Franz Beckenbauer was a German football machine whose off-field disgrace couldn’t overshadow his greatness on the pitch
HE WAS known as Der Kaiser.
The ultimate German footballing machine.
A World Cup winner as player and manager.
The heartbeat of the Bayern Munich side that dominated Europe in the mid-70s, who invented a new position on the pitch – and then tried to make “soccer” work in the USA.
One of the first ex-players to move into the realm of the suits, the movers and shakers.
But whose life ended in off-field disgrace.
Banned and shunned – and accused of being one of the worst double-dealers in Fifa’s cluttered field – even before ill-health and dementia claimed him as a victim through his later years.
Yet for most who loved football, it is the image of Franz Beckenbauer the player, the graceful, insightful, elegant swan of a booted hero, not the grasping anti-hero, which will always remain.
A symbol of Germany’s move from a pariah nation to Europe’s most powerful footballing force.
The man whose friendship with Bobby Charlton, forged on the field of combat, lasted for years. Enduring and deep.
And with his passing, just a few months after Charlton himself died, another of the links with English football’s greatest day has broken, leaving just half a dozen of the men who were on the Wembley turf on July 30 1966.
In Germany, unsurprisingly, the response to the news of Beckenbauer’s death at the age of 78 was a deep mourning.
Bild, the country’s top-selling paper, said: “Germany says goodbye to its greatest footballer.
“World champion as a player in 1974 and as a coach in 1990.
“The creator of the summer fairy tale in 2006.”
Lothar Matthaeus, Beckenbauer’s skipper in that 1990 triumph, added: “The shock is deep, even though I knew he wasn’t feeling well.
“Franz’ death is a loss for football and for Germany as a whole. He was one of the greatest, as a player and a coach but also off the field.”
That is true and while the image of Der Kaiser was tarnished by his flaws, the beauty of its initial incarnation will remain far longer.
Born to a Munich postal worker and his wife, just four months after the collapse of the Nazi regime and the end of World War Two in Europe, the schoolboy Beckenbauer was a fan of 1860 Munich.
But a tear-up with the 1860 centre-half – Beckenbauer was a centre-forward at the time – in a local youth tournament saw him decide to join Bayern at 14 instead.
Four years later, he was banned from the West German youth set-up because his girlfriend was pregnant, only for the national team’s assistant manager Dettmar Cramer to intervene on his behalf.
By 1965, he was part of the emerging new Bayern side, team-mates including Gerd Muller and Sepp Maier and soon a full international, making his debut in the decisive World Cup qualifying win in Sweden.
It was enough for coach Helmut Schoen. From then on, Beckenbauer was a certainty, and ever-present – a captain in waiting.
Despite playing as a deep-lying midfielder, Beckenbauer scored four goals, including the Goodison semi-final winner over the Soviet Union, to earn his side their Wembley date.
But Schon and Ramsey, wily foxes both, recognised the same thing, sending Charlton and Beckenbauer out to nullify each other.
It worked, for both. But England and Geoff Hurst danced away with the trophy.
Four years later, Beckenbauer and Germany got revenge in Leon, the Bayern man beginning a comeback from two down as he drove an angled shot past Peter Bonetti.
That World Cup win did not come, though, not yet, with Beckenbauer playing the latter stages of the 4-3 extra-time semi-final defeat by Italy with his arm in a sling, after Schon had used both his allowed substitutes.
By then Beckenbauer had become “Der Kaiser” – The Emperor – although his claim that it came about because he posed in front of a bust of former Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I might not have been entirely true.
No matter. He was Der Kaiser, unquestionably, the ball-playing libero – an attack-minded sweeper who came out from the back to make the play.
Captain of Schoen’s side as they demolished the Russians to win the Euros in Brussels in 1972 and having led Bayern to the first of three straight European Cup triumphs when he lifted the World Cup in his home city a few weeks later.
Even after he pulled up the drawbridge on his West Germany career after 103 caps to join New York Cosmos, there was a final hoorah as he played two seasons at Hamburg, adding a fifth Bundesliga crown.
His ascent to the managerial role was no surprise. Nor was the success, beaten only by the Diego Maradona-inspired Argentina in 1986, it was the South Americans who were vanquished in the repeat match-up in Rome four years later.
A return to Bayern as boss saw more silverware before Beckenbauer, the grand old statesman, became the German FA’s vice-president, asked to lead their bid for the 2006 World Cup.
Which is where things became more murky.
While the 2006 tournament was a huge success, it later emerged the “summer fairy tale” had been won on the back of an illicit deal which saw £1m enter his bank account from South Africa, while he also earned £3m from a covert sponsorship deal.
And Beckenbauer was also a member of the Fifa executive committee which awarded the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar respectively in 2010.
Documents later suggested he had received £3m-plus from Russia while he voted for Qatar despite being an ambassador for Australia’s bid.
Yet what matters, far more, is the legacy on the pitch. Der Kaiser represented an ideal. Even if he could not always live up to it.