Franz Beckenbauer: what fans remember

Franz Beckenbauer died at the age of 79. It is with him, one of the most extraordinary among football legends, world and European champion, two-time winner of the Ballon d’Or, that the power of Bayern and the German national team is still primarily associated.

Franz Beckenbauer, who has recently disappeared from public space and, judging by the stories of friends, was seriously ill, who, according to his family, died peacefully in his sleep, passed away a little over a year after the release of a biopic dedicated to him. It was not difficult to come up with a name for it – naturally, “Der Kaiser”. This nickname at one time stuck so firmly to Beckenbauer that it began to be perceived almost as a completely official title. Well, yes, Pele was the king of world football, and he was the emperor of German football, uncontested, despite the close proximity in time and space to many incredible talents who played with him in the German national team and Bayern, such as Gerd Müller, Sepp Mayer, Uwe Seeler, Gunter Netzer.

Franz Beckenbauer still stood out too much among them with his play, his role in the game. She was unique, this role. So unique that a person who decides to more precisely determine who Beckenbauer was according to the formal ampoule will easily get confused. Old sources clearly indicate that he was a defender. In modern match reports from the 1960s and 1970s, he is called a midfielder. But everything is clear, of course.

Franz Beckenbauer, who played as a center forward in his youth, grew up and suddenly decided to master a completely different role without throwing away the skills he had trained at the forefront. The position of a libero in itself – a defender, designed primarily to clean up other people’s mistakes, to try to be in time wherever it is hot – by the time of his appearance at Bayern in 1963, was not exotic a long time ago. But Beckenbauer managed to rethink it, perhaps, so radically that it looked like a real revolution. The libero in his performance not only corrected falsehoods – he went forward, he conducted attacks, and he completed them.

His libero was like a one-man orchestra, able to do absolutely everything at the highest level: at the same time a rock in the central defense zone, a playmaker, and an active striker, unexpectedly bursting into free zones, with technique and impact no worse than those of specialists to create threats to other people’s goals.

Franz Beckenbauer joined the German national team in his twenties, having already become the leader of Bayern, which was then just acquiring the features of a monster club and, in the year of its debut, broke through to the top division from the second in status. And once he got there, he almost immediately went to the World Championships in England, creating a real shock there with his effectiveness. Beckenbauer scored the most important goals, scoring a total of four times, and in the final, stepping on the throat of his own song, he tightly closed Bobby Charlton. The Germans were unlucky: instead of the devoured Charlton in that match, the hosts suddenly scored a hat-trick from Jeff Hurst.

Four years later there was another world championship, incomparable for Franz Beckenbauer personally – the Mexican one – with approximately the same result. The German national team, which largely thanks to him already seemed to be the only worthy opponent for the Brazilians, was eliminated in overtime of the crazy semi-final match against the Italians. And Beckenbauer was forced to play for a significant part of it with a knocked out shoulder, with a whip hanging from his arm, enduring terrible pain. Instead of fighting for gold, the Germans had to console themselves with bronze.

However, then titles rained down on Franz Beckenbauer and his teams as if from a cornucopia. In 1972, the Germans, already with Beckenbauer as captain, took gold at the European Championship, defeating the USSR national team in the final. And in 1974, their next campaign for the highest award of the most prestigious tournament culminated in a decisive match in the leader’s hometown against the Dutch. The Munich story was similar to the one that happened eight years earlier in London, but it had a happy ending for the German team. Beckenbauer again concentrated on guarding the opponents’ key player, and it turned out that with Johan Cruyff tied hand and foot, the Dutch total football that had just looked like an armor-piercing weapon was no longer so scary. The German team won with a score of 2:1.

Almost simultaneously, the legendary Bayern series started. From 1974 to 1976, she won the European Cup three times in a row, receiving a prize for this feat that will be treasured forever. Franz Beckenbauer himself, after his third triumph, received his second Ballon d’Or (the previous one was awarded to him in 1972). And this was truly an exceptional event, given that the defenders, no matter what their scale and functionality, always a priori had much less chances in the competition than those who live next to the opponents’ goal.

Then Franz Beckenbauer had a move to America that had become a trend – to the New York Cosmos, a return as a veteran, albeit not for long, to the Bundesliga, to Hamburg, and the next stage in life, also bright and eventful.

In 1990, he again won gold at the World Championship, but now not as a player, but as a coach of the German national team.

At the Italian championship she was so convincing that Beckenbauer, it seems, was absolutely serious about the fact that victories would not escape her. Before him, such a “golden double” – winning the world championship as both a football player and a coach – was achieved by one Brazilian, Mario Zagallo. Later, the Frenchman Didier Deschamps was added to this tiny company.

And Franz Beckenbauer, after his rise as a coach, retrained as a top football functionary with a typical set of cases. As the president of Bayern, the anthems were sung with wisdom and instinct against the backdrop of the club’s successes. Cases were brought against him, a figure who enjoys enormous authority and has a colossal amount of business and friendly connections, on suspicion of tax evasion and disinterested assistance to the Russian bid committee, which won the 2018 World Cup. And at this stage of his life, Beckenbauer watched his special role disappear. Today’s football, with its advanced formations and defensive midfielders, has relegated the libero position to the dustbin. Although, when you watch the recordings of the greatest matches of Bayern and the West German national team half a century ago, sometimes you think that it ended up in the scrapheap rather for the simple reason that in order to be at the top of it, you need to have too exclusive abilities, and a tenth of which inaccessible even to a very gifted football player. You need to be a real Kaiser.

Alexey Dospehov