Raphael Honigstein > Quotes

“Heidel and Klopp learned an important lesson in those weeks. Little old Mainz could only grow as a club if the supporters were on board. They had to feel truly involved, feel that they were an important part of Mainz’s success. ‘You have to get people onside at an emotional level,’ says Heidel.”
― Raphael Honigstein, Bring the Noise: The Jürgen Klopp Story

“Würde man Rooney als metrosexuell bezeichnen, würde er sich wohl zuerst verwundert am Quadratschädel kratzen und dann vorsichtshalber zuschlagen.”
― Raphael Honigstein, Harder, better, faster, stronger

“Many in the proudly working-class city of Liverpool were pleased to find that the Swabian’s convictions echoed their own. ‘I wouldn’t call myself very political but I’m on the left, of course. More left than the middle,’ Klopp told taz in 2009. ‘I believe in the welfare state, I don’t mind paying for health insurance. I’m not privately insured, I would never vote for a party because they promised to lower the top tax rate. My political understanding is this: if I’m doing well, I want others to do well, too. If there’s something I’ll never do in my life it’s voting for the right.”
― Raphael Honigstein, Klopp: Bring the Noise

“LFC’s changing room in the Olympic stadium was ‘like a sickbay’ after their final defeat by Real Madrid, he says. Mohamed Salah, back from an X-ray of his shoulder injury at a nearby hospital, sat crying; for everyone else, the hurt was merely psychological but no less piercing. ‘You’re so disappointed, you can’t stop the tears.’ They heard their triumphant opponents singing next door. Worse than that, the team of referees were loudly celebrating, too. ‘We saw a crate of beer going in and they were partying. I can’t tell you why. But they were partying.’ Krawietz”
― Raphael Honigstein, Klopp: Bring the Noise

“The summer of 2006 was Germany’s Summer of Love, our generation’s Woodstock.”
― Raphael Honigstein, Das Reboot: How German Football Reinvented Itself and Conquered the World

“The players’ council – Lahm, Schweinsteiger, Per Mertesacker and Klose – invited the entire DFB (German FA) delegation to ‘sweat for the trophy’ in the hotel’s ‘event sauna’, a vast space holding eighty people. Bierhoff: ‘The 2014 Sauna World Cup winner was there – no, I didn’t know there was such a thing, either – and he performed a show with music and strobe lights, waving towels around. We were in there with sixty men. Every player, every staff member, symbolically sweating together for this World Cup. That was an amazing idea by the players. It”
― Raphael Honigstein, Das Reboot: How German Football Reinvented Itself and Conquered the World

“In March 2016 and again in August of the same year, news of Chinese conglomerate SinoFortone offering hundreds of millions of pounds for a stake in the club was greeted with feverish anticipation on Merseyside. But FSG have not sold. Klopp’s circumspect view on a possible change of ownership might have partially informed their stance. When the link with China hit the headlines Klopp told the Americans explicitly that it was they who had his trust. ‘We chose Jürgen as manager, but we’re very conscious of the fact that this was a mutual decision, that he chose us, likewise,’ Gordon says. ‘I don’t want to use the word “legitimacy”, but his decision has validated everything that those of us that have been working on the football side of the club have been seeking to achieve.”
― Raphael Honigstein, Klopp: Bring the Noise