Franz Beckenbauer, Kaiser and greatest legend of German football, dies

The name of Franz Beckenbauer is irremediably linked to the successes and history of Bayern Munich and German football that he marked as a player, coach and also as an official.

Beckenbauer grew up in the Munich neighborhood of Giesing and began playing with the SC 1906 Munich children’s team. At that time the first team in the Bavarian capital was not Bayern but 1860 Munich, for which Beckenbauer was about to sign at the age of 13.

However, an episode that has become famous ended up taking him to Bayern. Gerhard König, a player in the 1860 youth team, slapped him in a match and Beckenbauer decided that he would never play for that team.

With Beckenbauer’s arrival at Bayern, his rise as a player and the club’s rise to the highest peaks in Europe become intertwined as if they were a single story.

In 1965, Bayern was promoted, with Beckenbauer, Sepp Maier and Gerd Müller, to the first division of the Bundesliga.

In 1966 Beckenbauer won the German Cup with Bayern and was runner-up in the world championship with his team. At that time he was already an idol without the biggest successes of his career having yet arrived.

Meanwhile Bayern, which to date only had one title, German champion in 1932, became great. In 1967 the Bavarians won the Cup Winners’ Cup, which was their first European title. In ’69 Beckenbauer won his first Bundesliga with Bayern.

Between 1972 and 1974 Bayern would become the first team to win the Bundesliga three seasons in a row and between 1974 and 1976 they would win the old European Cup three times in a row, the first of them against Atlético de Madrid.

In ’72 Germany won the Euro Cup, with Beckenbauer as captain who would also win the Ballon d’Or, which he would repeat four years later. In 1974, in Munich, Beckenbauer’s Germany was crowned world champion by defeating Cruyff’s Netherlands, which was the favourite, 2-1.

A money making machine

In Beckenbauer’s biography there is a key character named Robert Schwann. Schwann was Bayern manager when Beckenbauer signed with the club and quickly discovered that he could turn the club’s new figure into a money-making machine.

Germany was the last country in Western Europe to accept the full professionalization of football. Uwe Seeler, Beckenbauer’s predecessor as Germany captain, had to take a vacation from Adidas to play in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.

Beckenbauer, supported by Schwann, bet everything on football and soon became a money-making machine.

In 1976, Beckenbauer found himself at the center of a media scandal after a review detected that he had hidden income worth 1.8 million marks (about 900,000 euros today) from the treasury.

The departure to the Cosmos in 1977 may have had to do partly with the tax evasion scandal and partly with Beckenbauer’s separation from his first wife. Schwann had to do with the transfer and ended up leaving Bayern due to a conflict of interest.

From player to coach

Between 1977 and 1980 Beckenbauer won three American leagues with the Cosmos. From those years in New York there is also a portrait of him made by Andy Warhol, which confirms him as an icon of popular culture. And his income from image rights and appearances in advertisements continued to increase.

In 1980, after seeing him in a friendly match, Günter Netzer, who was Hamburg’s sports director, convinced him to return to Germany and sign for the Hanseatic team. In 1982 Beckenbauer won his last Bundesliga, this time with Hamburg.

In the 1984 Euro Cup, which was held in France, the German team, after a defeat against Spain, was eliminated for the first time in its history in the qualifying phase, which represented the end of the era of coach Jupp Derwall.

“Only Franz can fix this“, headlined the newspaper “Bild” on its front page, which was the beginning of a media campaign.

His career as a coach would end with the world title in Italy in 1990. After the final, while the players celebrated in front of the stands, Beckenbauer began to walk alone on the field with the medal around his neck.

Sepp Maier, the goalkeeper from 1974 and goalkeeping coach in 1990, says that after the world title as a coach the feeling that everyone had was that, if necessary, “Franz could walk on water”.

The official and the fall

After the 1990 World Cup, Beckenbauer had some experiences on the bench. First at Olympique Marseille and then, twice, at Bayern when he took over as interim in 1993, to relieve Erich Ribeck, and in 1996, as a replacement for the dismissed Otto Rehhagel.

In 1991 he became German champion and said that he no longer needed to win anything else. In 1996 he won the UEFA Cup although, after leading the team only to the final which he had reached with Rehagel, he said that he had had nothing to do “with it” when the players asked him to take the trophy.

However, by that time, Beckenbauer had already become first and foremost vice-president and then president of Bayern – while still earning income from image rights and multiple advertising contracts.

His next big project was to bring the World Cup to Germany in 2006 and he led the bid that ended up winning, which helped expand his image as a man blessed by success.

Then suspicions began that the World Cup had not been achieved with Beckenbauer’s charisma alone. Flows of money were detected that ended up in the accounts of Mohamed Bin Haman and other officials.

Furthermore, the idea that Beckenbauer had worked unpaid for the German candidacy was called into question. In those years he received money that, although he assures that they were advertising fees, had to do with the World Cup.

Then came the death of his son Steffan, various illnesses that prevented him from testifying in the trial that was being carried out against him in Switzerland and that in the end ended up being closed due to the statute of limitations of the charges.

In recent years the “Kaiser” has appeared little in public life, especially when compared to the years when he was omnipresent in the media.