Jürgen Klopp: advisor and seeker of meaning at Red Bull

Anyone who has ever heard Jürgen Klopp speak, whether in Mainz, Dortmund or Liverpool, who knows how eloquent this coach is, how lucid, quick-witted and funny – could only be one thing on Tuesday afternoon: disappointed.

For almost an hour and a half, Jürgen Klopp sat on a stage at his new employer Red Bull in Salzburg and tried to explain what lies behind the title “Global Head of Soccer”. Klopp, uncharacteristically for him, remained vague, one cloudy sentence followed the next. He wants to share all his experience and give advice to anyone who asks for advice. He is convinced that he can deliver added value, although of course it is also important to learn from other sports in the Red Bull universe. He is fascinated by the brand and the passion with which the people at Red Bull go about their work.

It went on like that for a while, similar statements in ever new words.

Klopp, the sparse conclusion is, will be a kind of supervisor at Red Bull and its football clubs in Germany, Austria, France, Japan, Brazil and the USA. Someone who tinkers with the structures, but above all brings in a good spirit.

On Tuesday, Klopp sounded like someone who had picked up a few sentences from sports psychology books and spent an afternoon with them. He apparently noticed himself that this led to a lot of redundancies. “Is this the longest press conference in Austria?” he asked in the last third of the event.

No, it probably wasn’t, it’s just that the question round felt like that, tough and long. The shower company’s sense of mission was great: the press conference was held in English so that the TV signal could be sent all over the world. Even journalists from Egypt, Poland and England traveled to Salzburg to interview Klopp, the 2019 world coach.

Klopp’s strange appearance should be interpreted less as a change in personality than as evidence that there is still no clear job profile for the 57-year-old football specialist. This will probably only become clearer in the next few weeks when Klopp travels the Red Bull cosmos and makes his inaugural visits to the branches.

Does Klopp even have the ability to develop a club, like Ralf Rangnick once did at RB Leipzig and before that at Hoffenheim? Klopp believes his public image of the coach dancing on the sidelines is a truncated one. In truth, he has always worked heavily strategically in the background, both in Mainz and Dortmund and at his last stop in Liverpool.

In order to counter the suspicion that is swirling in the industry that he might coach one of the Red Bull clubs and thus return to his old job, Klopp said: “I rule that out. That won’t happen.” He also showed no interest in the position of national coach. Julian Nagelsmann’s contract with the DFB ends after the 2026 World Cup – but Klopp says: “I hope Julian does this job for a very, very long time and wins titles.”

Klopp, who was a coach in professional football for 23 years, faces a big challenge at Red Bull: He is supposed to lead coaches and clubs, but he first has to find out what exactly a Global Head of Soccer actually is. He is an advisor and a seeker at the same time. A task that he can grow with – or despair of.