2024-01-08 20:17:00
The ball rested on a wheat beer glass. And Franz Beckenbauer turned around once more briefly. It’s as if he wanted to make sure that everyone was actually watching in ZDF’s “current sports studio”. He hit the ball with his right, it bounced once or twice and landed at the bottom of the legendary goal wall. The man really seemed to succeed in everything. At least with the ball. The whole thing happened in May 1994. Beckenbauer had just made FC Bayern Munich German champions – as a coach. Shortly before he took over the office, he had declared: “The more I think regarding it, the more I am not available.” That was Franz Beckenbauer. Always good for a saying. And always for a spontaneous turnaround. “Firlefranz,” the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” dubbed him.
Beckenbauer was a Munich child. FC Bayern is his club. The footballer, born on September 11, 1945, grew up in the working-class district of Giesing as the son of a postal worker and a housewife. Money was tight. Football everything. “We collected waste paper and scrap iron to get the few pennies that a leather ball cost back then,” he later recalled. At 13, Beckenbauer landed at FC Bayern Munich. He turned the club into a global club. First as a player, later as a coach, even later as president. Bavaria was Beckenbauer. That was the equation.
Even as a player, Beckenbauer rose to become one of the most legendary footballers in Germany: five times German champion, four cup winners, three titles in the European Cup, European champion in 1972 and world champion in 1974 in Munich. More is not possible. Fritz Walter, captain of the 1954 World Cup team, gave Germany a new self-esteem nine years following the end of the Second World War. With his long hair, Günter Netzer was considered the rebel of football in Willy Brandt Germany in the 1970s. But with the elegance of his playing, Beckenbauer gave the Germans a previously unimagined feeling of lightness. The fact that his FC Bayern played their home games in the airy Munich Olympic Stadium only fit the picture. When he let the ball bounce briefly on both feet in a game once morest Schalke 04, the Bild newspaper gave him the title “Kaiser”. Francis, the Emperor. It stayed that way.
Beckenbauer and his manager Robert Schwan discovered early on the new possibilities that the football projection surface offered. An early David Beckham. Songs like “No one should separate good friends” were recorded. archyde news contracts from Maggi soup to telephone providers followed. And of course the marketing for a Bavarian wheat beer.
Too perfect for a lifetime. In the mid-1970s, the tax investigation investigated. The first marriage also had a crisis. Beckenbauer and his new partner, the sports photographer Diana Sandmann, fled to New York. The Kaiser played football with Pelé at Cosmos New York, and he had a table with his girlfriend at the legendary Club 54. Beckenbauer was definitely a man of the world.
But German football needed him. In 1984, following the botched European Championship, Beckenbauer joined the DFB. He didn’t have a trainer’s license. So he was promoted to team boss. Beckenbauer always had his own rules. And people who worked for him. Georg “Katsche” Schwarzenbeck let him shine as a libero at FC Bayern, and Berti Vogts and Holger Osieck at the DFB as coaches. The coronation was to follow in 1990 at the World Cup in Italy: Shortly before reunification, the Federal Republic became world champions for the third time. “Let’s go out and play football,” was Beckenbauer’s tactical instruction to the team. The game can be that simple. At least for someone like Beckenbauer.
Beckenbauer was the first to win the World Cup as both a player and a coach. He was to achieve another triumph: as a World Cup organizer, he brought the 2006 World Cup to Germany. Title of the application: “The world as a guest of friends.” What was supposed to be a tournament ended as a summer fairy tale. A country in black, red and gold, reconciled with itself and the world. Also a credit to Beckenbauer. But it didn’t remain so fairytale-like. In the last decade, research came to light that suggested that illicit funds had flowed in the course of Germany’s World Cup bid. About Beckenbauer. Like Helmut Kohl, another great of German history, Beckenbauer remained silent regarding the circumstances. That didn’t make it any better.
The emperor was also affected privately. His son Stephan Beckenbauer died in 2015. Bundesliga player and coach like his father. Beckenbauer never got over his death. Injured and suffering from illness, he increasingly retreated back to his adopted home of Salzburg. “I’m just happy to have had him as a brother,” said Beckenbauer’s older brother Walter in the ARD documentary “Beckenbauer.”
Franz Beckenbauer, the shining light of German football, died on Sunday in Salzburg at the age of 78. The whole country is happy to have had Beckenbauer.
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