Jurgen Klopp on pressure facing World Cup coaches: ‘These tournaments are all about winning’

A handful of high-profile coaches will be leading national teams at next summer’s World Cup, many of them in their first international posts after making a name for themselves as successful tacticians in the club game. Though their reputations precede them, their previous experiences may be in direct conflict with the task ahead of them, according to Jurgen Klopp.

Klopp, now the head of global soccer at Red Bull, said in a wide-ranging interview with CBS Sports that he believes a job coaching a national team to be an “intense” one and that the creation of competitions like the UEFA Nations League adds undue pressure to managers in those roles. The ex-Liverpool manager has never held a national team job and insists he is unlikely to take another coaching role, admitting he has “no clue” what the appeal of that particular post might be despite the influx of club coaches who have flocked to national teams in recent years.

The list of high-profile coaches on touchlines at next summer’s World Cup includes the U.S. men’s national team’s Mauricio Pochettino, Brazil’s Carlo Ancelotti, England’s Thomas Tuchel and Germany’s Julian Nagelsmann, each of whom he heaped praise on. Klopp, though, feels that there are several obstacles in place that make it difficult for national team coaches to instill a progressive tactical vision.

“Julian’s exceptional, Thomas, exceptional, Poche, exceptional, Carlo – oof! Fantastic, so could,” Klopp said. “A big tournament with real preparation but again, you have a little bit of a problem that [there’s] a preseason for the tournament but it’s in the moment when they need, physically, a preseason. … At the same time, you have to bring them all together, world-class players but [in the] right position.”

Klopp cited France‘s 2018 World Cup-winning team as an example of a group that sacrificed style points to win the title, a habit that he believes many national team coaches are forced to adopt.

“When France won the World Cup under [Didier] Deschamps, they played really defensive with the best football players in the world,” Klopp said. “They had the team that was incredible. They were defending like – no offense – Burnley, but their counterattacks were deadly! This was like, oh, my God! Convincing a team with these players to do it, I don’t even know, where [Antoine] Griezmann was running around everywhere, marking, firing in. You see him at Atletico or wherever it was, at Barcelona, it was like keepy-uppies, stuff like this and he was really fighting for his country.”

Klopp chalked it up to the contrast between coaching a club team and a national team – club managers have weeks or months at a time to work with players over a long season, while their international counterparts only work with their players intermittently and for days at a time.

“That sounds like a real interesting challenge but to invent things, to change things, you need time,” he said. “That’s a quality but it’s not an invention from a tactical point of view.”

He also remarked on the fact that national team coaches are almost exclusively judged on their results in major competitions, further accentuating the difference between those jobs and similar roles at the club level.

“These tournaments are all about winning,” Klopp said. “Did you ever hear 10 years after the World Cup that someone said, look, they went out in the quarterfinal but I tell you, the football they played was incredible! I don’t think somebody would write that on your gravestone. ‘Actually, he was not successful but he had great ideas, or she. Fantastic! Super! Your family barely has enough to eat so that’s why we have to deliver [in] this job.”