Jürgen Klopp swore he was done coaching, then took Germany on his own terms

Jürgen Klopp

Photo: Mehdi Bolourian / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 16, 1967 Stuttgart
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	Bundesliga ×2 · DFB-Pokal 2012 · League Cup ×3 · UEFA Europa League 2016 · Champions League 2019 · Premier League 2020
Individual awards	Order of Merit of Baden-Württemberg · Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany · Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

At his first press conference as Germany head coach, at the football association’s headquarters in Frankfurt, Jürgen Klopp explained how he would quit. If enough people decided he should go, he said, and he meant a broad mood rather than one or two critics, he would leave without a severance payment. If the press went after his family, he would also leave. New managers rarely open a job meant to last through the next World Cup by describing its end. Klopp did, and it fitted a man who had told everyone he was finished with the touchline.

The return also puts the most club-shaped coach of his generation in charge of a squad he only borrows. His reputation rests on daily contact: training sessions that turn pressing into reflex, players he knows well enough to push and console in the same week. A national coach gets a few days between club fixtures. After his first home match, a defeat by Greece in Augsburg, he said it himself: “Football needs training, football needs routines.”

Klopp was born in Stuttgart on 16 June 1967 and grew up in Glatten, a Black Forest village near Freudenstadt, the youngest of three children of Norbert, a travelling salesman who had kept goal as an amateur. The boy played for village clubs and then for three Frankfurt sides while studying sports science at Goethe University, where his diploma thesis was about walking. He later summed up his own gifts as a player as “fourth-division feet and a first-division head”.

Most of his playing career belonged to Mainz 05, in the second division, where he arrived in 1990 as a striker and left eleven years later as a defender with 52 league goals. When the club dismissed its coach in February 2001, it gave the job to the player. Klopp kept Mainz up. Over the next three seasons he drilled a cheap squad in pressing and counter-pressing, and in 2004 he took the club into the Bundesliga for the first time, where it started with the smallest budget and the smallest stadium in the league. Relegation came in 2007; when promotion failed a year later, he resigned. By then television had made his face familiar well beyond Mainz: his analysis for ZDF during the 2006 World Cup won him the Deutscher Fernsehpreis.

Borussia Dortmund hired him in 2008. His young side won the Bundesliga in 2011 and in 2012 added the DFB-Pokal, the first league and cup double in the club’s history. The football had a technical name, Gegenpressing, the habit of hunting the ball in the seconds after losing it instead of retreating, and Klopp supplied a louder one: heavy metal. Dortmund reached the 2013 Champions League final at Wembley and lost it to Bayern Munich, the club that went on to sign Mario Götze and Robert Lewandowski from him in consecutive summers. His last season began so badly that he announced his departure in April 2015, and his final match was a cup final lost to Wolfsburg.

Liverpool appointed him that October. The first finals went the same way, the League Cup and the Europa League in 2016 and the Champions League against Real Madrid in Kyiv in 2018. Then, in Madrid in 2019, Liverpool beat Tottenham Hotspur to win the European Cup for the sixth time. A year later came the Premier League with 99 points, the club’s first league title in 30 years, after a 97-point season that had still finished second to Manchester City. The FA Cup and the League Cup followed in 2022, and a last League Cup in 2024. FIFA named him the best men’s coach in the world in 2019 and again in 2020.

The canonized version leaves out some awkward detail. Before Madrid, Klopp had lost six major finals in a row, and nine years at Anfield produced one league title, which his admirers credit to Manchester City’s spending and his critics to a style that drained players and coach alike. He said as much when he announced his exit from Liverpool in January 2024, explaining that he was “running out of energy”. That summer he told ESPN he was done as a coach. Within months he had signed as Red Bull’s Head of Global Soccer, and the reaction in Germany was hostile. Supporters and journalists who had cast him as the romantic of Mainz and Dortmund accused him of lending his face to a multi-club model he had criticized in the past. When the national team came for him, the German football association paid one million euros to a Red Bull foundation to release him.

The opening came out of failure. Klopp spent the 2026 World Cup as a television pundit for MagentaTV and watched Germany go out to Paraguay in the round of 32. Julian Nagelsmann resigned on 3 July. Three weeks later the association presented Klopp, in president Bernd Neuendorf’s words, as its “unrestricted dream solution”, on a contract that runs to 2030 and covers Euro 2028 and the World Cup after it. He started on 15 August with two of his oldest collaborators, Peter Krawietz, who has worked with him since Mainz, and Pep Lijnders from the Liverpool years, along with the former Germany international Sven Bender.

The start has been uneven. A 1-1 draw in Amsterdam against the Netherlands, decided by a Cody Gakpo equaliser in stoppage time, was followed by the 1-0 home defeat by Greece, in which Germany kept three quarters of the ball and lost to a deflected shot. Klopp took what he called one hundred percent of the responsibility and described the result as part of the process. Four days later in Munich, Tom Bischof scored his first international goal and Florian Wirtz added a second as Germany beat Serbia 2-0 for Klopp’s first win.

For a man who has sold beer and cars in German advertising, he guards his family closely. He has been married since 2005 to Ulla Sandrock, a social worker and children’s author, and has a son from his first marriage. He is a Lutheran and has spoken openly about how much his faith matters to him. Liverpool made him a Freeman of the city in 2022; Germany awarded him the Federal Order of Merit in 2024, and Britain an honorary CBE in 2025.

The next test is in Thessaloniki on 4 October, against the same Greece side that won in Augsburg. The contract runs to 2030, but Klopp has already said what would shorten it. How long he stays depends on results, and on whether the country and its newspapers keep to the terms he set on day one.

Tags: sports, athletes, football managers, Liverpool FC, Jürgen Klopp, Borussia Dortmund, Germany national football team, Julian Nagelsmann