Special Moments
In front of the north stand of the Mainz Bruchwegstadion stands a man in the inner area who immediately catches the eye with his cream-coloured leather blazer and black shirt. The southwest dandy keeps reaching for his phone. He is fuming at referee Hermann Albrecht from Kaufbeuren, who had hardly calmed the Mainz nerves by awarding two penalties in the fifth and seventh minutes of the decisive second-division match against Eintracht Trier.
The restlessly fidgeting figure is Christian Heidel, the honorary manager of 1. FSV Mainz 05. Heidel is experiencing the most important day of his career. Or more accurately: he is suffering through it. His day job is running a car dealership. At a young age, he bought a 20 per cent stake in one. Mainz 05 ("I never saw it as a job") is his life's work, and today is the day it all comes down to.
Further ahead, another man prowls through the coaching zone. It is the man to whom Christian Heidel and all of Mainz owe this memorable constellation. It is Jürgen Norbert Klopp, Mainz's coach since 2001. Klopp keeps pulling his players to the touchline. He gives instructions, he roars, he gesticulates. He wants to get it over the line today. Finally over the line — the promotion to the Bundesliga.
Heidel does not yet trust the overflowing joy in the small, makeshift Bruchweg arena, bolstered with temporary and tubular steel stands, after 23 minutes. The images of weeping Mainz players, fans and officials after the non-promotion dramas of recent years in Wolfsburg, Berlin and Braunschweig are etched too deeply in his consciousness. "We'd been close so many times before that I couldn't allow myself to celebrate until the very end."
It is 3:43 p.m. when the "volcano" Jürgen Klopp erupts. Karlsruher SC are leading 1-0 against Mainz's promotion rivals Alemannia Aachen. "Kloppo" clenches his fist as if shouting to his boys: "Now or never!" Heidel is already struggling to hold back his tears. At 4:23 p.m., Manuel Friedrich — who will go down in history as the first German international from Mainz 05 — scores to seal it. Mainz are up. For the first time. Into the Bundesliga.
In the dressing room, Jürgen Klopp drinks the first of many promotion beers. That he happens to be drinking the brand that will later sign him as an ambassador — he could not possibly have known. He cannot yet grasp the promotion. But he explains it. In precisely the ironic, intelligent manner that made him a cult figure in Mainz, and later as a TV pundit on ZDF and as coach in Dortmund and Liverpool.
Classic Klopp. Like no other, the master motivator knew how to cut through the sometimes brutal football business with sharp humour. Together with Christian Heidel ("In the 2. Liga we were the greyest mouse among grey mice"), he led a club into the Bundesliga that had long been a nobody even in Rhineland-Palatinate. In the shadow of the almost cultishly venerated 1. FC Kaiserslautern, Mainz were overlooked for decades.
From 1989, Christian Heidel tried to bring some professionalism to the club. He ran a car dealership; his father was mayor and head of urban planning in Mainz. In 1992, he joined the Mainz board. "Mainz is home, a life's mission, and this club is somehow my baby too," he told DIE WELT years later. And somehow also a coaching revolving door. Between 1992 and 2001, Heidel went through eight coaches — until he found Klopp.
On February 28, 2001 — Rosenmontag (Carnival Monday) in Mainz, with most fans at the big parade — Mainz 05 parted ways with Eckhard Krautzun, who had gone seven matches without a win and had the team in a relegation spot. Heidel was at home. He had no interest in the ARD broadcast of the Rosenmontag parade with its "Schwollköpp," "Klepper-Garde" and "Scheierborzelern."
He called "Kloppo," who didn't think twice. "Christian Heidel phones, Kloppo, we're sacking Eckhard, blah blah blah, can you imagine doing it?" Klopp later recounted the conversation that would permanently change his life and the history of FSV Mainz 05. He took over Mainz 05 as coach on — of all days — Rosenmontag. "It was a bit spooky when Klopp became coach," recalled Heidel. "But I had a gut feeling."
Klopp himself put it in his own inimitable way: "We were branded as uncoachable, but we were just a team that had a lot of questions." Klopp answered those questions with great meticulousness and tactical understanding, which he had adopted from his mentor, Wolfgang Frank, who died far too early in 2013.
Klopp speaks the players' language. Even as a professional, he was never one for empty phrases. "We've been under pressure for months and you come here and ask me what we dream about — I've never heard such rubbish in my life," he once snapped at an SWR reporter. The young, dynamic coach Klopp — alongside Dortmund's Matthias Sammer one of the youngest Bundesliga coaches at the time — brought a raw, authentic energy that transformed Mainz 05.