences he enjoys having a beer with his counterparts after the sessions and simply talking about their job.
In the past, Klopp often found it odd that it was seen as a weakness to ask questions as a head coach, that you were supposed to be the one with the answers already, when in other professions, such as with doctors or scientists, the opposite is true.
His overarching philosophy is that when he enters the room the mood should not get worse. There is certainly no chance of that whenever he stands in front of aspiring coaches desperate to learn.
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