On the day of the 2013 Champions League final, Jurgen Klopp sent a text message to his mentor, Wolfgang Frank: “Without you, I wouldn’t be here today, in London at Wembley.”
Frank remains relatively unknown in European football but his influence on the German game makes him one of the most important tacticians in the creation of modern football. For Klopp, their relationship mimics Pep Guardiola's with Johan Cruyff.
“I have told more than a thousand players that Wolfgang influenced a whole generation of footballers and still continues to do so,” the Liverpool manager told Raphael Honigstein in the book ‘Klopp: Bring the Noise’. “He is the coach who has influenced me most. He was an extraordinary human being.”
Frank’s legacy at Mainz 05 inspired Klopp to be a manager, informing his tactics, training, and his man-management style, as well as leading directly to his appointment as Mainz head coach in 2001. However, that legacy – and the line of succession to Klopp – would not have happened without a scrappy 1-0 win at the bottom end of the German second division in May 1996.
When Frank was appointed manager in September 1995, few had hope he could perform a miracle at Mainz 05 and keep them up. He was at the bottom of the list, pretty much the only person willing to take the job, and after a poor start to his tenure, the club looked doomed when German football’s winter break began.
Frank, though, used the time to develop a radical new tactical system that would revolutionise Germany. He abandoned the sweeper – a traditional role in German football seen as vital at the time – and went to an equally rare back four. He introduced zonal marking – also unheard of – and enlisted data analysts.
However, the most important of his risks was to go all-in on a high-pressing system that focused on exploiting space, not technical ability; that focused on the compression and expansion of team shape, not force of will.
Frank’s tactics, later rebirthed and tweaked by Klopp as the gegenpress, were a hybrid of Arrigo Sacchi’s AC Milan and Netherlands’ ‘Total Football’.
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Frank’s Mainz would squeeze the space when defending, baffling their own supporters by abandoning the far flank to bunch up on the side with the ball, only to fan out for quick vertical attacking when possession was won. That should sound familiar to Liverpool fans.
With German football in the 1990s as unevolved as the Premier League, the Mainz players were more or less introduced to the concept of tactics by Frank. They spent whole days training without the ball and hours locked in a meeting room with the manager.
Klopp quickly became a disciple. He absorbed every detail, recording notes for the time when he would go into management, and became Frank’s tactical brain on the pitch. Results improved dramatically.
However, on the final day of the season, Mainz 05 were far from safe. They needed to beat league leaders VfL Bochum to avoid the drop, which they did courtesy of Marco Weisshaupt’s seventh-minute strike.
Frank’s methods had been vindicated but, more importantly, the team stayed together for the 1996-97 season, in which Mainz found themselves in the top two in January and on the verge of their first ever promotion to the Bundesliga.
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Frank resigned mid-season and Mainz didn’t go up, but the template – and the relationship – had already been established. The club bounced around without a plan until Frank returned a year later to restore his philosophy and lead them to two mid-table finishes – a brilliant achievement considering their budget.
When he left in 2000, Mainz again lost their way before sporting director Christian Heidel realised the club needed to return to Frank’s vision – and appointed a young Klopp as coach.
That chronology simply would not have happened had Mainz 05 been relegated in 1996, breaking the team apart and ending the Frank experiment.
Klopp might have moved on, too, severing the ties that led to his first break in management. More importantly, however, Klopp would have missed out on two-and-a-half years more tutoring from his mentor.
Within a few days of being appointed Mainz manager in 2001, Klopp had solved their problems, according to Heidel. He knew exactly what the team was missing and the system he had to bring back.
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“When I became a manager, I used a lot of the stuff I learned from him,” Klopp said of Frank. “He was the perfect role model.”
Frank never came close to achievements on the scale of Klopp’s triumphs at Mainz, Borussia Dortmund, and Liverpool, falling away after walking out on Mainz in 2000, but his protégé’s understanding of space, illustrated succinctly by his famous dictum that “no playmaker in the world can be as good as a good counter-pressing situation,” is pure Wolfgang Frank.
It was just a launch pad, of course, as Klopp would go on to define a German ‘Heavy Metal’ playing style that merged with Spain’s Guardiola-inspired possession system in the 2010s to define modern European football.
His gegenpressing Dortmund, coinciding with the national team’s 2014 World Cup win (managed by another Frank disciple, Joachim Low, who captained Frank’s FC Winterthur), inspired Guardiola to adapt his approach at Bayern Munich. Their cross-pollination in the Bundesliga created the era-defining tactics we see today at Manchester City and Liverpool.
None of it would have happened without Frank, whose revolutionary style in the 1990s eventually bore fruit for Germany in the first two decades of the 21st century. As for Klopp, an untalented footballer blessed with a tactical brain, the trajectory of his life may have been very different without Wolfgang Frank taking him under his wing in 1995.
And their relationship, from long nights discussing tactics together to Klopp’s emergence as his natural successor in 2001, would have been cut short had it not been for a forgotten sliding doors moment: a tense, scrappy 1-0 win on the final day of the 1995-96 2. Bundesliga season.