Franz Beckenbauer, a footballer so elegant that he was nicknamed ‘Der Kaiser’ and who won the World Cup as player and coach, has died. He was 78.
“It is with deep sadness that we announce that my husband and our father, Franz Beckenbauer, passed away peacefully in his sleep yesterday, Sunday, surrounded by his family,” the family said in a statement to DPA, the German news agency. “We ask that we be allowed grieve in peace and spared any questions.” The statement did not provide a cause of death.
Beckenbauer dabbled with every aspect of football and generally emerged with flying colours. Without any coaching experience, he took West Germany to two World Cup finals. He was a Bayern Munich legend and West Germany captain who led the country in 50 of his 103 internationals. He won the Ballon d’Or twice. He was also Pele’s teammate at New York Cosmos and the man who got the World Cup to Germany in 2006. His role as an administrator at FIFA though was marred by allegations of foul play.
To Beckenbauer goes the credit of inventing the position of a sweeper, a defender who would join in the attack. “My style was very unusual at that time because a defender was a defender, a midfielder was a midfielder and a striker, striker,” he told HT in an interview in Munich in 2011.
“I started as a striker, had the mentality to play as forward but my coach said play in the defence. But my strength, I always believed, was in the offence.”
When he joined Bayern in 1964, the club was far from the behemoth and serial Germany champions they are now. Bayern were not even good enough to join Bundesliga when it began in 1963. Bayern’s rise into a European superpower had a lot to do with Beckenbauer and his mates such as goalkeeper Sepp Maier, Paul Brietner, Gerd Mueller, Uli Hoeness and Georg Schwarzenbeck. They were moulded into a successful outfit by the Czech coach Tschik Cajkovski.
“He (Cajkovski) was very positive. When I attacked, he ordered that some player would fall back. In Italy they had the same system but the libero never crossed the centre-line. The idea of an attacking defender basically came from Italian Giacinto Facchetti. But since he was a left fullback, he could go up only on one side of the field. But I could go left, right and centre. You could say Facchetti was my mentor,” Beckenbauer, glass of wine in hand, had said in the interview at Bayern Munich’s Allianz Arena.
Like with Mario Zagallo, the first to win the World Cup as player and coach (France’s Didier Deschamps is the third in the list of three), football was not Beckenbauer’s first career choice. Growing up in post-war West Germany such thoughts were not encouraged even though they had won the World Cup in 1954 and so he studied insurance “because that seemed a secure future.” Zagallo, who died on Friday at age 92, had read accountancy.
But so assured was Beckenbauer with the ball, so evident were his leadership skills on the pitch that he did not need to fall back on his training in the insurance sector. Bayern won their first Bundesliga in 1968-69 under his captaincy. By 20, he was an international. West Germany conquered, it would be Europe next.
With their team of stars and without the bickering of later assortments of stars that would give Bayern the nickname FC Hollywood, Beckenbauer and his mates won a hattrick of European Cup titles. “That was the best team I had played for,” Breitner had told HT. “We were so good that we would say, ‘okay, today let us try and win by three goals,’ and we usually would.”
Bayern’s domination of Europe coincided with the resurgence of West Germany as a football power. The World Cup title in 1954 had facilitated West Germany’s acceptance after World War 2, Beckenbauer said, and was important for their self-confidence. But it wasn’t till 1974 that they would win another World Cup. By then, Beckenbauer had played three iterations of the competition and the world had come to call him ‘Der Kaiser.’
That happened after a game in Vienna. “In front of the reception, there was a statue of Kaiser Franz Joseph (former emperor of Austria). Now, hundreds of photographers cover such a match, at that time there was only one. He sent the picture to all newspapers and that’s how the media came to call me ‘Der Kaiser’. It didn’t matter whether I liked it or not – it was the fact. Only the media called me that. For my colleagues (teammates) I was and will always be Franz,” he said.
The coaching assignment came almost as soon as he retired his studs. West Germany had faltered in the European championship of 1984 and even though he didn’t have a coaching licence, the federation gave him the job. He stayed six years in that role transiting from football spikes to suits and gold-rimmed glasses like it was the easiest thing to do. West Germany lost the final in 1986 to Diego Maradona’s Argentina but avenged that defeat four years later.
After the 1990 World Cup, Beckenbauer joined Bayern’s administration. With Hoeness as a long-time general manager, they turned the club into the successful financial enterprise it still is. One with a heart. It was because of Beckenbauer and Hoeness that Bayern stood by Mueller when the legendary scorer recovered from an alcohol problem. Beckenbauer was made honorary president at the club in 2009.
He was also the man responsible for getting the World Cup to Germany three years earlier. The helicopter carrying Beckenbauer arriving minutes before a crucial game was as much a part of the competition as was Germany’s rise under Juergen Klinsmann. In 2017, Beckenbauer was questioned by Switzerland’s official on charges of corruption regarding Germany’s winning bid. The trial ended without a verdict in 2020. Part of the FIFA’s executive committee, Beckenbauer was also banned for 90 days for his role in awarding the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar.
