Micky Beisenherz about Jürgen Klopp and his job for Red Bull

If he blinded us all, then at least we know about him with what.

In the future, we will see the beaming smile and bared teeth (depending on the score) in the boxes and conference rooms of the Red Bull Group, instead of on the bench of a club close to their hearts. That was Jürgen Klopp’s ancestral habit: tradition, earthiness, real love. Kloppo, that was always him Pöhler! And now he’s playing rough can-tossing games with the fragile framework of our worldview. This authenticity bomb, the same three has made dry, traditional clubs blossom in the most dazzling colors: Mainz, Dortmund, Liverpool. The green thumb in the capitalist rock garden of professional football.

When he announced his departure from Liverpool, we all cried. And of course, we understood that he needed a break from this stressful business. It’s a pig business, after all. And he was ohne Energy. The fact that Red Bull provides exactly this is a popular claim by the company. The fact that Red Bull is primarily interested in football and does not use sport as a cheap vehicle to promote its soda is less popular.

For cowl wearers, season ticket holders and currywurst-eating journalists, nothing less than a world collapsed. Klopp: the name of the can. Anxious question: Should even professional football be partially receptive to commercialism? Within a few minutes, the popularity ratings of the cult coach, who was only suitable for chancellor, fell alarmingly below the Nestlé threshold. Even Uli Hoeneß and Clemens Tönnies had to swallow for a moment.

Jürgen Klopp – the man can be trusted to do anything

When he recently posted a photo with the “cool guy” Dieter Bohlen, it was already clear to me: the man can do anything. A person was not expelled from paradise because he ate an apple. That was at least half a fruit salad! Even a move to FC Bayern would have been a venial sin. Of all people, whose perhaps greatest life achievement was never letting on that he was born a Swabian, is now deciding to make big money?

I also felt disturbed. In Dortmund we still haven’t recovered from the fact that Dad moved out.

“You either die a hero or you see yourself become the villain”: This is a quote in the Batman film “The Dark Knight” and describes the transformation of the honorable prosecutor Harvey Dent into the villainous Harvey Two-Face. If heroes don’t die in time, it’s only a matter of time before they become villains. Everywhere you look there are monuments just waiting to rot from their pedestals. Ask the once-celebrated Greta Thunberg, who, around five years ago, was an angry girl who spoke urgently to our ecological conscience about the fact that even the consumer bible “GQ” was enchanted by the Swedish cover girl in its own paper and allowed herself to be scolded for her own excessive luxury promotion. What remains now is a mentally confused anti-Semitic woman in her early 20s who is dragged away by the police during protests that turn into hate speech. Patriarchy, capitalism, Israel – the main thing is to get rid of it. That’s what it sounds like to her.

Fallen idols line the public path. They wouldn’t have been able to breathe up there where we put them. Americans have never been able to forgive national saint Jackie Kennedy for marrying Greek shipowner Aristotle Onassis. Would have our Boris Becker couldn’t just marry Steffi Graf and pay a little attention to his money? Rock’n’Roll’s last man of honor (besides Bruce Springsteen, of course), Dave Grohl has to admit to having fathered a child out of wedlock, and who knows: even the ever-popular Donald Trump might make a moral blunder at some point.

Of all people, Red Bull

More sensitive souls were looking for cognac in the house bar years ago, when their education mayor Harald Schmidt first introduced them to a certain Oliver Pocher as co-moderator, only to then regularly sign on to the shallow water steamer “Dream Ship”. Your idol, bound to instructions in the organizational chart under Florian Silbereisen? That’s like being a page one girl at the “FAZ”! Maybe Schmidt, who had long seemed bored to death by the endlessly boring adoration of his senior student audience, wanted to give the uncritical pleb something to chew on so that he could finally feel himself again. I don’t know whether the cult Kloppo, who was also revered supernaturally, had a similar motivation. No advertising partner, no matter how questionable, could tarnish his reputation. And at the latest at the German investment consultancy, even Carsten Maschmeyer twitches his eyebrow nervously.

The fact that in a global ball sports competition with rogue states, pig corporations and operating teams of rogue companies it is now Red Bull that is disenchanting professional football and its golden boy, one can also note with some surprise. While the backers of hollowed-out and gutted traditional clubs like Manchester City and PSG tend not to care about human rights, diversity or queerness for reasons of state, the same cannot be said of the company from Fuschl. I don’t remember Pep Guardiola or Thomas Tuchel being criticized with similar vehemence for this. But I may have overlooked the fact that the fizzy dairy from Austria is the gateway to fascism.

In the end, Klopp is the victim of our projections. A man who has taken on a relatively glamorous and harmless job as “Head of Global Soccer”, in which he goes on a few nice trips around the world with his wife Ulla and gets a few euros for it. And if he becomes national coach in 2026, well-rested, this well-paid breakfast director position will also be forgotten. Until then, we should remember that the heroes of our time are, above all, one thing: people. Not nearly as good as we make them. But often not that bad. We ourselves were just stupid enough to put her on a pedestal in our fury of adoration.

And now we’re annoyed that our arms hurt.