**Jurgen Klopp’s agent, Marc Kosicke, has revealed some interesting information about the German manager, including the need to step in when things got heated with FSG.**
The former Borussia Dortmund coach is no longer in the football management game. Instead, he now works as Red Bull’s Head of Global Soccer.
His agent has now shared how the pair had to sacrifice money to get rid of an embarrassing ad, intervening during intense moments with FSG and convincing him to take the Red Bull role despite the company’s perception in Germany.
Jurgen Klopp called his agent about an embarrassing ad in the early days of his career
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[Speaking to Transfermrkt](https://www.transfermarkt.de/news/view?id=475403), Kosicke said: _“We’re very similar in how we deal with issues and people. Ages ago, Jürgen did an ad for Henkel’s Metylan wallpaper paste. Things went terribly wrong. It was a truly awful and embarrassing commercial – and it was constantly playing._
_“Jürgen called me one evening; he was in a Wolfsburg hotel at the time. He held the phone out to the crowd and asked: ‘Do you hear that? Everyone here is laughing their heads off at me. It’s really awful, and I keep seeing that ad. Take it down!’_
_“I then used all my commissions from that deal to get a different commercial made so we could avoid this stress together. Other people also told me that the first ad was absolutely terrible. And it was. We were young and needed the money.”_
Klopp’s agent had to mediate with FSG when he would get to riled up
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While Arne Slot was recently handed a £460m transfer splurge last summer, Klopp was rarely given large amounts of cash to spend in a single transfer window.
Kosicke has now shared how that sometimes led to moments of tension with FSG, and how he had to mediate.
He said: _“In situations where he might have gone too far with the owners because he desperately wanted players they wouldn’t give him, I stepped in and tried to mediate._
_“Jürgen and I can have incredibly good arguments. They’re brief moments, though. We’re close friends, and if we disagree, we can work it out.”_
On joining Red Bull – a hated organisation in Germany.
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RB Leipzig is a fairly new football club. When they were created in 2009, they discovered a workaround to the 50+1 ownership rule in Germany which is a traditional rule designed to give fans power in the game.
What this means is:
* Club members retain majority voting control.
* Investors cannot fully take over clubs.
Red Bull implemented a workaround that still legally complied but made it harder for fans to get involved due to:
* Higher membership fees
* Voting membership was restricted to a tiny number of people.
* Those members were closely linked to Red Bull.
So when Klopp was approached by Red Bull, he was reluctant to get involved.
Kosicke explained how things went down: _“Of course, we discussed the topic beforehand. I said to Jürgen: ‘You do realise that your popularity is likely to drop by 50 per cent, right?’_
_“I called his former owner, Mike Gordon of the Fenway Sports Group, and asked for his opinion. He thought Red Bull was fantastic and that it would be a perfect fit for Jürgen. Mike Gordon explained:_
_“There are eight billion people in the world, 80 million of them in Germany – including 30 million football fanatics, with perhaps one million fans from Dortmund and Mainz. Of those, a few hundred thousand are real hardcore fans and ultras. How many is that compared to the eight billion?_
_“Everywhere else in the world, Red Bull is viewed exclusively positively. That’s why we shouldn’t worry about it. That’s how Jürgen and I saw it too. He said he stood behind it. Why should it diminish what he had achieved in Dortmund and Mainz? And if people saw it differently, that was their right.”_