Of course, Jürgen Klopp is best known as the manager of Liverpool Football Club. Since his appointment at Anfield on October 8, 2015, Klopp has won six major trophies, including the Champions League, in 2018/19, and the Premier League, in 2019/20, and has been described, more than once, as the ‘best manager in football’.
Born in Stuttgart on June 16, 1967, Klopp signed for Fußball- und Sportverein (FSV) Mainz 05 in the summer of 1990 and spent the remainder of his playing career at the Rheinland-Pfalz club, initially as a forward and later as a defender. In February, 2001, with Mainz 05 lying second bottom in 2. Bundesliga, the second division of the Germany football league, Klopp, 33, was appointed manager, succeeding Eckhard Krautzun. At that stage, Managing Director Michael Kammerer said that he hoped that Klopp would ‘bring life back into the team’.
Klopp did exactly that, winning six of the next seven games and finishing the season on 40 points, thereby escaping relegation with a match to spare. All told, Klopp managed Mainz 05 for seven years, coming agonisingly close to promotion to the Bundesliga in both 2000/01 and 2001/02, before achieving that goal – for the first time in the history of the club – in 2003/04. Two eleventh-placed finishes followed, in 2004/05 and 2005/06, but Mainz 05 were relegated back to 2. Bundesliga. Klopp remained as manager in 2007/08 but, having narrowly missed promotion once again, resigned at the end of the season. Nevertheless, having joined Borussia Dortmund in May, 2008, Klopp won the Bundesliga twice, in 2010/11 and 2011/12.
The FIFA World Cup was established in 1930, but it was not until the eighth iteration, hosted by England in 1966, that a mascot became a feature of the quadrennial football tournament. Seeking to maximise merchandising revenue from the tournament, the Football Association (FA) approached Walter Tuckwell & Associates, a Picadilly-based company specialising in character merchandise for design ideas.
Their chosen design, ‘World Cup Willie’ – a square-shouldered lion with a Beatlesque, mop top haircut and a Union Flag jersey bearing the legend ‘World Cup’ – was the brainchild of freelance illustrator Reg Hoye, who reportedly needed less than five minutes to produce his initial rough sketch. Nevertheless, his creation proved to be a roaring success (sorry), appearing on a variety of products, including t-shirts, in comic strips and elsewhere and providing the inspiration for the official World Cup song by Lonnie Donnegan. All together now, ‘Dressed in red, white and blue, he’s World Cup Willie…’.
After the 1966 FIFA World Cup, the idea of an official tournament mascot caught on. World Cup Willie was followed by Juanito, a boy wearing a Mexico home jersey and sombrero, in 1970, and Tip and Tap, two boys wearing West Germany jerseys bearing the letters ‘WM’, for ‘Weltmeisterschaft’ – the German word for World Cup – and number 74, four years later.
Rather more fanciful, and creative, mascot ideas down the years have included Naranjito – or, in English, ‘Little Orange’ – an anthropomorphic orange dressed in Spanish kit, in 1982. More recently, direct descendants of World Cup Willie have included a green-haired leopard called Zakumi in South Africa in 2010 and a Brazilian three-banded armadillo called Fuleco in Brazil in 2014.