Klopp and 60 Calls: The One Told Directly, the Others Left in Silence

Of the more than 50 to 60 phone calls Jürgen Klopp made to finalise his Germany squad, only one cut player received a direct call. Hoffenheim goalkeeper Oliver Baumann picked up and heard the Germany head coach give him the reason straight: Klopp had chosen Marc-André ter Stegen as his number one, and after that he wanted the next generation. No email. No text message. No handing it to an assistant.

Set that call against two other names and the picture sharpens. Leroy Sané, now playing in Turkey, has not spoken to Klopp once this season. Leon Goretzka of Aston Villa has not either. Klopp does not hide it, nor does he treat it as a problem: "There also has to be substance in the phone calls. Just, hi, here I am, how are you? That was not what I had in mind. If there is something to talk about, we will talk."

Those words were delivered at the squad presentation in Frankfurt am Main. For a national team coach, that is a more revealing statement than any tactical diagram, because the biggest management tool available to a national team head is not the tactics board — it is the list of people he chooses to ring.

A national team window is the period in the international calendar when clubs are obliged to release players for national duty. In a single year Germany has only about six to eight such windows. That means a national team coach meets his players fewer times than a club coach meets his in three weeks. That gap is not filled with training plans. It is filled with phone calls.

Deniz Undav, the Stuttgart forward, received the longest explanation. Klopp told him plainly why he had no place: "Deniz has had his problems so far, he has not really got into the season properly yet. I wanted to go with four strikers here and I decided on the others — for the moment."

Read that sentence carefully. Klopp did not say Undav has been playing badly. He said he wanted exactly four strikers. That is a structural squad decision, not a verdict on form. In a list limited by a fixed number of places, the forward line is where one extra slot carries the highest substitution cost: carrying five strikers means cutting a midfielder or a full-back, and losing rotation capacity in the positions that run the most. Four is the balancing number.

But one detail matters more than the explanation itself. Klopp said the door is not closed to anyone. For Undav, that door is real. A forward in the mature phase of his career needs only a good run in the Bundesliga to return. This is a two-way door: it opens and shuts continuously with form.

Oliver Baumann is a different category altogether. The reason Klopp gave had nothing to do with the Hoffenheim goalkeeper's form. "It is quite simply the case that I decided on Marc-André ter Stegen — and after that I wanted the next generation." He personally informed Baumann of the decision.

The structure has two tiers: a confirmed number one, and a young goalkeeper promoted as the long-term back-up. Baumann, at his age, sits in neither tier. This is a one-way door: no run of Bundesliga form is enough to reverse a decision framed by age.

And here is the point worth stressing: a goalkeeper system is only safe when it has three tiers — the number one, the successor who has already been tested, and a third keeper experienced enough to step into a knockout match without collapsing. Klopp chose ter Stegen for tier one and a young keeper for tier two. Tier three was left deliberately empty. A good diagram is a picture; a great diagram is a living system — and a living system has to survive the loss of a part.

From this a core insight emerges: there are two kinds of "no" in international football. The temporary no based on form, and the structural no based on age and hierarchy. The first can be reversed by a handful of matches. The second is almost impossible to reverse at all. The phrase "for the moment" given to Undav belongs to the first kind. The phrase "the next generation" given to Baumann belongs to the second. The same shake of the head, two entirely different weights.

The Leroy Sané case is the hardest to read. Klopp said: "Leroy has not really found his feet this season yet. I will certainly speak to him." But as of the squad presentation in Frankfurt am Main, he had not called. And the word "if" in "if there is something to discuss" is the most telling part.

The problem goes beyond form. When a player moves to Turkey, he steps into a narrower coverage zone. Fewer matches are watched live by European scouts, fewer appearances enter professional debate, and the competitive level of the league becomes a variable in the assessment. For a national coach who sees his players only six to eight times a year, being out of sight is close to being out of the queue.

There is another layer. For a player, the silence of a national team coach is read in two ways: either you are not in the plans, or you are not important enough to be explained to. Both readings do damage. Based on my experience following matches across international windows, this kind of silence tends to create a psychological loop: the player shifts to safe, low-risk football to protect his club place, and that very safety makes him less attractive to the national team.

Leon Goretzka has not been contacted either. But Klopp placed a different fact right beside it: "Leon is injured." That is the important classification. Injury does not remove a player from the plan; it only removes him from the moment. No phone call is really necessary, because the answer is obvious: recover first, then we talk. Put differently, both are silence — but Goretzka's silence is neutral, while Sané's silence carries an information load.

Jamie Leweling sits in a different grey zone. Klopp said the Stuttgart midfielder was "not really firing on all cylinders" at the World Cup "because of an injury" and needs time. "He understood that." That is a third form of management: a tacit agreement that the body is not ready, and an omission that protects the player rather than punishing him.

More than 50 to 60 calls in a single squad selection reflects the workload a national team coach carries, and it also explains why Klopp applies a filter: a call must have content. He made it clear that those he did speak to — and who asked — received feedback on why, for what reason, and what was missing.

That principle sounds cold, but it contains a different form of respect. It assumes a professional does not need to be soothed by formalities, and that a call carrying no information dilutes the value of the calls that do. The compensation for silence is specific feedback — but only when the player actively asks.

That is also where the counter-argument begins. The principle of "only call when there is something to say" sounds very much like an executive, very efficient. But it ignores a property of the international environment: there, silence is not neutral.

At club level, a player has around sixty training sessions a season to calibrate his thinking against his coach. Not being phoned means nothing, because they will meet on the training pitch tomorrow. At international level, a player has only six to eight gatherings a year, and the gap between two of them can stretch to four months. Four months of silence, to a professional, reads as an assessment.

In other words, at international level, saying nothing is also a management action — and it is the only management action with no feedback mechanism, because the player has no channel through which to ask back.

There is one more blind spot, located in the bet on ter Stegen. Naming a number one at the late stage of his career and handing the back-up slot to the next generation is a sensible succession decision, but it concentrates all physical risk in one individual. If ter Stegen is injured in an important window, Germany walks into a major match with a goalkeeper who has never played a knockout game at international level. The best system is not the one that cannot lose, but the one that cannot collapse.

Klopp said the door is not closed to anyone. In principle that is true, and he stressed that everyone he spoke to accepted his decision. But a principle only has value when it is tested by a concrete case.

The real test of this method is not the squad presentation in Frankfurt am Main. It is the next window, where a player who was never called will be forced to answer his own question. If he comes back, the principle holds. If he disappears, people will remember the single call made to Baumann — and remember that in a system run by telephone, the one who is not called is the one left behind.