 "Mona Nemmer")
Jurgen Klopp did not introduce his Liverpool players to the woman who would subtly change their lives right away. When she joined the team, at the club’s preseason camp in Palo Alto, Calif., last summer, Klopp waited a couple of days, eager to see if her actions would win them over more easily than his words.
“Usually, in preseason, the players eat as much as they can, as fast as they can,” Klopp said in an interview this month at Liverpool’s Melwood training base. He wanted them to slow down, not to “come, eat, go,” to leave their phones outside, to relax.
After a couple of days in Palo Alto, he noticed something was different. The players, aching from his demanding conditioning sessions, were lingering at their tables. They were lining up by the salad bar, intrigued by the choices. “I had not seen that atmosphere before,” he said. “They were staying to eat, and they loved it.”
Only then did Klopp stand up in the restaurant and formally welcome his two new staff members. The first, Andreas Kornmayer, a former fitness coach at Bayern Munich, was easy. “A lot of them knew Andy,” Klopp said. “And they are used to having a fitness coach: He is the drill sergeant guy, shouting at them to run more.” The second introduction, the one Klopp had delayed, could have been trickier. Mona Nemmer had come from Bayern, too, to be Liverpool’s head of nutrition. Such appointments can be awkward: Players can be reluctant to embrace the less familiar.
Had Klopp detailed exactly what she had been hired to do, they might have been skeptical. Nemmer’s plans — for individualised, scientifically planned diets, for food sourced as locally and as organically as possible, for four compulsory meals a day and even for cooking lessons — would have been revelatory even to seasoned pros, far in advance of what most soccer clubs offer.
He did not need to go into all of that, though. The food had done his job for him. A couple of days of Nemmer’s meals were all the recommendation his players needed. Casting his mind back, Klopp mimed them putting down their knives and forks, eyes bright with intense concentration. “They were eating unbelievable food,” he said. “She had already made that first impression, so they paid attention.”
Six months into her new job, Nemmer, regarded within the club as one of Klopp’s biggest summer signings, is far too modest to claim much credit for her part in third-place Liverpool’s blistering start to the Premier League season. She insists that she is just a cog in the machine. “All of the departments — medical, coaching, psychological and sports science — play an important role,” she said.
She certainly does not regard herself as a guru. The word she returns to — in fluent English already tinged with Liverpool’s distinct, and apparently contagious, long vowels — is “holistic.” She is there, she said, to support and dovetail with others.
Her colleagues, though, are more forthcoming. Klopp insists “you do not find a lot of people like her;” she has already been flown out to meet Liverpool’s owners, John Henry and Tom Werner, in Boston. Adam Lallana, the England midfielder, admits that all of his teammates “love her to bits.”
“She almost mothers us,” he said, a little bashfully.
That caring, personable side is part of Nemmer’s secret. Some players — notably goalkeeper Simon Mignolet and left back James Milner — pepper her with questions, keen to learn as much as possible about what she is doing and why. She is happy to take a more discreet approach with others. “She does not try and blind us with science,” Lallana said. That does not mean, though, that the science is not there.
Nemmer, 32, did not mean to go into sports. She fell into it almost by accident, after studying nutrition in her native Germany. “I learned a lot of theoretical stuff, but I was missing the practical side,” she said. “So I took an apprenticeship as a chef.” When a chance came up to help cater for Germany’s national youth teams while they traveled to tournaments, she fit the profile: someone who knew what the players should be eating, and how to prepare it.
Her work for Germany, she says, was largely basic — “Don’t get food poisoning while you’re away in Nigeria” — but it lit a fire. “I got deeper and deeper into the topic of sport, studying, doing conferences, doing another apprenticeship in sports nutrition,” she said. Her reputation in Germany soared, too, enough for her to win a job at Bayern.
©2016 The New York Times
©2016 The New York Times
