Klopp rallies neutrals to support Dortmund

An hour after the first of Jurgen Klopp’s many jokes, interspersed with his worldly insights into football and life, he returns to a more personal memory. It is fitting and evocative because the tumultuous journey that Klopp and Borussia Dortmund have taken to the Champions League final at Wembley, where they play Bayern Munich on Saturday, has been this season’s most memorable story.

A passionate club’s exhilarating play and outrageous drama, painful transfer intrigue and riotous joy, validates Klopp’s claim that “this is the most interesting football project in the world”.

It was strangely similar for Klopp at Mainz, the first love of his sporting life. Klopp, who eventually became their coach, used to be a lumbering striker-turned-defender in the German second division, and he suggests that: “Just like every person who works for Dortmund is a fan of the club, it was the same at Mainz. When I was a player there we had 800 supporters on rainy Saturday afternoons and if we died no one would notice or come to our funeral. But we loved the club and we have this same feeling at Dortmund. It’s a very special club — a workers’ club.”

Klopp is canny enough to evoke these romantic roots when, speaking in English with real fervour, he says: “I left Mainz after 18 years and thought: ‘Next time I will work with a little less of my heart’. I said that because we all cried for a week. The city gave us a goodbye party and it lasted a week. For a normal person that emotion is too much. I thought it’s not healthy to work like this. But after one week at Dortmund it was the same situation. To find this twice, to be hit by good fortune, is very unusual.”

Borussia Dortmund reeled from Champions League glory in 1997 to the brink of bankruptcy in 2005. Transformed by Klopp’s arrival from Mainz almost five years ago, the €189m they generated in 2012 makes them the world’s 11th largest club. Their imposing Westfalenstadion, dominated by the steep Yellow Wall terrace, rocks with 82,000 fans for every game.

But, compared to Bayern and Manchester United, Real Madrid and Barcelona, they remain Champions League romantics. Their wage bill is half that of Bayern’s and a third of Madrid’s and yet, in their semi-final first leg, they swept aside the Spanish club 4-1. Just days before that unforgettable match, the 20-year-old Mario Gotze, their most gifted player who has been at Dortmund since the age of nine, decided to join Bayern this summer.

It’s the latest in a line of departures that threaten to tear the heart from Klopp’s young squad. Robert Lewandowski, who scored all four goals against Real, will almost certainly leave — probably also for Bayern, already strong enough to have obliterated Barcelona 7-0 in the other semi-final.

“What can I say?” Klopp says with his only shrug in a 90-minute interview at Puma’s office in Dortmund. “If that’s what Bayern wants — It’s like James Bond, except they are the other guy [the villain].”

Klopp outwitted Jos Mourinho at the Signal Iduna Park. Beyond the relentless pressing and devastatingly quick transitions that define Dortmund, Klopp found a way to blunt Xabi Alonso and, in turn, Cristiano Ronaldo. The fact that Mourinho has since taken to phoning him regularly is another sign of Klopp’s place at the peak of European coaching. But, besides tactical acumen, his ability to connect emotionally with his players is telling.

As he approaches the biggest game of his life, Klopp talks merrily of “a fairytale.” But he also points out calmly that, last season, Dortmund did the league-and-cup double over Bayern, as he predicted. It was their second Bundesliga title in a row. At the start of this season Klopp insisted Dortmund were ready to win the Champions League.

Bayern will be favourites but Dortmund have the support of most neutrals — for it is difficult to resist such an exuberant team and their riveting coach.

“We are a club, not a company,” Klopp says, “but it depends on which kind of story the neutral fan wants to hear. If he respects the story of Bayern, and how much they have won since the 1970s, he can support them. But if he wants the new story, the special story, it must be Dortmund. I think, in this moment in the football world, you have to be on our side.”

— Guardian News and Media Ltd