Transcript

Peter Bowes

And you mentioned the word tone, how do you adopt the right tone with players? You are a very, I can detect a very easy going guy and coaches sometimes are actually not that easy going, they’re quite aggressive, and some teams I suspect there is a certain element of fear between the players and the coach; what is your attitude?

Jurgen Klinsmann

I think there you need to turn it around, because I don’t believe in that the coach has to have the right tone, but I try, if a player really understands that he is in the driver’s seat, he is the decision maker on the field, because football is players driven, they make the decisions on the field. Yes, you will put the 11 on the field but then the game goes and it’s them.

It’s very opposite to the other American sports, baseball, football, even basketball you can call time out and you have always stops and you can explain things, and football is the very, very opposite of it because it’s inner driven, it’s the athlete that makes the call, that makes the decision. I think over time a real big player learns to take the coach’s messages the right way, learns to read the messages, learns to take it for him in order to improve, because you have, let’s say, 20, 25 players on a roster and there is no coach in the world that has the right tone for every one of those 25, it doesn’t exist.

So I think it’s much easier to say, you 25 players need to figure out a way to take those messages from the coach, if it’s now a stronger voice, a more aggressive voice, a calmer voice, whatever it is, and pick out those things that are good for you. Then I think you will grow as a player. I don’t think somebody, a coach makes Messi or Ronaldo or Steven Gerrard. Those went through x amount of coaches throughout their career and I had about 16, 18 of those, and every one taught me something, told me something, but there was no perfect one, so the tone has to be found actually by the player and not given by the coach, because you are not making it right for 25 altogether.

Peter Bowes

And when there is conflict within a team how does that affect the individuals?

Jurgen Klinsmann

Oh, it affects everybody, so there are two ways. The best way is to solve the conflict, you know, to talk it through, to work it out, and to create even more positive energy out of that conflict. That is the ideal scenario. When you over time, and that’s just my personal experience, see that we are not solving this issue, it’s too deep, it’s too personal, it’s too distracting, you as a manager then have to make the decision to let one of those two go.