It was classic Klopp. Like hardly anyone else, he knew how to puncture the brutality of football business with humor. Together with Christian Heidel — who once called Mainz “the greyest mouse among all the grey mice of the second division” — he had dragged a club into the Bundesliga that for decades had not even been a major force in Rhineland-Palatinate.\n\nIn the shadow of the quasi-cultishly revered 1. FC Kaiserslautern, every club between the Rhine and the Moselle struggled for attention.
Mainz had long tried to increase their appeal. The “Pappnasen,” as some in the city called them, lacked the money to put a first-rate side into the ramshackle ground at the Bruchweg.\n\nThe stadium itself, built on wartime rubble, had long resembled a district sports ground rather than a serious arena. Financial crises repeatedly threatened professional football in Mainz; in 1976 the club even gave up its second-division licence voluntarily and dropped down.