Even if you’re not into football, bear with me. Because it’s not just a simple game with 22 men chasing a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, Germans go home early, swearing they’ll never get their hopes up again.
It is about (and who am I telling this to, after how many years of hurt?) – national self-esteem. In Germany this is a complicated affair at the best of times. Lately it has been at a record low, and we haven’t even got Brexit to blame.
Enter the Chosen One: Jürgen Klopp – expected to lead us into a Black-Red-Golden Age and deliver us from further embarrassment against Fußball giants like South Korea and North Macedonia.
So far, his experimental squad has yet to convince. To quote the Diario AS sporting news outlet from Spain: “The Klopp era fails to ignite.”
Klopp, being Klopp, saw it coming. “I am not asking for time. Whether you [the media] give it to us now or not: we need it anyway. If someone is stupid enough to believe that we would turn the football world upside down with one and a half training sessions, then I really can’t help them.”
Later, however, he did try to help the slower among us anyway, with a compelling comparison: “If you put a ballet troupe together and expect them to perform after just four days, they’d be running into each other.” Not that we’re a ballet team, he added, though everyone already pictured Joshua Kimmich (currently fearing for his captaincy) and Florian Wirtz going from plié to pirouette in a tutu.
But his appeals go beyond punchlines. Because Klopp, the Redeemer, does play in another league altogether – one that might help to hold the country together.
After the AfD’s victory in Sachsen-Anhalt, he was asked about patriotism.
I genuinely think, he replied, “we are a wonderful country” and the squad is a bit like it: don’t look at what we lack, look at what we have. He, the political “layman”, wasn’t claiming that this would solve Germany’s problems, but having this approach now and then would certainly help some people.
He then moved on to national pride – a touchy subject here, since the term has long been hijacked by the far right. Can you be proud to be German, Klopp asked, and still be open, diverse, nice, friendly? “Can you have compassion? Can you have all these things? I’m one hundred per cent certain you can.”
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He didn’t rest his case for positive patriotism there: “I would like to take the flag back, for myself or for us.”
The flag, you see, has been in far right hands for longer than AfD has existed. “When you wave it,” Klopp said, “I want nobody to think, ‘What’s wrong with you?’” (as many people do now. They’ll assume you’ve gone nationalist).
“I just want people to have the feeling: yes, you’re happy, and you understand that you were lucky to have been born, grown up, moved here or whatever – that you live in this wonderful country.” In short: He didn’t want “to leave national pride to the wrong people”.
If the job of Germany’s national football manager weren’t quite so terribly important, one might be tempted to wish Klopp into the soon-to-be-vacant office of federal president. As it is, he still has to reach the knockout stage of the Nations League. Which will be tricky enough. Let’s not get our hopes up.
