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German footballer Franz Beckenbauer, considered one of the greatest defenders in history, died on Monday 8 January at the age of 78. At the beginning of his career he was a left winger with excellent prospects; subsequently he played first in midfield and then in defense, distinguishing himself in both cases for his charisma and a very elegant playing style with few equals for the times, which earned him the nickname “Kaiser” (“Emperor” in German).
After the end of his playing career he was a very successful coach, winning among other things the 1990 World Cup with the West Germany national team: 16 years earlier he had won that competition as a footballer, beating the Netherlands in the final in the first World Cup played at home by Germany. He is one of the very few footballers to have succeeded: he shares this record with the Brazilian Mário Zagallo, who died on January 5 at the age of 92, and with the Frenchman Didier Deschamps. In the final phase of his career Beckenbauer was a much discussed manager, in particular for his role in organizing the football World Cup which took place in Germany in 2006.
Beckenbauer was born on 11 September 1945 in Munich: the son of a postal worker and a housewife, he spent his childhood in the Giesing district. Starting to play football was not a big problem: his apartment, in fact, was located opposite the sports field of AS Monaco 1906, the local team where he spent the very first years of his career.
In 1959, at the age of 14, he joined the youth team of Bayern Munich, the most important team in his city and more generally in German football. He made his first team debut five years later, on 6 June 1964, in a Second Division match (the equivalent of the B series for the German championship) against St. Pauli, one of the Hamburg teams.
Although in the following years he would make history by playing the role of defender like few others before him, initially he played forward: during his time in the youth sector he had made headlines for the many goals he scored as a left winger, for his turbulent character and for his constant arguments with the Primavera coach Rudi Weiß.
On the debut day against St. Pauli, Bayern Munich won 4 to 0, and Beckenbauer immediately stood out for his personality, scoring the last goal. At the end of the season the team won the championship and returned to the Bundesliga, the top division of German football. In the meantime, Beckenbauer had become a regular starter: he ended the season scoring 16 goals, including 5 from penalties, and people began to talk about him as one of the most promising talents in German football. He would play at Bayern Munich until 1977, becoming their most representative footballer. In those 13 years he won four championships, one Cup Winners’ Cup, four German cups, three European Cups and one Intercontinental Cup.
He stood out for a very elegant playing style and for his dribbling ability, which at the time were difficult characteristics to find in a defender. Trying to define Beckenbauer’s style, the Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, who was a great football fan, wrote that «against the dominant tendency towards pure strength football, the Panzer division model, he demonstrated that elegance can be more powerful than a tank and the more penetrating delicacy of a howitzer.”
He began to change roles thanks to the intuitions of Zlatko Čajkovski, Yugoslav coach of Bayern Munich in the 1960s, who in 1966 decided to make him play in midfield to take advantage of his passing ability. His role changed definitively in 1972, when West Germany coach Helmut Schön chose to move him to defense, but without entrusting him with the canonical tackling and marking tasks, leaving him the freedom to position himself in the areas of the pitch necessary to interrupt offensive actions .
It was an important evolution for his career: thanks to his vision of the game and his throwing ability he had the ability to initiate actions without worrying too much about his opponents. In short, he became a “libero”, a role that had begun to be used by many teams in the early 1950s, especially in the Italian championship, and which today has completely disappeared. The change of position gave further impetus to his career: in 1972 he won his first Ballon d’Or, a success which he would replicate four years later.
In 1977, after 13 years at Bayern Munich, he went to play in the United States, where he was signed by the New York Cosmos, a club with which he won three North American championships in four seasons. In 1980 he returned to Germany to play for Hamburg, with whom he won the Bundesliga the following year, at the age of 35. He returned to New York in 1983, playing his final season with the Cosmos and retiring from playing football at 38.
His career in the national team was also full of successes, both as a footballer and as a coach. Starting from 1971 he became the captain of West Germany: the following year he won the European championship, and in 1974 he won the World Cup played at home by beating the Netherlands in the final, in a match that saw him against Dutch footballer Johan Cruijff , with whom he had a very close friendship but also a strong sporting rivalry.
Sixteen years later he returned to win this competition as a coach, beating Argentina in the final of the World Cup hosted by Italy. Beckenbauer also had some success in his few years on the bench of Bayern Munich: in 1994 he took over as coach from Erich Ribbeck and won the Bundesliga, the thirteenth in the club’s history.
After his coaching stint ended, Beckenbauer became a leader of great political weight and influence. In 2002 he became administrative director of Bayern Munich, a club of which he would become honorary president in 2009. In 2006 he was the president of the organizing committee of the first World Cup hosted by united Germany, the last ones won by the Italian national team: his lobbying activities to ensure the Germany that edition of the World Cup was highly criticized.
As it has rebuilt Dario Saltari in an in-depth article published on The Last Man, in July 2000, a few days before the vote to decide the location of those World Cups, former Adidas CEO Robert Louis-Dreyfus made a 6.7 million euro transfer to the committee chaired by Beckenbauer. That money, officially, would have been used to organize a FIFA gala evening for the opening day of the German World Cup, but second lo Spiegel, one of the most authoritative German periodicals, were allegedly used to bribe the four Asian representatives of the FIFA executive committee, persuading them to vote for Germany, which ultimately prevailed over South Africa by a single vote. However, Beckenbauer rejected these accusations, placing the blame on Robert Schwan, a former advisor to him who died in 2002.
From 2007 to 30 March 2011 he was vice-president of FIFA (the international federation that governs football), when the president was Sepp Blatter. In 2016, when Blatter ended up at the center of a corruption scandal, Beckenbauer was fined by the FIFA ethics committee because of his rejection to collaborate in the investigation relating to the awarding of the 2022 world championship to Qatar, which was characterized by several episodes of corruption.