An hour after the first of Jürgen 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."
Read the whole story at the Guardian here...
