#mainz 05 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

live-laugh-loverpool · 1 year

Text

The Supernaturals: Jürgen Klopp

Did I get carried away while writing this? Yes.

Am I sorry? No.

@alissonbecksfan234,@moomin279, @millythegoat, @rubybecker-rb2 this is more than a little angsty...🖤

He could talk to the dead.

As a young boy, Jürgen Klopp was a very cheerful and affectionate child. He hardly went an hour without hugging somebody...or talking to them. Even football was a passionate affair to him.

It was clear to all around him that young Jürgen just loved life in itself. He loved things that were alive. Stuttgart and the Black Forest were always alive. Every single moment, there was a bird singing or a river babbling or wind whistling through one's hair. Jürgen's life was lively and bubbly and passionate, just like him.

So it came as a huge surprise when Jürgen woke up at 3:00 AM to hear the voices of a family who'd died in a car accident a month before. At first the twelve year old had thought he'd been hearing things--he did have an overactive imagination, after all. But then he'd knocked over a bouquet of daisies while thinking about the voices, and the ghosts of the family appeared right in front of him.

He'd screamed, running away, only to trip down the stairs for the first time in his life. It surely wasn't the last time he tripped down the stairs...or heard the voices.

Jürgen had asked his mother about all the voices he heard while she cleaned the scrapes on his knee with hydrogen peroxide. It turned out that he was a Supernatural, and the Klopp matriarch herself was an Old Master--a holder of magical knowledge and powerful spells.

Jürgen was a necromancer--and he hated it. He loved life, and his power dealt with talking to the dead? No thank you. He hated spirits, he hated death and dying, he hated morbid, sorrowful stuff.

The spirits kept him awake at night and distracted him in the day. Whenever Jürgen tried to talk to them, they would launch into depressing, frightening stories of turmoil and family drama and even suicide. The stories would weigh down on Jürgen's mind, sobering him a great deal. So just three months after first discovering his power, Jürgen decided to stop talking to the spirits.

He now wore his restriction bracelet all the time. He didn't want to talk to spirits. He wanted to live.

And so he lived. He grew up and left the Black Forest, choosing to continue his footballing career in Mainz. He ended up staying there for the rest of his playing career. Just a mere two years after he moved there, he bonded with Željko Buvač, their new Bosnian recruit.

Klopp, as he was known now, hadn't told Buvač about his powers. He didn't like to talk about his necromancy; it crept him out. Buvač had talked to him about his power--invisibility--and that was fine with Klopp. At that point, any power in the world seemed better than the curse of talking with the dead.

Football was a welcome distraction from his powers. Klopp went from striker to defender--quite a surprise for him, but he soon adjusted well. He'd scored superb, fortunate and downright crazy goals, all accompanied by celebrations of the same nature.

Sometimes Klopp would inspect himself in the mirror, seeing if he'd grown into the predestined supernatural role of "creepy necromancer sorcerer". Every time he saw a young man with wild blond hair and vivid blue eyes who looked as if he'd just burst in from a morning jog or hectic meeting. Nothing about him looked suspicious or hermit-like...nothing at all. He had the unbridled passion and energy of his father; and the easygoing, relaxed, friendly nature of his mother.

In 1998, Klopp tasted heartbreak for the first time in his thirty-one year life. His father died from liver cancer, and now the man in the mirror was reversed.

His previously rampant and wild spirits were still, and the spark in his eyes had gone. Every time Klopp looked in the mirror, he could only see his father staring back at him.

The spirits grew stronger than ever after that, infiltrating his mind if his bracelet was even partially hanging off of him. Klopp tried to talk with his father's spirit once, but it was too painful. He'd shut down for days, and it took Buvač's patient coaxing and encouragement to get him back to himself.

After that, Klopp didn't try to talk with the spirits for a long time. The conflicting images were the least of his problems--it was the endless pain that conversing with the dead brought him.

Three years after Klopp swore off necromancy, he hung up his boots and decided to try his hand at managing. He'd already made a name for himself as a Mainz player; to him, he had nothing to lose as a manager.

Well, it turned out that he had everything to gain. Klopp was a far better coach than player, having a better mental skill set than physical. Together, Klopp and Buvač, who'd come along as his assistant coach, brought Mainz to the Bundesliga for the first time in forever.

There were so many real voices and people in Mainz that Klopp felt alive again. Buvač handled statistics and tactics, leaving Klopp to handle the team--not just as players, but as young men. Klopp had been young once, after all, and so he empathized with each of the players like few others could. Eventually, the Mainz players gave their two managers nicknames: Buvač was "The Brain" while Klopp was "The Heart".

Klopp had to admit that the name suited him. He had a mind for tactics in certain ways, but he was far more comfortable with the man management and emotional aspect of coaching than the numbers--that was Buvač's specialty. Needless to say, Klopp and Buvač made a great team--which pertained with their move to Borussia Dortmund.

Dortmund, with their yellow and black kits and rich history, were a different situation for Klopp, who'd come fresh from a traditionally second-division club. After establishing the basics, the team grew hungry for a different mission: Champions' League glory. They came agonizingly close, just losing out in the final, but Klopp was an important part in Dortmund's two marches to Bundesliga victory over a money-loaded Bayern.

Klopp grew closer to his players like he never had before. They liked him, and he liked them. The players in Mainz had only been slightly younger than him--more like brothers--but the Dortmund players were young enough to be his children. And so they became die jungen, the boys.

After much success and the usual amount of failure, Klopp left in 2015. Just that summer, he received a call-up from Liverpool. As usual, his whole coaching team accompanied him. They were his good friends, and Buvač in particular was the brother he'd never had.

Upon stepping into Melwood, Klopp could tell something was different. He didn't know if it was the British weather or the fact that he was in a new country, but the training ground just felt...special. That was when he learned (from other managers and his own players) that England had a complicated Supernatural network, too.

It was chaos. Milner could lift an eighteen-wheeler, Coutinho had telekinesis, and Henderson could talk to the spirits of sea animals. Klopp found the latter power especially interesting, since that technically meant Henderson was also a necromancer. The young captain didn't have the haunted look that Buvač said Klopp had carried around after his last attempt to talk with the spirits seventeen years ago. Klopp guessed it was because sea animals didn't have the same problems humans did--also, Henderson hadn't really grown up around the ocean.

Klopp felt an even stronger magnetism towards his players this time around. There was something about Firmino's bright smile, or Coutinho's sweet habit of removing dangers with his telekinesis before they could hurt anybody, or the way Milner muscled people around to protect them; that something made his heart swell so much, he felt it would burst with happiness. He loved the warmth of this team, and the passion.

In 2018 Buvač left, much to Klopp's disappointment. He would miss coaching with the Bosnian by his side, whispering tactics and old jokes as the match played out in front of him. He would miss the man that he now considered his older brother.

The new assistant manager--Klopp would never call him a replacement--was a young Dutchman in his thirties by the name of Pep Lijnders. His youthful spirit eventually won Klopp over, who'd been slightly sulky about Buvač's departure. They became a new dynamic duo, recruiting more players and going further than ever before. Trophies rained down on Liverpool: a Champions' League (hell yes!) one year, a Super League and Club World Cup title the next.

In early March, just before Liverpool could win the title they'd been racing to for the past seven months, Covid brought the world to a grinding halt, separating Klopp from his whole team and his job. After nearly four months of no football, Liverpool was allowed to continue playing. They wrapped up their first Premier League title with seven games to spare. Things were going so well for Klopp that for the first time in twenty-two years, he considered trying to use his powers again.

But then Liverpool suffered multiple injuries, one after the other, thwarting Klopp's plans so much that he had to focus on altering them, again and again. Somehow, they managed to be top of the table at Christmas for the third year in a row, and Klopp felt like he could actually relax for a few days.

Klopp welcomed 2021 with open arms, as usual. A new year was always full of opportunities and new adventures to experience, full of life and joy. Nineteen days after the whole world rang in the New Year, tragedy struck Klopp once again. His mother, his only living parent for almost twenty-three years, passed away from illness. And due to Covid, he couldn't even attend the funeral.

A small part of him shouted that this was the perfect time to use his powers. But Klopp was too grief-stricken to consider it. He still remembered the last time he'd tried necromancy as vividly as if it was yesterday. And so once again he pushed down his powers, battling them along with his own thoughts and pain.

His internal battle must've had an effect on the team, because Liverpool went on a shocking losing streak, including six straight home defeats for the first time in Klopp's tenure. Many times, when the days were long and arduous and filled with conflict from the media, Klopp would sink into his office chair and consider giving up. He was tired, both of losing and the media.

Then in late February, he'd received a message from Buvač for the first time in months. His old friend had asked him about how he was doing, and specifically noted that he wanted an honest answer. That had been enough to prompt Klopp to spill the inner turmoil of the past month and a half. His brain just wouldn't work, he bemoaned over the phone, and nothing was working out. They were in sharp decline and Klopp just couldn't find out why.

Buvač had been silent for a long while after he said that. Klopp began to worry that Buvač had hung up on him before the older man had answered. And the answer was ridiculously simple.

He didn't coach with his brain at all. He coached with his heart, and right now his heart carried the heavy weight of recent loss. He would have to reach emotional closure, otherwise he would never have peace and Liverpool would never get better.

At first, Klopp vehemently objected. After all, his long-reaching and diverse memory still bore the scars of when he'd got his power.

But then he'd stepped onto the pitch to conduct the training session, and he'd taken a good, hard look at his boys. At Henderson, who'd come so far since he'd first filled the giant footsteps of Steven Gerrard. At Milner, one of his oldest and most reliable players. At Alisson, who was wrestling with his own grief. Every one of them gathered in a circle around Klopp, waiting for his instructions. That's when Klopp realized that he wasn't the only one he was doing this for. He was doing this for all of them--the players, the staff and every single person associated with Liverpool FC.

That night, Klopp removed his restriction bracelet for the first time in twenty-three long, rollercoaster-riding years. Instead of being vague and afraid of his powers like he'd always done, Klopp tried to be more deliberate.

Remembering the incident with the daisies, he scattered the petals of daisies and blue irises, his mother's favorite flowers, around him in a circle. He closed his eyes and pictured her, smiling at her only son with open arms and twinkling eyes not dissimilar to his. And when he opened them, that was exactly what he did see.

The rest was instinctive from there. It helped that his mom's ghost was visible instead of just in his mind, so he could actually talk with her. After two long hours of discussion, it was time to stop. But this time, as the spirits faded away and disappeared, Klopp felt strangely peaceful, as if something that had weighed down on him fled his heart, leaving it free.

Klopp woke up the next morning slightly tired from the reduced sleep, but feeling better than he had in six weeks. Somehow the others could sense his changed state of mind. They all flocked to him as soon as he came in through the cafeteria door, wrapping him in a forty-person group hug.

Liverpool passed the rest of the season with flying colors, finishing third in an epic final-day battle. Klopp saluted the Anfield crowd with a broad grin, his fist pumps in perfect sync with their roars. He'd missed them...and now that he didn't fear his powers anymore, he wouldn't have to miss anybody ever again.

6 notes · View notes