‘I’m Jurgen Klopp, but I had no clue what that meant’

What, exactly, does Jurgen Klopp do now?

Asked that question at RB Leipzig’s brand new office building in Cottaweg, Germany, and Klopp’s familiar chuckle fills a second-floor conference room.

It has been a year since he started as Red Bull’s Head of Global Soccer and his ascension from Champions League-, Premier League- and Bundesliga-winning coach with Liverpool and Borussia Dortmund to overseer of the sport’s largest multi-club organisation has been difficult to follow.

“When I started this job,” he says, “nobody really had an idea of how it would look. It was the same for me.

“I’m Jurgen Klopp, but I had no clue what that meant, to be honest. As a football coach, I knew exactly — but what did that mean for the rest of my life? I’m pretty sure a lot of people thought: he wants to have an easy time, not coach anymore, travel a bit — stuff like that — but I know myself well enough to understand that I would not be happy like that.”

It’s easier to list what Klopp is not.

He’s not a backseat coach, making team selections over the heads of managers employed across the Red Bull network. Nor is he there to loom in the background and add pressure.

“Recently, I heard that I’m the ‘Totengraeber’ — the gravedigger — for coaches, but that’s the last title I ever want to have,” he says. “It’s an advisory role, but with power. But I’m not a person who shoots from far away. So that means I listen and rely a lot on the people at the clubs. I calm things down in some moments, and make decisions in others.”

The Red Bull network comprises RB Leipzig atop the pyramid, above New York Red Bulls in the United States, Red Bull Bragantino in Brazil and RB Omiya Ardija in Japan. The drinks manufacturer also owns a minority stake in Paris FC, in France’s Ligue 1, has an unknown shareholding in Premier League club Leeds United, and is a major sponsor of RB Salzburg and FC Liefering, in Austria.

Klopp’s first task, following his arrival at Red Bull seven months after his departure from Liverpool in May 2024, was to properly understand that network, and to criss-cross the globe in order to visit its outposts.

“I found a global team that was perfectly set up by Mario Gomez (technical director for Red Bull Soccer International). There were really good, hard-working people. But to lead this multi-club organisation, I needed to know who I was working with. So I travelled, got to know those people better. That’s how I understand leadership and that’s what everyone expected from me.

“So, the first half-year was like that.”

If Klopp’s job description sounds broad, that’s because it is. The Athletic meets him on Saturday afternoon, a few hours before Leipzig face Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga. Later, before Leipzig’s encouraging start crumbles into a 1-5 defeat, he will be the main attraction in the RB Arena’s VIP suites.

Before becoming Liverpool’s head coach in 2015, Klopp achieved tremendous success with Mainz and Borussia Dortmund, establishing a unique personal brand and becoming extremely popular in Germany. To this day, he remains the country’s most marketable coaching figure and is startlingly prominent across television advertising campaigns, for fitness equipment, beer, banking and more.

There was a backlash to Klopp joining Red Bull. In German football, the organisation is viewed as an affront to the country’s fan-led culture. Fans at Mainz and Dortmund, where he was previously idolised, hung banners in their stadiums decrying his decision shortly after his appointment became public in late 2024. Among those without a stake in the game, however, his appeal is seemingly undimmed.

Naturally, as one of the most successful coaches of his generation, he also retains great authority within the game. His voice carries weight with footballing executives plotting macro strategy, but continues to resonate in his old world, too.

David Raum, Leipzig’s club captain, says that he and Klopp are in regular contact.

“We had a meeting earlier in the season with some of the other captains,” he tells The Athletic. “He gave us good advice and told us some stories from his past as a coach. Sometimes he writes to me on WhatsApp after games. It gives me a good feeling. He always calls me ‘skipper’, which I think he learned in England.”

Red Bull’s technical reputation in football is as a smart recruiter — an early identifier of talent, capable of maximising player potential before selling it on to the top of the sport.

Klopp is a voice in those discussions. One of many, he stresses. He can also be an invaluable part of the pitch to new players, explains Marcel Schaefer, Leipzig’s sporting director.

“During the (transfer) process, in the conversations with the agents, the families, and the player, if Jurgen is in the room, speaking about our project and our vision, he has something unique. He has a god-given talent to capture people in just a few minutes.”

Last summer, following a disappointing seventh-place finish, the lowest since their promotion to the Bundesliga in 2016, Leipzig undertook a major overhaul of their first-team squad. One of the players targeted was winger Johan Bakayoko, then of Dutch club PSV, who described meeting with Klopp prior to agreeing his move.

“The funny part was that we didn’t even talk about him wanting me to come (to Leipzig),” he told The Athletic in August. “It was really about football and my view on football. I thought, ‘OK, so this person isn’t even here to push me.’

“He even told me what to do to adapt if I ended up somewhere else. It was just a friendly talk — he wanted to see what I was like as a person. If someone like this talks to you in this way, he wants to build a project and wants you to be part of it, but he doesn’t want to push you. He’s giving you the freedom to express yourself.”

Traditionally, Red Bull’s footballing style has centred around a 4-2-2-2 formation, with floating playmakers behind two mobile forwards. Since Klopp’s arrival, that has been tweaked to something closer to the 4-3-3 often used by his Liverpool teams, with the attacking thrust provided by dynamic wide players. In Leipzig, that now means Bakayoko, Antonio Nusa and the exceptional Yan Diomande.

That adjustment seems typical of the tone of Klopp’s influence throughout the organisation.

Last year, Manuel Baum, Leipzig’s former head of academy, left his role for family reasons and took up a new position at Augsburg. In June, he was replaced by David Wagner, the former Norwich City, Huddersfield Town and Schalke head coach, who spent four years in charge of Borussia Dortmund’s second team while Klopp was the club’s head coach.

The two are close friends: when Klopp got married in 2005, Wagner was his best man.

One of Leipzig’s historic weaknesses has been their inability to create homegrown talent from their own academy: they have produced Bundesliga players before, but never one for their own side. Whether they can change that depends on many factors, but the straight line that now exists between the academy and the top of the organisation will hardly hurt.

For all these broader influences, it’s when Klopp talks about how he can impact Red Bull’s network of coaches that he is at his most precise — both in terms of what he can identify, and how he might help those already working under the umbrella.

“We can all agree that coaching is a really important job at a specific club. In the next two years, we will probably need four, five or even as many as six new coaches at the clubs where we are involved. Not because we’re going to be sacking everybody, but because if they are over-performing, then they will go somewhere else. We are not the final level (in football).

“So that’s why we are scouting coaches all over the world. It’s pretty new. But it’s similar to player scouting. It’s tricky because you have to know more about a coach than how well their team is playing and whether they are impressive in their press conferences.

“I want to give youth a chance. The best sporting director in 2035 is already out there somewhere. The next best coaches are already out there, too. Oh my god, there’s so much potential. So, come here and let’s take the next steps.”

In the here and now, his role is also to develop the staff already under contract.

“My idea with our coaches is to be the guy I never had. That nobody ever had in the business. (When I was a coach) I would very often sit in my office and be very alone. I had assistants who, over the years, became friends, so I never had to go through difficult times by myself, but making decisions always means being alone.

“A lot of people give you advice and have great ideas, but it’s really not that easy to make the final decision. So that was always a problem. So now, in the moments when the coaches feel alone, I want to be there.

“Talk to me about it. I will not judge. The coach needs to be the one in the building who has always the answer. So I want to help with those answers.”

He is, in his words, “around” — a source of experience and reassurance, a sounding board for ideas, available but not overbearing — not an easy balance to find.

Klopp is 58 now. He is younger than Jose Mourinho (62) and Carlo Ancelotti (66) and so when, at his presentation in Salzburg in January 2025, he suggested that his coaching days were behind him, nobody really took him at his word. He reiterated that stance in an Athletic interview in September, although stories about a return are never far away.

A week ago, Real Madrid sacked head coach Xabi Alonso. Klopp went on Austrian television afterwards and said that the news “had nothing to do with me and hasn’t triggered anything in me either”.

It was definitive. And yet he continues to be linked with the job, the insinuation being that the right offer would quickly tempt him back.

He laughs about the speculation. Partly amused, partly exasperated.

“I know I can coach a football team, but that doesn’t mean I have to do it until my last day. I wanted to do something different. Red Bull gave me an opportunity to find a role which we have been defining together, step by step. I’m in a place as a person where I’m completely at peace with where I am. I don’t want to be somewhere else.

“I’ve got to know a lot of people who I didn’t know before. I’ve been to a lot of business meetings and learned words that I never knew before,” he says, again with that trademark laugh. “It’s been a good time. One year in, five years of experience gained.”

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