Growing up in bombed-out Munich after the Second World War, a young Franz Beckenbauer spent hours and hours kicking a ball against a brick wall. “That wall was the most honest team-mate I could ever have wished for,” he said years later. “Whenever you played a proper pass to it, you’d get a proper pass back and didn’t need to run.”
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Hard work and repetition, not God-given talent, were at the heart of his unsurpassed impact on German football and beyond, but Beckenbauer’s technique was so extraordinary, his touch so assured, that he never looked like he was having to try particularly hard.
At a time when football was still predominantly understood as ritualised battle in his native country, Beckenbauer, who has died aged 78, had an upright elegance — he had simply no need to look down at the ball — which broke the mould. More than that, it was a provocation.
“I was seen as an arrogant prig, playing arrogant football,” he recalled. “Journalists had no use for it.” Opponents, too, were unnerved. Playing for his neighbourhood side SC 1906, a 12-year-old Beckenbauer was hit in the face after complaining about a TSV 1860 player’s incessant fouling. That slap changed football history. Beckenbauer had been due to join 1860, then Munich’s biggest club, but decided to go to minnows by the name of FC Bayern instead.
His bewildering pace made him a target for lesser-skilled adversaries, which is why a Bayern youth coach decided to “hide” him in defensive midfield instead. Joining up with attacks from deep positions, Beckenbauer scored four goals at the 1966 World Cup to lead West Germany to the final at Wembley and shine on the biggest stage for the first time.
His Bayern team had one year earlier been promoted to the Bundesliga to emerge as an instant force. They won the DFB Pokal, Germany’s version of the FA Cup, in 1966 and in 1967, a year in which they also beat Glasgow Rangers in the final of the now-defunct UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup.
Beckenbauer, who had been made into a bit of a pop star who recorded songs and starred in TV soup commercials by his personal manager Robert Schwan, captained Bayern to their first league and cup double two years later, earning a nickname that captured his majestic, if sometimes haughty, style. After getting jeered by supporters of cup-final opponents Schalke following a foul on Stan Libuda (“the King of Westphalia”), Beckenbauer retaliated by juggling the ball for a good few seconds. In the days that followed, newspapers called him “Der Kaiser”.
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By then, he had also reinvented the position of the sweeper.
Beckenbauer’s libero, unlike the Italian originals, wasn’t just a human safety valve, designed to mop up behind the tough-tackling defenders, but a player freed from the constraints of the time. Without a direct opponent man-marking him, Beckenbauer routinely stepped into a midfield to orchestrate attacking moves with beguiling nonchalance. Pin-perfect, outside-of-his-boot-passes played in full stride became his trademark but naturally did little to dispel accusations of hubris. He and fellow Bayern players even had knives thrown at them in away grounds.
Perceptions changed when Beckenbauer played through the pain of a dislocated shoulder in the 1970 World Cup semi-final against Italy, a 4-3 defeat that was hailed as “the game of the century” in Germany. By the time the national team won the European Championship in 1972 and captain Beckenbauer lifted the trophy, his lightness of touch and free-spirited creativity was lauded well beyond the confines of the sports pages: Beckenbauer’s team were seen as the vanguard of a more open-minded, liberal society.
Triumph at the 1974 World Cup and three European Cups in succession with Bayern from 1974-76 consolidated his status as the greatest German footballer. But his career with the national team ended prematurely when he joined New York Cosmos in 1977, partly to escape tax troubles at home. Players at foreign clubs were unofficially banned from representing the German Football Association (DFB) at the time. Beckenbauer developed a taste for the opera and clubbing at Studio 54 in the Big Apple, before returning to Germany for one last, injury-riddled spell with Hamburg.
A partnership with the nation’s biggest tabloid, Bild, and frequent TV appearances ensured he remained front and centre of the public’s attention after his playing career ended. The clamour for a saviour after West Germany’s poor showing at the Euros in 1984 led the DFB to appoint him as manager, and he once more brought pride and joy to the whole nation when he guided his country to victory at the 1990 World Cup in Italy. Beckenbauer was no longer “Der Kaiser” but now being hailed as a “Lichtgestalt”, a celestial, demigod figure whose popularity knew no bounds, especially as he later delivered a third World Cup: heading the successful bid to host the 2006 tournament.
Beckenbauer, in the black jacket, celebrates winning the 1990 World Cup (Frank Kleefeldt/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Before that, he played an integral role in cementing Bayern’s domestic dominance, as chairman from 1994 to 2009, and twice stepping in as caretaker manager, winning the 1994 championship as well as the 1996 UEFA Cup.
Infamously outspoken, Beckenbauer combined his presidential role — he also later spent four years on FIFA’s executive committee from 2007-11 — with starring as the country’s most important TV pundit and columnist, a seemingly irreconcilable conflict of interest he somehow managed to make work thanks to his great charm, and being effectively beyond reproach.
He once castigated Bayern for playing “pensioners’ football” after a Champions League defeat in 2001. They went on to win the trophy two months later.
Beckenbauer was a giant of German football, whose popularity continued long after his playing career ended (Sascha Schuermann/AFP via Getty Images)
Beckenbauer wore both his genius and popularity extremely lightly. Strangers were astonished by his politeness and ability to appear genuinely pleased about meeting them, and the public admired him so much that an extramarital misstep with a Bayern secretary at a Christmas party — she later became his third wife — hardly left a dent.
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While allegations of corruption in relation to that 2006 World Cup subjected him to legal proceedings and did tarnish his image considerably in recent years, they will be little more than a footnote to his life’s work in most people’s eyes.
A one-in-60-million diamond that emerged from the ruins of war to sparkle light on everyone blessed with watching him play, Beckenbauer was the most beautiful and important footballer Germany ever produced.
No one will ever get close on either count.
(Top photo: Werner Schulze/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
Munich-born Raphael Honigstein has lived in London since 1993. He writes about German football and the Premier League. Follow Raphael on Twitter @honigstein
